Donald Trump's strange sincerity His vulgarity looks like authenticity

Time will tell whether Kamala Harris was an adequate pick to replace Joe Biden, once his age-related incapacity could no longer be concealed. But the method of her selection sealed the public’s understanding of Democrats as the party of monied elites — not a good thing to be this year. Concealing Biden’s condition required the collusion of the whole party, Harris included. It wrested the choice of Democrats’ 2024 candidate from rank-and-file voters and delivered it to the party’s billionaire backers in finance, entertainment and tech. The party is taking on a fat-cat profile. It has relied on ruses to hand-pick its presidential candidate in the past three elections. In 2016, the officially neutral chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, worked behind the scenes to see off the socialist Bernie Sanders’s challenge to Hillary Clinton. In 2020, donors and strategists, desperate to unify the party factions against Trump and (again) to thwart Sanders, rescued Joe Biden’s failing candidacy by purging other moderates. Biden’s win was a vindication of their tactics. But they damaged the US — because the factions that made way for Biden would all have to be paid off when Democrats took power. The Biden administration was a junta of special interests — Black Lives Matter, immigrant and transgender activists, green-energy moguls, neoconservatives — without, we now realise, any guiding intelligence at its centre. Keeping these special interests together has cost money. That is how the American debt has rocketed to historic highs.

As a president is supposedly powerful, it was assumed that ousting Biden would require his assent. It didn’t. Once Biden stumbled in a debate last June, a funding strike called by the entertainment and finance billionaires did the trick. Cartoon heiress Abigail Disney, cryptocurrency billionaire Mike Novogratz, Netflix founder Reed Hoffman cut the party off until it agreed to replace Biden at the top of the ticket. In a sense it doesn’t matter which politician the system chooses. The party belongs not to voters but to interest groups, as it did between the Gilded Age and the reforms that democratised the nominating process in the early Seventies.

Donald Trump has turned that into a liability for Democrats. Working people remember fondly the economy as Trump ran it in the three years before the Covid emergency. It was not perfect: growth was lower than under Obama. But it was better distributed. The lowest quarter of workers saw their real wages rise by 5% under Trump, the first sustained improvement for the working poor since the 20th century. The great polling surprise of the 2024 election — the highest Republican support among black males since 1960 — is more plausibly explained by concrete economic achievements than by the intangible factors that pundits usually adduce, from Trump’s “ghetto” ostentation to his troubles with the legal system.

Gains for the working class proved unsustainable under the Biden Administration, amid a flood of 7.5 million illegal immigrants. If one episode could sum up the whole campaign season, it would be the exchange between Trump and Harris, during their televised debate in September, over allegations that Haitian immigrants were — in the Trumpian phrase that launched a thousand remixes — “eating the pets of the people that live there”.

Judged as a contest, the debate was an outright victory for Harris: a drubbing, a shutout. Trump is lazy (he obviously did not even outline a closing statement), ignorant (he did not seem to know what a “bill” is), inarticulate (there were moments when he was nearly as woolly as Joe Biden was in the embarrassing debate performance that drove him from the race).

But Harris’s victory was Pyrrhic. The issues Trump raised, however inarticulately and inaccurately, cut in his favour. Many American swing voters understand that the opening of the country’s Southern border was brought about by concrete actions urged by the immigrant-activist wing of the Biden “junta” and undertaken by executive order in the very first days of the administration in 2021.

But most Americans had no idea until Trump started going on about eating cats and dogs that there were so many places like Springfield, Ohio, a withering industrial city of 58,000 people that has received 12,000-15,000 Haitians in the last year or so. That sounds like a “minority” problem, but as Germans discovered after Angela Merkel’s invitation to refugees from the Syrian war in 2015, such newcomers are disproportionately young and male. They can become a majority in the public spaces during business hours. They can wind up laying down the law. This does not mean they are violent or even rude. They just have the force that cohesive groups of men naturally possess in the prime of life.

Many of the Springfield newcomers have rent subsidies and food stamps, and — this being the United States — a heavy carapace of rights and protections that derive from civil rights law. When you inject a federally subsidised population of 15,000 people into a small city that has not seen new housing construction in many years, natives’ rents get driven through the roof. American workers have reason to fear competition from workers who were formed in a country where the per capita income is barely $1,600.

Distant people in positions of authority sometimes accuse voters in places like Springfield of grumbling. You can see why: no one ever sets out actively to screw the natives. It’s just something “the market” does to them while the mayor and the federal government are busy patting themselves on the back for their generosity. Under such circumstances, the besieged-feeling viewers of the Trump-Harris debate might well have preferred the guy who sputtered and turned red at the very thought of Springfield to the lady who read her lines and kept her composure.

