US politics – thinking liberal

Time to get used to the idea of Trump’s return

Back in 2021 it had seemed impossible for Donald Trump to return to the White House. Even in 2022 it seemed that his brand was diminished – as candidates he endorsed did badly in Congressional elections. But we should have known better. For the first time in his political career, the man looks unstoppable. We must now think what many of us liberals had thought unthinkable: he will be President again.

Pretty much everybody I know regards the prospect of a repeat Trump presidency with horror, including a handful of Americans. Some Britons do like Trump, but most treat him as a bit of a joke – a caricature of the worst American stereotypes, and transparently narcissistic. This country has had enough of un-serious politicians after the chaotic period of Boris Johnson’s ministry, and his successors’ indulgence in gesture politics. It is one reason that Sir Keir Starmer’s popularity ratings are now high – seriousness is his most demonstrable virtue. You don’t have to be a liberal here in order to dislike Trump.

But it is clearly different in America. The first way that Mr Trump has been able to make a comeback is that he has fired up a supporter base that has enabled him to take over the Republican Party. He has made short work of his rivals, and any Republican law-maker that doesn’t pay homage to him will have their careers quickly terminated. Mr Trump has been able to forge a special bond with this supporters. He plays on their sense of grievance, and the feeling that the political establishment despises them (which they often do…). This seems is intuitive – I have called him a right-brained genius – following the once-fashionable idea that people are a product of a rational left brain and an emotional and instinctive right one. The irony is that this idea was promoted by liberal types to suggest that Western culture was excessively left-brained and destroying the world – and that the world needed more right-brained thinking. Alas this analysis turned out to be too left-brained.

The interesting thing about Mr Trump’s genius is that other conservative politicians have been unable to replicate it. Ultimately they are too calculating and they can’t hide it, and that undermines their authenticity. That fate has befallen Florida Governor Ron De Santis, once billed as being more dangerous, because more rational. We will have to see how Mr Trump’s Vice Presidential pick JD Vance works out. He is clearly a calculating man, but he gets much closer to his boss’s rhetoric than Mr De Santis did – and his empathy with white working class Americans is authentic.

The second reason for Mr Trump’s comeback lies with the current President, Joe Biden. He did well to beat Mr Trump in 2020 – and he has been highly effective in office. Too effective, perhaps. A narrow victory in a campaign that was mainly about the fitness for office of his opponent was not a mandate for many of the radical measures that he brought forward. There were two particular problems. The first was that inflation got out of hand on his watch. Some of the blame may lie with the fiscal generosity of his predecessor, and some arose from international events – but Mr Biden threw in plenty of fiscal generosity of his own. Inflation is now back under control (apparently) but it has left deep scars in its wake, notably with interest rates still high, and petrol prices over 20% higher than in his first year of office. Mr Biden’s supporters like to paint a rosy picture of their man’s economic achievements – but no amount of aggregrate economic statistics can mitigate the pain that many American people have gone through. The second major problem is the chaotic scenes on the border. Now I haven’t been following that particular issue closely, and it is clearly being hyped up by the Republicans – but there does seem to have been a lack of focus by the Biden administration in its attempts to play a number of competing interests.

And then there was the question of Mr Biden’s lack of physical fitness for office. His disastrous debate performance with Mr trump only confirmed what many people had suspected. As I write, he has now thankfully bowed out – but only after an obstinate period of denial. His likely replacement candidate is the Vice President, Kamala Harris. She doesn’t get a very good press (though how justified that is I find hard to assess). My feeling is that she would do a better job than Biden of mobilising the Democrat base, especially younger voters, but will struggle with neutral voters. But the Democrats campaign has lost momentum, and will need to be completely reset.

I don’t think Mr Trump’s survival of the assassination attempt will make more than a marginal difference. It gave him some momentum at a useful time, which doubtless helped bring some donations in. But he and his party reverted to type so quickly afterwards that surely few voters will be swayed.

Mr Trump still has those two big points in his favour: the economy and the border. For some reason many American voters, even those who are otherwise sceptical of Mr Trump, think that he is a better bet for managing both issues than whoever the Democrats throw up. In the case of the economy, that’s a bit bizarre. He plans to raise prices for ordinary Americans by imposing tariffs, while reducing taxes for the better off by adding to the national debt. Reducing immigration, if he succeeds, may make things worse by raising inflation – though it could help lower-paid workers. Still, the idea that a businessman is well-placed to manage the economy a strong one in America. And if Mr Trump’s record as a businessman is a flawed one, years of starring in The Apprentice have clearly impressed many Americans.

And as for the threat Mr Trump poses to American institutions, many Americans clearly don’t think he will be that bad in practice – and perhaps those institutions have been corrupted anyway. The only criminal convictions that Mr Trump has so far suffered were from a distinctly dubious case legally, giving some substance to Mr Trump’s accusations of “lawfare” against him. Other cases may be stronger but the American judiciary has played along with his efforts to kick them into the long grass. Mr Trump has never made himself out to be a saint, even if he sometimes claims to be an instrument of God.

So what are the consequences for us Europeans if Mr Trump succeeds? The most serious is the war in Ukraine. Most European leaders want wear the Russians down, and force them to conclude the war on terms that they cannot paint as victory – and so weakening their threat. They hope that Mr Trump can be manoeuvred into supporting this – but they know it is unlikely. More likely is that he will force Ukraine into a ceasefire. Russia is then likely to regroup and rearm – although it is possible that the enormous cost of the war will start to rebound on Vladimir Putin’s regime. The European powers will have to reorganise their defences, and reduce their dependence on US weaponry.

Economically the main threat is Mr Trump’s proposed tariff regime – but the main economic damage is likely to be wrought on the Americans themselves, and then their neighbours in the Americas and Asia. But it is unlikely to help Europe’s struggling economies – hastening the awkward political choices that permanent low growth will entail.

A difficult four years beckon. It may not come to that, of course. The last month or so have already shown how fast politics can move. Mr Trump seems to have taken his recent successes as as justifying his continued focus on his base – rather than softening his image to appeal to uncommitted votes. If his opponents can succeed in making the threat of a Trump regime look less abstract – by focusing on concrete issues like abortion, rather abstract ones like “democracy” and “the rule of law”, and if their candidate looks properly presidential, more sceptical voters can be persuaded to vote him down. Perhaps, even, he will go too far and look start looking more dangerously deranged, even to some of his erstwhile supporters. We have been hoping for that for eight years, though, and nothing he does seems to faze his base.

Americans will do what Americans will do. We in Europe will just have to live with whatever they choose to do. That’s democracy, I’m afraid.

