Donald Trump has little to smile about as he faces fire and fury of electoral battlefield

Donald Trump speaking at the campaign rally in Tulsa. He appeared bedraggled afterwards
AP
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Could we see Joe Biden victorious in November and the beginning of a post-Trump presidency?

The sigh of relief from Democrats and dissenting Republicans would be echoed by an outpouring of relief across the free world.

Foes of the MAGA man — Make America Great Again — have good grounds to dream.

A statistical snapshot shows a considerable margin of probability for such an outcome.

As the grand Shrek of American politics launched his campaign for re-election at the weekend, a new slew of polls, ranging from Fox News (which puts the President 12 points behind his rival) to The Economist’s in-depth statistical model, predict that Biden is “highly likely” to win.

Polls can analyse probabilities in increasingly sophisticated detail but they cannot tell us how a race will unfold, nor the impact on turnout of the pandemic, nor the fizzy human alchemy of how the candidates’ strengths and weaknesses will interact once they go head to head. What they do is set the framework of a vital election.

Anne McElvoy

Because Trump inspires a kind of petrified awe in supporters and detractors alike, it has become fashionable to conclude that he must inevitably win, either by force of personality or fouler means of gerrymandering and voter suppression.

In the last few months, however, bluster has failed to conceal the march of the Covid virus from high-density Democrat states into Republican ones.

Revelations about allegedly currying favour with China for political gain; or Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton’s accusation that he is incapable of separating personal gain from his presidential role; or telling Finland from Russia, are just the most recent flourishes.

Returning from a Tulsa stadium on Saturday, which revealed rows of empty seats, Trump looked bedraggled. I have seen him on top form — and this is not it.

Once, when I encountered him backstage at the hotel which bears his name in DC, the mood was a heady blend of tubthumping rhetoric and affability.

“Look after these good people,” were the codewords dispensed with a hefty grin to expel my producer and me when he had had enough of our presence. He knew his enemies’ blindspots too.

“When Trump is coming at you,” Hillary Clinton’s aide Huma Abedin told me “you are in for a whirlwind.”

She conceded that their campaign had underestimated the “focus” of their opponent.

That focus has been a largely negative force, stirring up tensions at home and leaving allies of the US, including Britain, as disappointed suitors, waiting for Trump to rediscover bilateral good manners, let alone deliver on the mirage of favourable UK trade deals.

A new wave of culture wars and their own excesses are productive for Trump.

When he preaches that Democrats were beset by a mob of Leftists who would “demolish our heritage so they can impose their new repressive regime”, there is more than a whiff of racism, but also truth in the view that ultra-radicals represent extremes of their own, such as the counterproductive “defund the police” demands.

Joe Biden would be well-advised to distance himself from demands which are more Leninist than reformist.

The failures of a presidency which scorns the hard slog of everyday governing are there to be seen in a coronavirus death toll above 120,000.

It leaves Trump starting from behind, a position which favoured his brand as an insurgency in 2016, but pits him against tougher odds as an incumbent whose economic “bump” has taken a battering from the virus.

The Democrats, if they can avoid reopening sectarian strife, are better organised and attuned to the Trump gameplan. Foreign interference is harder to conceal; social platforms are getting fiercer at flagging presidential untruths.

This more testing course might explain why a tetchy Trump is defending himself more often on the grounds that outrageous remarks about Covid testing were simply “a joke”, a line which feels more truculent than confident.

Fire and fury surely lie ahead and the unlikeliest American leader of modern times could silence the pundits again. In the launch phase of Trump 2020 though, he looks like a man contemplating the electoral battlefield ahead and not yet finding much to smile about.

Anne McElvoy is Senior Editor at The Economist

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