Regardless of whether he wins the presidency, Trump has won a victory in the argument about immigration that he introduced on the day he announced his candidacy in 2015. It is also a loss for elite-led campaigns of shaming and ostracism. Clearly “Woke” — that set of moral proscriptions about diversity, backed up by the power granted by civil-rights law to harass and disgrace refractory citizens in the courts — has lost much of its power to intimidate. The Trump campaign’s single most powerful television ad shows Harris passionately telling a transgender interviewer that she would back publicly funded sex-change operations for prison inmates. “Kamala is for they/them,” the ad closes. “President Trump is for you.” The Pew Center recently reported that there are more registered Republicans than Democrats for the first time since it started tallying these numbers in 1992. In the closing days of this campaign, three Democratic senators in tight races who had voted to impeach Trump twice — Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin, Bob Casey in Pennsylvania — hurriedly cut TV ads implying that their own positions on immigration were the same as Trump’s. Those who lived by the sword of woke are now dying by it.

We are getting a better idea now of why half the country is willing to be led by a man whose personality would have unfitted him for leadership at almost any previous juncture of American history. Trump’s seeming indifference to policy, a sign of unseriousness at other times, looks like a savvy refusal to be taken in. His vulgarity can look like a post-modern kind of authenticity. After making a crude joke about Kamala Harris’s husband at a Catholic gala in New York, he stared down at his printed speech and admitted others had prepared it for him — something an American politician never does. “That’s a nasty one,” he muttered. “That’s nasty. I told these idiots that gave me this stuff, that’s too tough.” Bizarrely, at times like these, Trump seems like the only sincere political figure in an otherwise rigidly scripted system.

Pandering politicians often assign a set of policy opinions to the citizenry, and then take a bunch of phoney positions to match them. Harris, discovering that swing-state voters like cars and guns, has presented herself in the campaign’s final days as a Formula 1 enthusiast (a backer of Sir Lewis Hamilton) and a gun owner — a gun fanatic, even. “If somebody breaks into my house they’re getting shot,” she told Oprah Winfrey. After not holding a single press conference in the first two months of her campaign, the teleprompter — which she used even at such traditionally impromptu occasions as voter town halls — became a symbol of her campaign.

And Trump’s strange sincerity may be why the various attempts to prosecute him have not been fatal. On the contrary. Harris commonly calls him a “convicted felon”, but what has he been convicted of? A business misdeed so small, so obscure, and brought to a verdict by a process so partisan, that it would be more accurate to say Trump had been designated a criminal than proved one. No Trump opponent has ever managed to explain his offence in a convincing way.

One factor both in blunting the propaganda effect of criminal prosecutions against Trump and allowing the enemies of Woke to rally together has been the purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk two years ago. It is not that Musk is in Trump’s corner, although he (stridently) is. It is that, in this election cycle at least, Democrat-aligned tech executives have been unable to slow the movement of narrative-disrupting stories through the news ecosystem — as they were able to do in 2020 with stories concerning the laptop of wayward presidential son Hunter Biden. Under heightened scrutiny American elites are finding it harder to stick together than they did back then.

The question arises of whether these same elites can hold the country together well enough to continue to exercise what they like to call “global leadership”. The answer appears to be no. If the world has become a much more dangerous place under Biden, it owes partly to how he was nominated. Among the interest groups that won a free hand in the 2020 coalition of anti-Trump forces was a bipartisan group of neoconservatives — foreign-policy thinkers who rose through the system under the “democracy promotion” agenda that led Bill Clinton into Kosovo and George W. Bush into Iraq.

They have drawn the United States (and its allies) into a proxy war in Ukraine that the West cannot win without an active Nato military involvement that would be reckless in the extreme. Reckless because, at the core of the Western military/diplomatic system, the American public is too badly divided ideologically to commit to a war anywhere. In January, it is true, President Biden gave a State of the Union address in which he likened both Vladimir Putin and the Republican opposition to the fascists who were on the march on the eve of the Second World War, and yet, with the help of Republican House speaker Mike Johnson, he passed a $60 billion aid bill for Ukraine.

But such bipartisanship is unlikely in the future. As things now stand, Johnson would pay with his career for any future collaboration. Harris is less connected to pre-Trumpian hawks than Biden was, even if she has received the endorsement of Dick Cheney. Trump’s vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance is a stalwart opponent of the Ukraine war. And Trump’s own bizarre reminiscences at a late October rally of threats he allegedly made to Putin are neither believable nor the basis for a bipartisan foreign policy.

This is especially since the parties, one representing the raging electorate and the other the sputtering elite, have not been so at odds in a long while. Americans may yet have a future as leaders of the free world. But that will have to await an end to the conflict between Republican populists and Democratic elitists, a conflict that 5 November is more likely to exacerbate than resolve.