Postscript: 23 July

The news that Joe Biden was withdrawing broke while I was finishing the article. Anxious to publish, I edited it without changing the overall thrust. But the whole dynamic of the contest seems to have changed. Kamala Harris has launched her campaign built up real momentum – it looks as if she will be chosen without contest. The Trump campaign seems to have been wrong-footed. They have no shortage of attack lines on Ms Harris, whom they despise as much as her boss. But the main ones look weaker than the focus on mr Biden’s capacity, while the Democrats have some attack opportunities of their own: capacity issues can be turned back on Trump, and maybe they will even get a chance to attack some of Mr Trump’s policies – like his disastrous looking economic ideas. Alas Ms Harris’s early attack lines seem to focus on Mr Trump’s criminality and lack of moral fibre. That’s old news and won’t sway many, surely. Matt Goodwin, who had been predicting a Trump landslide, meanwhile rushed out an article suggesting that Ms Harris is an even more hopeless candidate than Mr Biden.

It will be a couple of weeks before we see if Ms Harris is making a serious impact on Mr Tump’s lead. American voters have a way of bringing me down to earth, so my wiser self is saying that the main thrust of my article still stands – even if my optimistic self thinks that the spring in the step that Ms Harris is showing must have some sort of positive effect.

Understanding the genius of Donald Trump

Everybody is talking about him. How the New Yorker is covering THAT mugshot

It’s unwise to bet against Donald Trump. Last autumn he hit a low point when candidates he backed performed badly in the US mid-term elections. But to see how effortlessly he is leaving his Republican rivals for the presidency in his wake leaves me gasping in a sort of admiration. He does this by breaking every piece of advice and common sense that crowds my feed on LinkedIn. Any person who seeks to be effective in politics, or management, needs to understand why Mr Trump is so effective at self-promotion – even as he is so ineffective at pretty much anything else.

As I was pondering this, I read an article on “The truth behind emotional intelligence”, by FT columnist Janan Ganesh. A lot of what clogs my LinkedIn feed is promotion of emotional intelligence. Mr Ganesh complains that people are muddling emotional intelligence with niceness. In fact many nice people have little understanding of the emotional dynamics of the situations they are in and are consequently ineffective – while many nasty people are extremely good at manipulation, which is founded on strong emotional intelligence. He uses as his example Shakespeare’s villain Iago in Othello.

I agree. I first encountered the idea of emotional intelligence on a residential management course in about the year 2000. It was profoundly influential for me. Our trainers were about promoting management effectiveness, not niceness. On the one hand I found the course very reassuring. I proved extremely good at understanding emotional dynamics at work. I was a good listener. As Mr Ganesh points out, emotional intelligence requires listening, and quiet people are usually better at it than the noisy ones who trumpet their emotional understanding. And I was, and I still am, a quiet person – often painfully so. But, and my trainer was clear about this, that quietness got in the way of my effectiveness as a manager. It held me back from being as assertive as I sometimes needed to be. This summed up my professional career very well. While my quietness somewhat typecast me as being very clever in an introverted, geekish way – a large part of my effectiveness actually derived from listening skills and ability to navigate the emotional chess of office politics. But on the other hand I lacked something big and important, and that held my career back. I flourished best when I worked among a small (ish) team of people who worked well together. After we were taken over by a large multi-national bank I quickly started to fade, and took voluntary redundancy.

But what has that got to do with Donald Trump? Well the first point is that Mr Trump is pretty much everything that I am not. That assertiveness that I lacked is overwhelming in him. He is not good at empathy. And yet Mr Trump succeeds like no other politician in forging an emotional connection with his supporters. A recent poll suggested that 71% said that what Mr Trump told them was likely to be true, compared to 63% for friends and family, and just 43% for religious leaders. That, presumably, is because Mr Trump understands what they think the truth is, and feeds it back to them. Those ratings would collapse if he got up and said that, for example, warnings about carbon emissions were well-founded and that all coal mining in the US should cease. But what gives Mr Trump that understanding? Clearly listening of some sort is happening. In the past I have called this right-brained genius – building on the idea that the left side of our brain is our rationale side, and the right our intuitive side. Advocates of this idea suggest that in the West we overdo left-brain thinking, and we should be more in touch with our right brains. But the right brain has its dark side – Mr Trump is very in touch with his.

But that explanation only takes you so far. His Republican rivals listen to the same people and pick up the same messages. Mr Trump builds on his understanding in his public presentation. This is rambling and incoherent (to an extent you would not appreciate if all you heard was edited sound bites), but delivered with a sly sense of humour. This comes over as authentic – no speechwriter could deliver the the same effect – and he makes his audience feel that they are insiders. All the attacks on him, he says, are attacks on you. The more he is attacked, the more his supporters like him. He uses his recent legal troubles to boost a collective sense of victimhood – most recently in his recent use of his Georgia mugshot. He is able to channel all his audience’s frustrations with the world. It is, once again, very right-brained. Even the best paid political consultants cannot coach their clients into achieving something similar – anyway he got there first, which adds to the authenticity. And the more outrageous he is, the more newsworthy – and the more people are talking about him and only him. Meanwhile others who entered politics to achieve serious things, and spend time trying to understand the world, are most unlikely to have the right head-space for that type of behaviour.

There is an evil to Mr Trump’s evil. It is entirely about self-promotion. Naturally he thinks that the world would be a much better place with him in charge, because nobody understands the world like he does. But he is fundamentally un-serious about government and his ego undermines any attempt to implement serious policy. In power he might do some good things, but overall it would be a major step back for the world.

Will he win the presidency? His campaign is better organised and more savvy than in 2016 when he first won. He is running rings around his Republican rivals, even those who are much more capable and qualified than he is. But his challenge will be to reach out to beyond those who worship him – to those who have a better grasp of his weaknesses. That will be hard but it isn’t hopeless. Many have little faith in the Democrats, and their likely candidate, President Biden, has weaknesses of his own. If Mr Trump wins his party’s nomination he will have momentum. His odds of success are better than they should be.

What is the message for the rest of us? Understanding of the emotional side of life is critical to success, whether or not you call it emotional intelligence. But those who possess it are often less effective in other ways, because listening is demanding work and can come at the cost of assertiveness. For some people intuitive emotional connection can substitute for this. But that brings its own dangers.

The BBC’s questionable coverage of the US elections

Photo: USCapitol, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The British political class is obsessed with US politics. The right wish to emulate US culture wars and attack “wokeism”. The left (rather more successfully) pick up on the Black Lives Matter movement, never mind our very different racial history. So perhaps it was inevitable that the BBC would cover the US mid-term elections so heavily. But in doing so they have posed deeper issues about the institution.

I try to resist the temptation to comment on other countries’ politics. I last commented directly on US politics in 2021, when I praised the progress being made by President Joe Biden. That quickly became a very unfashionable view, especially after the Afghanistan debacle. I still think he is underestimated – but then I thought that of Jimmy Carter when he was president – another deeply unfashionable view. But want I want to look at this time is not US politics itself, but how the BBC in particular covered it.

