Donald Trump participates in a campaign event on changing the tax code and promoting US manufacturing at the Johnny Mercer Theatre in Savannah, Georgia, USA, 24 September 2024. EPA-EFE/ERIK S. LESSER Like many urban liberals, I’m completely appalled by US presidential candidate Donald Trump. That the world’s most successful country could have thrown up the most vile candidate in US history is astounding. Leave aside his personal failings, they are just too obvious. More importantly, his economic policies will hurt his country and the world.
His proposed trade protectionism is massively more intense than in his previous term, and his anti-immigration stance is so unhinged it verges on fascism. That an immigrant like Elon Musk supports him is simply appalling.
But, you know what, I think Trump is winning. The prediction markets now have him as the favourite to win outside the margin of error and the race is his to lose. While the citizen in me is appalled by the prospect of another Trump presidency, the journalist wants to understand why this is happening. I think there are four reasons: two obvious, two less so.
The first is that the US has an unacknowledged constitutional crisis. One of the great things about written constitutions is that they are relatively clear. The great weakness of written constitutions is that their clarity comes at a cost; they tend to be rooted in the politics of the time of their making and changing them to suit a different time is difficult.
No constitution demonstrates this better than South Africa’s, which heralds above all “inclusivity” but which sacrifices administrative clarity on that altar. Hence, the country’s most important city has had six mayors in five years as the political tides twist and turn.
The US Constitution favours rural over urban to such an extent that in this election Trump has virtually no chance of winning the popular vote but a very good chance of winning the presidency. If Trump wins, it will be the fifth time the most popular candidate has lost. Hillary Clinton won almost three million more votes than Trump in 2016, for example, but still lost the Electoral College vote. A bifurcated election favours the Republicans, which is why the system can throw up candidates not just disliked by the other side but repelled by them.
The second obvious reason for Trump’s success is the advent of social media. Most media organisations regard the process of editing — largely unseen by media consumers — as an important part of their branding and a crucial part of their mission. However, social media provides irresponsible candidates with an opportunity to bypass the editing process so what you are left with is a different question: who is better at wielding the megaphone?
The result is that the most outrageous at brandishing the mic garners the most attention; that might repel but tends to allow the candidate to focus on touchstone issues that horrify their supporters without the need to be the least bit truthful. “Fact-checking” doesn’t help because once the weed is planted, those who want to pull it out are by definition “denialists” who can easily, even necessarily, be discarded. And so you get migrants who are eating the cats, and so on.
The first of the less-acknowledged reasons for Trump’s success has to do with global politics. I’ve often wondered why his catchphrase “Make America Great Again” is so powerful. From the outside, it seems to me America is pretty great as it stands. The economy is amazingly strong, the S&P is at a record high, and unemployment is lower than most economists thought possible.
But the fact is that while the US might not be absolutely declining, it is relatively declining. The Chinese economy is now easily as large as the US on a purchasing-power-parity basis. However, the Chinese economy is only one of three that will match the US in due course; the others are India and Indonesia. Think about this for a moment: by 2050, the UK will not be in the top 10 economies in the world and Italy will not be in the top 20, suggests a PwC report.
Mexico, Turkey and Vietnam will be among the new powerhouses. The axis on which the world turns is changing at extraordinary speed.
For the US, the world’s powerhouse for more than a century, the prospect of the loss of its predominant position must be something of a psychic shock, not in any direct way, but in a subtler, more generic sense. I suspect that is carrying through into US politics, with older citizens in particular harking back to the glory days — like the generation of British fogies obsessed with “the war” and the sun never setting and all that sort of stuff. The main difference between the UK and Germany is immediately visible when you walk into a bookshop: in the UK, you are confronted by a wall of history books; in Germany, you are confronted by a wall of books about design.
What I suspect most people don’t get about the “Make America Great Again” slogan is that it is not about ambition, it’s about nostalgia.
Gender politics
The second, more subterranean reason why Trump is ahead, has to do with gender politics. With a man vs woman candidate, it’s somewhat inevitable the election should be split along gender lines, but in this case, the split is extreme. In the 2020 election, Trump had a five-point advantage among men; that has now doubled. Biden’s 12-point edge among women in 2020 has become a 13-point lead for Harris. That gender difference is even more pronounced than it was in 2016 when the split ended up around 10 points.
Why has the gap increased? Obviously, one reason is the gender of the candidates. There is an underlying reason too, I suspect. Because the top end of society and overall earning power is so dominated by men, it’s easy to conclude that the male preference for the male candidate is designed to be protective of that advantage.
But actually, it’s more complex, because the gender gap is more acute among younger voters than older. Women might be less representative at the top of the pyramid, in the C-suite, for example, but they are dominating at the base. Just one example is university enrolment — graduation rates now favour women two to one.
That is a massive change in society not visible in the formal media, which is still almost exclusively focused on the top-line differentials still favouring men. There is a class and gender aspect too. Women across the board have seen an increase in wages over the last 20 years, but men who are not in the top 25% of the distribution curve have seen their wages stagnate.
It’s not as though Democratic contender Kamala Harris is unaware of these dynamics. She has pointedly avoided highlighting her gender, in contrast to Clinton who often came across as a lightweight suffragette. But in the gender wars, Harris, as a Californian professional, just doesn’t have the same set of tools — the blue-collar, bro credentials — that President Joe Biden had in 2020. That means she loses five percentage points by definition.
So how bad will it be if Trump does win? I think it will be pretty bad. It will exacerbate the trade wars and diminish US standing around the world, which means the democratic order will have no leadership. The US legal system will continue to be stocked by judicial lightweights with an ideological bent.
I was interested to hear that despite Trump’s anti-Chinese, tariff-war-threatening stance, he is massively the more popular candidate in China. The reason is simple: in authoritarian societies, the most important question when it comes to politics is whether the candidates are transactional. And Trump is nothing if not transactional. He is selling Chinese-made Good Bless the USA (“Trump”) Bibles during an election campaign, for heaven’s sake. Literally. I am not making this up.
I suspect this is why Trump gets so much support from billionaires too: what Musk cares about most of all is that the political administration doesn’t stop funding his businesses or preventing his rockets from launching. Having a corruptible president you can fob off with a few fake compliments and pocket change would be enormously helpful in that regard. Musk’s SpaceX business alone has won government contracts worth around $1-billion every year for more than a decade. When you are talking about that kind of money, the $75-million he has pumped into the Trump campaign is just table stakes.
It’s a common misconception that extractive businesspeople and authoritarian governments are cautious about obviously flawed candidates. You might think logic would prevail, because a flawed candidate is always going to be a risk. Exactly the opposite is true: flawed, populist candidates are the preferred commodities, because they are so much more amenable to State Capture. They don’t even notice it’s happening. Hello Jacob Zuma.
I hope Harris wins, but I’m bracing for the worst. But, you know, take heart; I suspect this is the last hurrah of the old school. From here on, for better or for worse, the post-Boomer era begins. DM