As a patriotic American, and as a working journalist who believes in the sanctity of that role, I should note here that the only vote I’ve ever cast in a presidential election was for Willie Nelson, the country and western star and a symbol of reconciliation between rednecks and hippies. Still, I was eager to hear what Trump would say. To be more accurate, given my level of inebriation in sub-freezing Montana weather, with snow-globe snow gently falling outside the windows of a local bar, I was eager to mix the some whiskey with the tonalities of America’s greatest living bullshit artist and teller of tall tales. Trump’s voice is a powerful source of connection to the American literary and comic tradition, going back to the Rat Pack and to Mark Twain. I was ready to hear his magnificent instrument resonate with the promise of a better future, a future filled with laughter — and joy, even.

At 3am, West Palm Beach time, Trump’s large family stood with him onstage looking chipper and attractive. They were joined there by the celebrity validators that made Trump’s third run for the White House seem less angry and more inclusive than his prior one-man shows.

At 78, Trump’s relentless pitchman’s energy is at once diminished, and at the same more genial. And no wonder. Since his loss, in 2020, when he claimed that the election was stolen from him — and his opponents claimed that he tried to seize power through illegal means — Trump had been subjected to a whole-of-society assault by the American elite that would have killed most men 20 years younger, including those who don’t eat cheeseburgers most days for lunch. After 116 indictments, an armed raid on his home, the jailing of his business associates, and the looming threat of bankruptcy, followed by two and even three in-person rallies a day for the better part of a year, which led to him being shot in the head by a would-be assassin, the fact that Trump is still standing upright, let alone greeting a crowd as President-elect, is clearly a miracle – the biggest miracle since the Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ, I can hear Trump saying. Now, he is about to speak. The TV above the bar remains silent.

“Honey, have you ever been in a bar before?” the bartender is asking me. For the past 10 minutes or so, we’ve been politely going back and forth about whether she can turn up the volume on the bar’s television set. All I can hear around me as Trump starts to speak is the noise of a late Tuesday night at the Wagon Wheel.

Sure, I’ve been in plenty of bars before, I answer. “Well, then you know that politics is a subject that men get angry over, and I don’t want that in my bar,” the waitress answers matter-of-factly. “You can read the captions on the TV.”

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As sensible as her precautions might seem, there’s an undertone to her replies that reminds me that I am in a town, and not in the countryside. Even out here in the West, in a solid red state that epitomises cowboy culture, it is the divide between urban and exurban places, not the division between so-called red and blue states, that is culturally defining. People living in Brooklyn Heights, or in Austin, Texas or in Missoula, Montana or in Grand Rapids, Iowa, all tend to have more in common with each other than they do with people living even a mere 20 miles away.

“For fuck’s sake, this is history,” I suggest, as I watch Trump’s lips moving. “It’s not politics. Everyone can all put their prejudices aside for five minutes s and hear the man.” She purses her lips, and signals it’s a no-go. Then she offers me a free seltzer.

“We must protect our geniuses, protect our super-geniuses”, the caption-writer translates, as Trump’s lips form grandiloquent and hilarious phrases introducing Elon Musk and his love for rockets. “We have so few of them.”

Trump is clearly one. He’s an American genius, an original of a type that began with P.T. Barnum, and also includes Elon Musk. But neither Barnum nor Musk could ever become President twice, and defeat the entire American power structure. I wish to God I could hear him speak. After overcoming 100+ indictments, and having his X account revoked, the man deserves to have his moment here, in this bar.

I don’t need to hear Trump’s stunned-looking critics in the Party commentariat speak, though. The expressions on their pallid faces say it all. They are reckoning with the extent of their loss, which is turn related to their collective sense of self-importance — which is belied both by tonight’s result and by their viewership numbers. Having cratered public trust in their profession over the past decade by routinely lying to their audience on behalf of the government, which they identified in turn with the Democratic Party, the country’s self-identified defenders of democracy can fume all they want about Trump’s authoritarian, anti-democratic, fascist, Hitlerian leanings. The rest of America is as deaf to their blather as I am.

Praising Elon Musk, the country’s most successful technologist, Trump looks more like an avuncular Caribbean vacation package or waterbed salesman than a would-be Hitler. Meanwhile, party hacks like Joy Reid and the political consultants turned “commentators” like David Axelrod, along with supposed “straight news” types like Jake Tapper of CNN, who had all long ago become indistinguishable from each other, by virtue of drinking the Party Kool-Aid are waving their hands at the cameras like they were calling for smelling salts. But once lost, the trust of an audience is hard to win back.