News coverage of the US midterm elections was extensive, and especially on the BBC – my leading source of daily news. A Danish general election came and went without comment – in a country with a close cultural affinity with England, if the not the rest of Britain – while reporting on the 10 O’clock TV News from America was almost daily.

The first striking thing abut this coverage was the BBC’s claim that these elections were hugely consequential, a view widely repeated in Britain. They explained how if the Democrats lost control over Congress, then the presidential agenda would be halted. And yet this usually happens in the US midterms, and life goes on. Mr Biden has fought hard to get as much of his legislative agenda as possible achieved before these elections; he always expected his party would lose them. BBC correspondents eventually seemed to realise that this argument wasn’t strong enough to support the trope that these were the most important midterms ever (how sick I get when this claim is made of elections, as it always is). So they said that democracy itself was at stake. The basis of this claim was the number of Republican supporters of Donald Trump, who claimed that the presidential election of 2020 was stolen by Mr Biden. And some of them sought to take control over state electoral processes, so that they could ensure the right outcome next time. This is indeed an interesting aspect of current US politics. But were the BBC following the Democrats’ line a bit too uncritically? I don’t mind their reporters repeatedly saying that Mr Trump’s claims are false – his supporters have been unable to produce evidence that can be tested in court – perjury is a serious matter, after all. But the endangerment of the electoral process in some states is only one issue that American voters have to weigh up.

But this marks a more general Democrat bias to the BBC coverage – a prejudice which, to be fair, is pretty prevalent in Britain. They are careful to present Republican views in their interviews with politicians and in vox pops. But we are left thinking that most Republican supporters are nutters – repeating those election fraud allegations, for example. If this were all there was to it, then it raises the question of why the Republicans are doing so well. Surely Americans aren’t all that stupid? There is clearly something else going on. And that something else seems to be the perceived extremism of many Democrats, which clearly annoys many Americans, and not just less-educated white ones. We will struggle to get any idea of what lies behind this fear from watching BBC coverage – or I suspect that of most other British news outlets. In the end the story of American conspiracy theorists, and the ramblings of Mr Trump, are the more entertaining story, and that dominates our coverage.

Funnily enough, after all the hype of the run-up, coverage of the election results has been very muted. They were almost exactly in line with the more considered predictions (published by The Economist, for example), but probably a bit worse for the Republicans in the House of Representatives. But they still won there – and there will be significant consequences arising from that. Mr Trump seems to have had a measurable negative impact on his party’s performance, but I haven’t seen that story through on the mainstream reporting. We’re now onto the World Cup and COP27. And there is quite a bit of domestic news to be digested too.

All of this is making me think harder about the role of the BBC in news. It remains a trusted brand, and we are lucky to have it in place of the more partisan free for all that dominates the US. But, as a public service organisation committed to balanced coverage, it faces tricky decisions. Not so long ago it got into trouble by “balancing” scientists warning us about carbon emissions with unqualified s**t-stirrers like Nigel Lawson. They have moved on from that, and it is good to see that they are not giving credibility to Mr Trump’s lies about the 2020 election in the name of balance. But, in general, the BBC feels it must follow the news agenda set by others, in which Britain’s diminishing print media have an outsize role. Since this media is dominated by organisations with a right-wing agenda, this causes much wailing and gnashing of teeth amongst people in the left. But there are bigger problems.

The first is the choice of which stories to cover, or not – what makes an important story in the news media is not necessarily all that important in the great scheme of things. We saw this in the coverage of the death of the Queen. This was a big news story, of course, but the BBC followed other media in excluding all other news reporting in the weeks after, until other media outlets started to let other stories in. The BBC wouldn’t devote so much as a minute to “other news” in extended news broadcasts, and instead went round in circles in with interviews with royal correspondents, there being little actual news to report. The BBC could and should have shown a bit of leadership here – five minutes of other news in a 60-minute programme was surely not have been too brave? The time given to US politics is another example, with European politics being neglected by comparison – in spite of the fact that the latter might have a more immediate impact on the country. That Danish general election was quite an interesting story. And then there is the bias towards covering elections before they happen, and neglecting the hard news of the actual results. Even The Economist does this, though. That is the difference between journalism and “the first draft of history”, I guess. Speculation is more fun than facts.

But what about the accusation of liberal bias that is so often levelled at the BBC – and which its coverage of the US election seems to illustrate? This is more complicated than it looks. Another example is racism and antisemitism. A few on the right might grumble about the apparently uncompromising stand that the BBC takes on these issues. But dig down a bit and you find problems. Racists and antisemites are portrayed as nutters that it is easy to dis-associate from. I have seen a couple of television dramas portraying far-right activism, along with its racist and antisemitic tropes. But these activists are cardboard cut-outs – poorly educated white people with a soft spot for Hitler and Naziism. There is much more to racism and antisemitism than this. Will there ever be a drama covering antisemitism in the far left? To say nothing of the muddle between antisemitism and criticism of Israel and Zionism? Of course not. It is too controversial. But this bias annoys both left and right. The right is annoyed by the persistent portrayal of racism as being confined tot he political right. The left complains that discussion of Israel is heavily constrained.

This is all rather depressing. There seem to be two types of news media: the partisan and the dumbed-down. The partisan media thrives on controversy and isn’t afraid to air conspiracy theories and nonsense tropes – and is consequently useless as a source of information. But the “balanced” media are too scared that controversy will damage their reputation for objectivity – and anyway tend to follow the pack in their coverage of stories. Perhaps there is an inevitability about this – but at least the BBC could try a bit harder to be more informative in its news coverage.

Joe Biden has made a strong start

“Cometh the hour, cometh the man,” is what I wrote when Joe Biden was elected US President last November. I had a good feeling about the man because Mr Biden looked to be somebody who confronts the world as it really is, rather than on some projection based on conviction, as more partisan politicians do. It is going better than I expected.

In that post I said that the new president needed to do three things: revive the economy, get on top of the virus, and put pressure on the Republicans. On all three counts he is doing well. He has been lucky, but he has helped to make that luck. We can now see that this is the job he has wanted to do all his political life. He was ready for it. It turns out that being a Vice President is good preparation for the Presidency, especially at the start. The last Vice President to make it to the top was George Bush Senior in 1988; he proved very effective at the job, even if he was less effective at the politics. Before that we might remember Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson, also very effective operators. Mr Biden knows how the machinery of government works and was well prepared by the time inauguration came, notwithstanding the tardy cooperation of the outgoing administration.

Mr Biden has also proved an adept politician. He made a good start before he took office when the Democrats took both the Senate run-off elections in Georgia. The Republicans had been favourites. How much he can take personal credit for this is hard to say – but he clearly didn’t get in the way. That gave him control of the Senate by the narrowest possible margin. He has used it skilfully. His biggest achievement has been pushing through a massive economic stimulus bill. He now has two more ambitious efforts involving massive outlays: an infrastructure plan and welfare reforms. He has not sought to build bridges with the Republicans, in the way that Barack Obama wasted so much time doing, but the measures are likely to go down well with many Republican voters, especially the ones that switched to Trump in 2016 and 2020. I can’t see that the welfare changes stand much chance, as they look too strong for conservative Democrats in the Senate – but they should help keep up the pressure.

And the next point about Mr Biden is that he takes decisions, even tough ones, quickly. This is part of being ready for the job, but it is a strong contrast with Mr Trump and Mr Obama, and especially the former’s gaggle of squabbling advisers. A striking example of this has been the decision to withdraw the US military completely from Afghanistan by 11 September. We might well think this is wrong (The Economist argued that keeping on a small commitment would be value for money), but it happened quickly.

But is he taking America in the right direction? One criticism is that he is just rehashing failed policies from the 1970s. This is put quite eloquently by Gerard Baker in The Times. Mr Biden wants to throw a lot of public money at problems, promoting federal agencies and trade unions, in a striking reversal of the prevailing wisdom since Ronald Reagan came to power in 1980 – even if the practice never quite lived up to the rhetoric. There does seem to be something quite old and familiar about this approach. Mr Biden has been compared to Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson – falsely because he doesn’t have enough Senate votes to be anything like as ambitious as this pair. His infrastructure plans recall Dwight Eisenhower. These policies just led to stagflation in the 1970s, it is said. But context is all. Big government worked well enough in the 1950s, with the rise of light manufacturing and the bureaucracy of the consumer society – all those salesman, account clerks and insurance administrators. But in the 1960s and 1970s, the economy and society suffered a number of problems. First came the Vietnam war, which the US government refused to finance through taxation, causing the postwar world financial infrastructure to buckle. Then came the malign effects of union inflexibility, which meant that consumer price rises fed through quickly into wage inflation, creating a wage-price spiral. And then came the shock of escalating oil prices in the 1970s, the first important symptom of environmental constraints on the US model of growth. Combine these with big government and you got stagflation.

That was then. Now is a very different world. The wage-price spiral has been broken by the growth of globalisation and the impact of technology. A new world financial infrastructure has emerged. Environmental constraints are being embraced rather than denied. And anyway since 2008 the developed world seems to have been suffering from deficient demand. Interest rates have been cut to rock bottom; there does not seem to be enough positive pressure in the labour market. Nominal jobless rates may look low (slowing for the pandemic), but pay at the lower end is propped up by minimum wages, job insecurity is rife, and people are dropping out of the workforce. Throwing public money at problems could be quite beneficial at such a time, even if it was harmful in the 1970s. And excess public spending is much more likely to get the money to where it is needed that tax cuts.

Still, you don’t have to be on the political right to worry that president is taking things too far. Predictions of a rise in inflation are widespread, though an awful lot of people seem to think that this will work in a similar way to the late 20th Century. One way or another interest rates are likely to rise – a sign of a better balanced economy after all – and this could have some fairly scary consequences in a financial system that seems to take low interest rates and booming asset prices as one of the fundamental rights of man. But it could take some time for any problems to emerge.

A second criticism is that Mr Biden is taking his radicalism too far. He has spoken of bringing America together and healing the partisan divides. But in many ways he is doing the opposite. Much of the Republican base – the wealthy rather than the populous part of it – was horrified by Donald Trump, whose grip on that party shows no sign of weakening. But they will be even more horrified by fear of tax rises, and will doubtless find themselves returning to the party fold. That does not matter that much in terms of votes (these are the top 1% after all, even if you have to add in larger numbers who fancy their chances of entering that elite) – but it means lots of campaign funding to promote misinformation and damaging memes. The Republicans scared a lot of people into voting for them in Congressional races last year by portraying the Democrats as being taken over by the “radical left”. It won’t be too hard to paint Mr Biden’s policies in that light.

A big challenge will come in 2022, when the mid-term elections come. Most commentators already seem to have written the Democrats’ chances off, following what happened to Mr Obama and Mr Trump at the same points in their presidencies. But that can’t be in the plans of a consummate politician like Joe Biden. He clearly feels that his policies can peel away a lot of voters from the Republicans.

And that will make American politics very interesting over the next year and a half. Mr Biden has started well, and he means to keep up the momentum.

Trump is not a proper fascist; his coup might have succeeded if he was

Throughout his presidency, I have waited for the moment when Donald Trump overstepped the mark, causing him to alienate a large part of his support base. There were moments when I thought he had reached such a point, but I was proved wrong each time. But the events last week in Washington are surely that moment. His presidency is nearly over anyway, of course, but he is surely unlikely to come back from this.

Of course an astonishing number of Americans thought that the storming of Congress was justified, but the Republican coalition is still breaking up, and it is likely to reform without Mr Trump in control. You could tell Mr Trump was in trouble when he read out his statement disowning the protesters and conceding that he would hand over to the new administration. He normally doubles down; he does not do light-footed manoeuvre.

What happened? It was very clear from even before the election that Mr Trump would try to cling to power if he lost. His plan to do so amounted to a coup, but one that maintained some vestiges of legality. He thought he could mobilise Republican Congressmen and state administrators, and sympathetic judges to annul the state election results he didn’t like, and substitute more congenial ones. For the most part they did not cooperate (the Congressmen being a shameful exception), because Mr Trump could not provide them with any serious evidence to work with, and they had too much respect for the rule of law, or at any rate understood that the risks for them personally were far too high. His last chance was on Wednesday, when Congress was due to ratify the election results. He organised a march of his supporters on the Capitol. What was Mr Trump trying to do? Here it gets murky. His hope may have been to intimidate the law-makers into overturning the election results. He may simply have wanted a spectacular demonstration of the strength of feeling on his side to sustain the betrayal narrative, from which he could build his comeback. If you want to build a conspiracy theory you can easily find enough to work on. After he lost the election Mr Trump cleared out the senior appointees of the Defence department and put in complete loyalists. The Washington National Guard was under the control of the Defence department, but it had not been mobilised for trouble, as it had been for the Black Lives Matter protests.

But it looks as if there was no clear plan. Once the protesters got into the building they did not know what to do. This was the worst possible outcome for Mr Trump. The protesters engaged in vandalism and showed general disrespect for one of the United States’s most hallowed institutions without achieving anything more than a delay to proceedings. This was fine by those of Mr Trump’s base driven by a hate for those institutions and of revolutionary intent: the white supremacists, the QAnon conspiracy theorists and the wild fringe in general. But a large part of the Republican coalition prefers to see these people as a tiresome sideshow. For many conservative Americans, having somebody dressed in a bison outfit leading the way is not a good look. Funnily enough, if the protestors had been met by a robust police and National Guard presence, it would probably have worked much better for Mr Trump – they could blame failure on the “deep state”. The plan had not been thought through and it lapsed into farce, albeit a farce in which several people were killed.

That is very revealing. Many people claim that Donald Trump is a fascist. It is perfectly true that there are many common threads between Trumpism and fascism. The cult of personality, the demand for personal loyalty amongst officials, the disrespect for the rule of law and political convention. The tactics were fascistic too: the use of elections to gain a foothold, the cooption and then subordination of establishment conservatives, and the indulgence of mob violence from supporters. But there are big differences. Fascists concentrate power in a militarised state, subordinating all other civil and private organisations. They adore administrative competence (Mussolini wanted to make the trains run on time; Hitler built autobahns). They are also driven by a clear, if fantastical, vision of where they want to take their country. Donald Trump worked to dismantle the state, not build it up. He let private corporations run riot, including ones he did not like. He has very little regard for administrative competence. He was not a warmonger either – he tried to end foreign wars, not start them. His supporters were not organised into paramilitary formations that could drive through a violent coup. Some of his supporters were heavily armed, it is true, but there was something anarchistic about them; they viewed their weapons as an extension to their personal autonomy, rather than part of being a soldier for a cause. Once you take the narcissism away from Trumpism, there really is very little left.

Which is why the coup failed and Mr Trump has been humiliated. There were no storm troopers ready to enter the Capitol and neutralise opposing Congressmen. There were no leaders on the ground with a clear idea about what they needed to do.

Very soon Donald Trump will leave office. So much of his power, and self-esteem, derived from that office that it will be difficult for him to come back, especially after this fiasco. But his popular base is still there, angry at the turn of events and convinced that it is they who are the victims of a coup. The new administration faces many difficult choices. Joe Biden wants to be a figure of healing and reconciliation. But can he simply let the forces of darkness reorganise with impunity? Republican leaders face hard choices too. Their no-prisoners resistance to the Democrats has unleashed a tiger that is consuming them. Is it time to change tactics in order to capitalise on the fears that much of the American public has of left-wing radicalism?

And all the while the pandemic runs riot. What a moment to become President. But it will not do to underestimate Joe Biden.

Joe Biden: cometh the hour, cometh the man?

I greeted the defeat of Donald Trump in the US Presidential election with relief rather than joy. It was the most important thing to be decided in these elections: but otherwise it was a poor night for the Democrats. That bodes ill for the success of the new administration. But perhaps the new President, Joe Biden, will rise to the occasion.

The first Democratic disappointment was the failure to suppress Mr Trump’s vote more than it did. In fact “suppress” is not the word: Mr Trump’s vote was huge. Victory depended on a series of narrow wins in key states: very similar in character to Mr Trump’s victory in 2016. Based on polling evidence, most people had expected something more decisive. The next disappointment was the Democrats’ failure to secure the Senate. This game isn’t over yet: it will be decided by the double run-off section in early January in Georgia, but the Republicans are favourites. But the Democrats fell short in a whole series of contests where they were expected to do well, and that was the pattern of the night. The Democrats hung on to the their majority in the House in Representatives, but went backwards. They did not make breakthroughs at state level either: important because these elections will affect redistricting for the House. Down-ticket Republicans polled more than Mr Trump.

If the Democrats couldn’t win big this year, when can they? Looked at strategically it the Republicans are winning the battle to be the natural party of government, albeit by a narrow margin. This should worry Democrats a lot. They have long been expecting a demographic dividend, as America becomes less white, and as older, conservative voters die off. Instead Republicans are managing to recruit amongst ethnic minorities. I don’t know what data on younger voters is, but I suspect it follows educational attainment. Less well-educated Americans gravitate towards the Republicans, regardless of race and age, it seems.

This bodes ill for the Democrats in 2024, and of Kamala Harris’s chances in that election if Joe Biden steps down, as expected. There will be a lot of soul-searching. Some want to go down a left-wing populist route, stoking up anger over wealthy elites rigging the system to their advantage. Such a strategy has worked in Latin America (though whether it has done poor voters there any good is another question) – but I don’t think it has traction in America, not least amongst those of Latin American heritage, for whom socialism is often a toxic brand, based on the record of Latin American socialists.

Beyond that, Mr Biden is going to find it very hard to govern. He needs the Senate to unlock major spending initiatives, or legal reforms, for example to health care, or reforms to make it easier to elect Democrats. Nothing in these election results is going to discourage the dominant no-prisoners wing of the Republican Party, represented by the senate leader Mitch McConnell, as well as Mr Trump himself. Republicans will suddenly rediscover their fiscal conservatism and stoke up worries about public debt, conveniently forgotten when Republicans such as Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush or Donald Trump have been in charge. The new administration will be undermined at every turn. And on top of likely control of the Senate, they have stacked the Supreme Court with conservatives. Mr Biden’s appeals for Americans to unite to tackle the country’s problems are entirely futile. Further, Republicans are trying to undermine his legitimacy by saying the election was “stolen”. The extreme partisan nature of US politics will continue.

So what does Joe Biden need to do? The critical things are to revive the economy, get on top of the virus, and put pressure on the Republicans. The economy is critical. Until 2020 this was looking good for Mr Trump. The acid test isn’t the level of the stock market, so beloved of the President, but whether the economy is running hot enough to push up wages and well as create a plentiful supply of less skilled jobs. Mr Trump’s success there doubtless accounts for much of the strength of his support. How much he was actually responsible for this, and how much he was building on his predecessor, we will never know. The virus, of course, is the test Mr Biden has set himself. On both counts luck looks to be on the new President’s. side. The first of the vaccines is coming good, and other promising ones are behind it. This is already having a positive effect on confidence. This means that he is not as reliant as he might of been on Congress to provide funding for the states. The second piece of luck is that the Federal Reserve takes an expansive view of its role in keeping the economy going, and should not jack up interest rates at the first sign of success.

What do I mean by putting pressure on the Republicans? His life will be a lot easier if a small handful of Republican Senators break ranks. It will also be easier if Supreme Court justices also feel a bit of political pressure to appear non-partisan. This dos not mean indulging in the culture wars (on abortion and such matters), which tend to polarise politics and rally the Republican faithful. It does mean keeping the heat up on healthcare and support for “seniors” and veterans. The Republicans aren’t having it all their own way. MrTrump is not going to disappear; surely the party’s stalwarts are going to tire of bowing and scraping to their monarch. Mr Trump is also likely to face a blizzard of lawsuits – though this is unlikely to change public opinion much.

The interesting thing is that of all senior Democrats, Joe Biden seems to understand what needs to be done best. He has it in him to empathise with the average working class Trump supporter. His campaign was very skilful. He is going to need all of that skill in the years ahead. But he knows that. Cometh the hour, cometh the man?

September: the virus strikes back

I still have not yet recovered blogging groove, as I settle down in my new home, and with family caring issues taking priority. So I am doing a consolidated look-back on the last month’s news again. If last time the central theme was the rise of Great Power politics, this time the theme is the virus.

After the Spring crisis passed, more or less, in the developed world (not so much in the US), people relaxed in the summer (or winter depending on your hemisphere). But the virus is coming back, with the world both better prepared, but less psychologically and economically resilient. The stress is showing.

The virus’s most spectacular victim was the US President. This drama is still playing out. What has emerged is interesting, though. Donald Trump has made a great show of not allowing the virus to affect him, being rarely seen in a mask. But in fact huge efforts are made to screen anybody that comes near him, with extensive use of a quick-turnaround test. But such measures only work so far, and if enough people come into proximity, the test is bound to have miss a few. A reception for his nominee for the Supreme Court appears to have been too hubristic.

Once Mr Trump was infected his behaviour stands in complete contrast to our own Boris Johnson. Mr Johnson soldiered on valiantly, did what the doctors told him, and went to a public hospital only when he had to, with treatment recognisably similar to any member of the public. Such a passive approach was not for Mr Trump. He quickly ordered the most aggressive treatment possible, and checked himself into and then out of an elite hospital. He now claims to have conquered the virus in days. We shall see. This probably reflects cultural differences between our two countries as much as personality. Many Americans, and especially the rich and powerful, struggle with the idea that they can’t take full control of their treatment, as is often the case with the UK’s NHS. Private treatment is available here, but, quite often the best expertise is tied to the public service, and Britons don’t like public and private to mix. It is one reason why nationalising health care is unpopular in the US, even if less well-off Americans have little practical control.

But what effect will this have on the US election campaign? Democrats continue to have reason for quiet confidence. A month ago they seemed a bit rattled, as Mr Trump had forced the narrative onto his own agenda: law and order. But the Democrats’ candidate, Joe Biden, is a seasoned campaigner, backed up by a solid team. He held his nerve. The riots subsided and soon the news was dominated by the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and the unseemly haste to replace her before the election. Mr Biden refused the invitation to stoke up the culture war on abortion, but instead moved the narrative on to court challenges to President Obama’s health care system, which many working class Americans now depend on. This was followed by the first TV debate, dominated by Mr Trump’s hyper=aggressive behaviour. Mr Biden was not given the rope to hang himself with, and the focus became the personality of the President, which the Democrats are quite happy with. And now Mr Trump’s infection has put the virus centre stage. Mr Biden’s poll lead seems to be holding up, and perhaps even increasing. Most Americans have chosen who they will vote for, and not a few have voted already. Everything that is happening seems to reinforcing those choices, on both sides, and making each side more motivated. As in the mid-term Congressional elections in 2018, that is mainly working for the Democrats. Can they seize the Senate?

But the biggest question to me is what will happen after the election, with the country so bitterly divided. Mr Trump doesn’t seem to care. But if Mr Biden wins, he will have a big job on his hands. He does seem to be aware of this.

Here in Britain, the UK government’s reputation is floundering. There is something curious about this. After its initial fumblings, and the appalling early death rate that resulted, the country’s record bears comparison with many of its peers. The record of the US is worse, and so is that of France, since June. Also the records of England (directly under the control of the UK government) and Scotland (mainly under the control of the devolved SNP government) is pretty similar. But Mr Johnson’s Conservatives have suffered much worse damage to their reputation. Mr Johnson’s style is ill-suited to the occasion, and, worse, he has surrounded himself with weak ministers, while more competent people remain on the sidelines criticising his record. There is a lot to criticise, of course, especially with the government’s failure to understand effective process management (with vastly inappropriate and over-centralised structures), and the lack of a clear strategy, as different factions vie to be heard. But others are making the same or worse mistakes and getting away with it. Mr Johnson is failing at the sorts of things politicians are supposed to be good at, as well as the ones for which they have little expertise. Many of theConservatives that voted Mr Johnson into office last year seem surprised; but most others are not.

So far the big winner from the crisis appears to be China. Although they too fumbled the early stages, with dire consequences for the rest of the world, their brand of totalitarian government has stamped out the disease and kept the virus at bay. Meanwhile everybody else is struggling: as they ease restrictions to let life go on as it should, the virus comes back, and the exponential dynamics of infectious diseases stoke. Still, some countries seem better able to handle the challenge than others. But it is hard to generalise. Herd immunity can be bought only at a very high price, in direct and indirect deaths, and debilitating “long-covid”, and may not last long-term anyway. But containment comes at a very high price too. A vaccine seems the best hope.

What are Donald Trump’s chances in November?

Like many Britons who follow politics, I follow US politics enthusiastically. But I don’t like to comment so much on it here. I have no special connection to the US zeitgeist,and it seems to be a bit rude to comment on somebody else’s politics. But we can’t help but be affected by the US, so I feel I must comment from time to time. The big question is whether Donald Trump will be reelected as President this November.

At the start of the year Mr Trump’s position looked strong. The economy was doing well, he was delivering to his base, and all of his potential Democratic opponents had limitations and weaknesses. He easily saw off impeachment, successfully portraying it as a manifestation of partisan politics. Mr Trump’s divisive style never made him a shoo-in in this year’s election, but he was the betting favourite. But then things started to go wrong. The Democrats resolved their selection race with unexpected speed, in favour of Joe Biden, the candidate, apparently, that Mr Trump most feared. And then came the Coronavirus epidemic, which saw Mr Trump conspicuously flailing. This was followed by the Black Lives Matter explosion after the murder of George Floyd, and more presidential flailing. Mr Biden has a steady and growing poll lead both nationally and in the battleground states, a lead that is bigger and steadier than Hillary Clinton achieved at this stage in 2016. But we have over four months to go, and a lot can happen.

To win, what Mr Trump needs to do is to motivate his base, demotivate the Democrats’ base and win over independent voters. The first part of this is going well enough for him. Mr Trump’s base has two main components: his fanbase and anti-liberals. The fanbase consists of less well-educated white people, who have felt excluded by political elites for decades. Mr Trump speaks their language and expresses what they feel. They experience a sort of euphoria when Mr Trump expresses their values from the top of the political system; they are happy to disregard incompetence for the sheer joy of seeing one their own in charge. And with Mr Trump, unlike many other populists, what you see is what you get; there is no guile about him. This increases the bond of trust. The anti-liberals, on the other hand, are not admirers of Mr Trump personally, but they love him because because he is a bastion against the advance of liberal values. They are passionate about such things as stopping abortion and maintaining complete freedom over the ownership of firearms. They don’t believe in a strong Federal state, apart from having strong armed forces, so they aren’t bothered by Mr Trump’s evident incompetence. This group is diverse, but religious groups are prominent. They also include many business owners who dislike government regulation and taxes, and seek opportunities for cosy deals. For this group Mr Trump has delivered on his promises, most notably in the appointment of Supreme Court (and other) justices, but also with tax cuts for companies and the neutering of federal regulation; he has also held the line against gun law reform, in spite of a spate of mass shootings. For the anti-liberals the Democrats pose as great a threat as ever, and there is no sign that their enthusiasm for reelecting Donald Trump is fading. Doubtless Mr Trump’s partisan approach to the Covid crisis and the BLM uprising helps motivate this group too. They are on fire.

How about the Democrats’ base? Their main weakness is their candidate. He’s been around for a long time, and there is lot of grey in his record, not least around claims of sexual harassment. Before the BLM explosion there were signs that younger voters were becoming demotivated by all the questions being raised by his record. But Mr Trump clearly doesn’t get why people are so angry about the Floyd murder. To him this is just an isolated crime, and not evidence of a systemic failure. He doesn’t feel the pain of decades of being fobbed off with talk of progress. In fact his behaviour has given succour to the forces of darkness. He has thus become a channel for anger across the Democrats’ base, and has managed to fire them up.

And how about independents? This is a harder group for people on this side of the Atlantic to read. Mr Trump picked up many independents in 2016, because his campaign to undermine Mrs Clinton’s credibility was so successful, and her campaign to reassure them was so weak. Mr Trump fitted the American model of a successful and admirable businessman much better than the European one, so people there were prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt, while most Europeans had written him off as a nutcase. It is probably this group that is gradually coming over to Mr Biden as Mr Trump showcases his incompetence. But they are doubtless wary of the Democrats too.

So what next? The campaign hasn’t really got started yet. We know that Mr Trump will try to make it about Mr Biden and not himself, by hammering on his weaknesses. He already refers to him as “Sleepy Joe”. But this is surely not as effective as “Crooked Hillary”‘; voters are tired of hyperactive and hyper partisan politics; “sleepy” doesn’t sound so bad. But there are plenty of cracks in Mr Biden’s candidacy, so the attack could work. A further issue is whether the need to keep his base fired up moves Mr Biden into tricky policy territory. The demand to “defund” the police may not be as bad as it sounds, but it sounds like an invitation to criminals.

A big question hangs over the future course of the epidemic. Mr Trump is playing on the idea that the threat was exaggerated and lockdown measures were overdone (by Democrat governors and mayors), and he is supporting the lifting of the lockdown, even though many think this is premature. This builds on the different experiences of the epidemic across America. It has been devastating in big, crowded cities, such as New York and New Orleans, but much less so in less densely populated places. By and large Republican voters’ experience has been much less severe than that of Democrats. So if the disease retreats even as the lockdown is removed, and the economy bounces back, the Republicans will claim vindication while the pain of many cities will be forgotten as they will vote Democrat anyway. And the administration’s financial management of the crisis has been perfectly competent, largely because Mr Trump has been happy to leave that to others, and not disrupt it.

On the other hand, the disease could boomerang, hitting Republican areas hard, and disrupting the economic recovery. This is particularly likely as Autumn approaches and the weather cools: i.e. just as America approaches the vote. This could create a perfect storm for the Republicans. Mr Trump’s plan to hold mass election rallies in defiance of social distancing and mask-wearing looks especially risky.

And that points to something that I think will be the deciding issue against Mr Trump. He has become very dependent on his own judgement. When he was first elected, it was expected by many that he would surround himself with competent people, and let them do most of the work. And that seemed to be what was happening, with the recruitment of many generals to his administration, and with Steve Bannon advising on political strategy. But Mr Trump hates to be managed and he has replaced almost everybody with more compliant people who will go along with his madnesses, with the interesting exceptions of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve. This has made Mr Trump much more likely to make mistakes. Mr Biden, on the other hand, while gaffe-prone, surely knows how to ask for and accept advice.

But four months is an eternity in this crazy year.

Has Donald Trump made a serious mistake?

I was astonished a week ago when the US President, Donald Trump, launched a Twitter attack on Democrat Congresswomen, telling them to “go back to where they came from”. My first reaction was that he had lost the plot. Since then he has doubled down on this attack, incorporating it into a central theme of his campaigning. I have read and heard quite a number of comments on this from neutral and unsympathetic commentators. They all say that this is a clever strategy by the President, and makes life for the Democrats more difficult. This view is so widely held that I am compelled to challenge it. Mr Trump has blundered and is compounding his mistake.

Why is this comment so shocking? Rather too much hot air is being expended on whether or not it is racist or merely xenophobic. This type of comment is a favourite line of attack by racists, and can be taken to shocking extremes, as we see with the Burmese attack on the Rohingyas – an ethnic group that has lived in the country for many generations, but whom ethnic Burmese regard as being “from” Bengal. But you don’t have to be ethnically separate in order for people to think that you aren’t really “from here” and that your home is somewhere else, even if it isn’t. Mr Trump’s supporters don’t regard themselves as being racist, since they don’t think that it is ethnicity that they are attacking. But it really doesn’t make much difference what name you call it: it touches a very raw nerve on the part of anybody of immigrant stock. It says that however hard you try, you are not accepted as belonging. It says that the accuser is making no effort at all to be inclusive. It is particularly shocking in a country that is founded on immigration. No serious British politician would say such a thing intentionally (although I would not put it past The Brexit Party’s Nigel Farage, now that Mr Trump has blazed the trail).

Why do so many commentators think Mr Trump is being clever? First they say that it fires up his core supporters. That is clearly true. They are the type of people who think that it is a perfectly fair thing to say about somebody from a first or second generation immigrant background whom they disagree with, and they adore the way Mr Trump flouts the rules of political correctness. But Mr Trump needs more than his core support to win. In 2016 he persuaded many others that he stood for a fresh start against an under-performing political establishment. Stoking up fear and loathing does not get through to these voters.

The second thing that the commentators are saying is that the four congresswomen at the heart of Mr Trump’s assault are to the left of the Democrats and that by drawing attention to them he will put centrist voters off the party. But Mr Trump is drawing more attention to their ethnicity than he is to their political views with his “go home” attacks. He is attacking their views too, of course: I heard on the radio part of Mr Trump’s recent campaign rally implying that one of them was an Al-Qaeda supporter, inciting chants of “send her home”. Perhaps there is a parallel with his “lock her up” attacks on his 2016 opponent Hillary Clinton, but this served to reinforce his claim that there was something dodgy about her, rather than distract from it. Once again, it’s a great way to fire up the base, but it is far from obvious that the attack will be effective beyond that.

Meanwhile, consider the damage that he is doing to his own and his party’s standing. His attack could not be better targeted to anger or worry voters of Latino or Asian background, and their friends. The picture may be a bit more complicated with black voters, but the racist undercurrent won’t be lost on them either. Mr Trump is crafting his appeal to white, less educated and older voters, demographic groups that are all in decline (if you take the age criterion as being defined by a particular birth date, which seems applicable in this case). He is doing so at the cost of winding up everybody else. This is a strategically disastrous course for his Republican party, recalling the attack by that party on Latinos in the 1990s in California, which has proved catastrophic for them. The Presidential and Congressional elections of 2020 are more about tactics that strategy – but it is hard to see how the Republicans can do well without at least apathy amongst better-educated, younger or non-white voters. Stirring them up will make that harder.

A final line of defence for Mr Trump is that the attack is a “dead cat” – a tactic to distract attention from something that is more profoundly damaging. But there is no imminent election: it is hard to see what he is trying to distract people from and why it should be now.

Of course Mr Trump is not to be underestimated. In 2016 he showed a real mastery of the art of creating doubts about his opponents. He can point to enough success in his term to say that he has proved sceptics wrong: in many cases the disastrous nature of his policies will only be evident after 2020. His robust attitude to America’s trading partners, especially China, draws praise; the economy seems to be doing well enough to boost wages; he has made conservative appointments to the judiciary, which appeals to a sizeable chunk of the electorate. But the xenophobia takes voters who might be impressed by all this to a different place. He has not made his reelection impossible, but he has surely made it harder.

Some commentators suggest that his best chance of success is if the Democrats select a candidate from the left of the party. But after this episode one wonders whether amongst Mr Trump’s many remarkable achievements will be making a candidate from the left electable.

Liberals still don’t get the Trump phenomenon. He is not in danger

To judge from the headlines in the liberal press, or liberal commentators on the BBC, you would think Donald Trump’s presidency in the US was on its last legs. This follows the conviction yesterday of two of his (formerly) close advisers, and his being implicated by one of them in an illegal pay-off. But these commentators have failed to understand how the Trump phenomenon has rewritten the rules of US politics. Provided he maintains his health, Mr Trump will surely last until the end of his term in 2020. And if his liberal opponents continue to underestimate him, he could well win a second term.

The first point to make is that Mr Trump is utterly shameless. He is not the least bit embarrassed by anything that he has done. Call this narcissism if you like, but he will fight on. The second point is that his base of support both remains solid, and maintains a grip on the Republican party.

To his base, Mr Trump is the man who has delivered. Evangelicals have their conservative judges. Business leaders have their tax cuts and roll-back of tiresome regulations. Conservatives everywhere are enjoying are enjoying the rout of liberal values: it feels like fresh air. And the bad behaviour? That is utterly unsurprising; they knew the sort of man they were taking on. So long as he is doing the job of battering ram, they will forgive everything. Corruption is something that happens to liberals, in their eyes, and not to politicians on their own side. Indeed in they seem to think that corruption is less about illegal payoffs and more about the process of political compromise with people who are not like them.

So neither Mr Trump nor his base will be shaken by recent events. Legally the President looks secure too. There is debate as to whether it is possible to indict a sitting president with a crime – but if that came to be tested the Supreme Court has shown no appetite to challenge Republicans on anything important. It is unlikely that the special prosecutor, Robert Mueller, will even try. Everybody else in Trumpland is either dispensable or Mr Trump can use his powers of pardon. There is pretty much nothing Mr Trump would not do rather than admit defeat.

Which leaves the danger of impeachment, which is essentially a political process. It is looking likely that the Democrats will take control of the House of Representatives in the mid-term elections in November. That would allow impeachment to proceed. If there were grounds to do so against Bill Clinton in the 1990s, there will be more than enough against Mr Trump. But success depends on the votes of two-thirds of the Senate. Which means that half or more Republican Senators will have to turn against him. Given Mr Trump’s hold on the party grassroots, and his ability to undermine the credibility of any given opponent by a constant process of smearing, he looks secure. He will paint the impeachment as a politically tainted process, and not without a degree of justice. This is politics, and Mr Trump has proved to be America’s most effective politician.

The problem for liberals is that they persist in judging Mr Trump and his supporters by their own standards. Mr Trump’s behaviour would kill a liberal politician’s career. But Mr Trump does not need liberal votes. Instead he is playing an altogether different game: the politics of emotion, victimhood and identity. It is something liberals really don’t get.

But Donald Trump is politically vulnerable. His base is as loyal as ever, but it is a minority. He is making little attempt to win over anybody else: indeed he enjoys antagonising large sections of the US nation. This is one reason why it looks as if he will do badly in the mid-term elections. Another is that there are some cracks in his record for some of the people who had supported him.

To his supporters Mr Trump is a breath of fresh air because, unlike politicians before him, he is delivering on his election promises. That is true in the sense that he is doing things that mainstream politicians have not dared to do: notably the ratcheting up of the trade war, which has widespread public support. There are broken promises aplenty, of course, but these are either on secondary issues, or easy enough to pass off blame onto others. But I think there are two sources of trouble. One is healthcare reform. This is fiercely complicated, and the Trump administration is unable to do anything complicated. His attempts to push through a reform last year collapsed. That itself is not a problem: there are plenty of people to blame it on. And if he had succeeded it might actually be worse for him. The problem is that for many working class Americans, getting decent and affordable health care insurance is becoming impossible. A Republican reform of healthcare would not have helped. But the slow decay of the Obamacare system is making things worse. That is enough to create doubts for a lot of Trump voters, who increasingly realise that the Republicans are not on their side.

A second problem comes with the trade war. The process itself may be popular, but as it progresses it will create more victims. Already many farmers are worried. It may be enough to help the Democrats hold on to Midwestern Senate seats that would otherwise have been near impossible to hold.

This may be enough for the Democrats to overcome gerrymandered boundaries and win the House of Representatives, and even the Senate (tricky because the previous contests were six years ago on a Democratic high water mark). But the path to the presidency in 2020 is much trickier. Once Mr Trump is able to concentrate his political skills on undermining a single opponent, all bets are off. A lot of people blame his victory in 2016 on the Democrats choosing a weak candidate in Hillary Clinton. But in many ways Mrs Clinton was a strong candidate. Mr Trump would have successfully undermined any Democrat opponent, just as he did with his Republican opponents in the primaries.

And there is a trap for Democrats. It is tempting to follow the Republicans into the politics of victimhood and identity. There are plenty of people who feel victimised by the Trump regime. But that takes them away from many of Mr Trump’s less committed and more sceptical supporters. He may be able to rally them again. The Democrats need to show that they are standing up for these voters too, on healthcare and jobs in particular.

I continue to hope there will be a moment of revelation to Trump supporters, akin to what Hurricane Katrina did for George Bush Jnr. But the man has survived so many knocks, that I doubt this will happen. After that I just hope that the Democrats can choose a candidate with high ethical standards that can convince all working class Americans that she or he is on their side and Donald Trump isn’t.