Trump has also lost a step or two himself. His speeches, once gorgeous arias of invective, innuendo and insult comedy, delivered with the snappy timing of a Vegas Rat Pack headliner, have been transformed into rambling arabesques, like the musings of a slightly dotty family patriarch at the Thanksgiving table. Let us bow our heads, while Loopy Uncle Donald tells us about the deal he made with a Saudi Prince on a golf course. Then everyone can eat more pumpkin pie.

Trump had also learned a trick or two along the way, though. He graciously shares the stage, and allows the importance and accomplishments of others to validate his own role as MC. His timing clearly couldn’t have been better. Five years of Covid laws, a stagnant economy, direct and indirect government censorship of social media, official lying and gaslighting on every subject from trans surgeries to the efficacy of masking to the startling numbers of illegal immigrants entering the country to the spectacle of a dottering Joe Biden being barely able to remember his own name, had left most of the country dispirited and ready for change.

As the evening ends, Trump and the political movement he founded will likely control not just the White House but also the Senate, the House, and also the Supreme Court, giving Trump an actual, real-world chance to fulfill his mandate to Make America Great Again. Even though, after a decade of near-constant repetition of the slogan by adherents and detractors, no one can say with any real certainty what it now means.

* * *

As it turns out, the American people are still allowed to vote, regardless of whether their betters decry their choices as racist, sexist, short-sighted, and above all anti-democratic. It’s a paradox that the country’s genius-level elites routinely fail to acknowledge, because they are all profoundly in agreement. We must protect our democracy from those evil anti-democratic forces, American voters, who vote for Donald Trump against the expert guidance of their betters, meaning us.

Meanwhile, the lurching of an increasingly overbearing and at the same time increasingly anarchic and incompetent American state had managed to alarm many Americans who were previously more alarmed by Trump. Over the past weeks, they have been turning out in larger numbers than anyone had imagined — defying the expressed preferences and instructions of the American’ elite’s chief tutelary figure, Barack Obama, who had campaigned very publicly and hard for Kamala Harris, often overshadowing the candidate herself. Obama’s role in the Harris campaign was truthfully less strange than the fact that the former President somehow remained in Washington after his time in the White House was over, instead taking meetings in his Kalorama mansion, which is hardly the most valuable entry in his bulging portfolio of luxury properties — which also includes high Gilded Age mansions in Hawaii and Martha’s Vineyard. But it was surely the most important, serving as the centre of his unprecedented Shadow Presidency.

As the leader of the Democratic Party, Obama was hardly a pretender to power in Washington. Rather, between 2008 and the evening of 5 November 2024, he was usually the foremost power in the land. After serving two elected terms in the White House, Obama then set up and captained the so-called “Resistance” to Trump — an activity that was contrary to all prior American norms and practices. After Trump left, Obama stayed in Washington and continued his role as unelected Party Leader during what had been advertised as the Biden Presidency.

Obama’s method of avoiding scrutiny from the pliant DC press was entirely in character, alternately drawing back into the shadows and then, out of whatever ego weakness, announcing that he was the true mover of events. Free from normative oversight or responsibility, he and his retainers could also avoid answering questions about the size or sources of his personal fortune, which was rumoured to amount to somewhere between $500 million and $1 billion. As a private citizen, Obama didn’t have to answer questions. He could have it both ways — state power, with no public responsibility.

Until he misstepped. By compelling Biden to withdraw in favour of Harris, who turned out to be an even worse candidate than a senile old man who had begun to resemble a badly taxidermied deer, Obama broke the unspoken agreement that had put him beyond scrutiny. Disappearing the sitting President from the Democratic Party ticket against his will, for reasons that were obviously contrary to what the press had been telling Americans about Biden’s incredibly acute mental functioning up, and replacing him with a candidate that no one in the party had actually voted for, required some sort of comment, however brief. It made it impossible, if only for a week or two, to maintain the fiction that Obama was simply living in Washington DC while staying out of politics. If Biden was senile, then who was actually running the country? Who had enough clout to order the President’s removal from the ticket?

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The answer in both cases was Obama. And now he was on the hook not only for Kamala Harris, but retroactively for the more general mess that he and his operatives had helped to make of the country. Everywhere from Harvard University, his alma mater, where he helped install a repeat plagiarist as the University’s President, to the Middle East, which went up in flames the moment he was able to re-animate his Iran Deal, which appeared to be even stupider — if not as expensive — as George W. Bush’s determination to transform Afghanistan and Iraq into Western-style democratic societies at the point of a gun, the Party Leader’s Midas Touch-in-reverse was evident, even if no one ever breathed a single word of criticism.

Yet Americans, of all races and creeds, felt themselves to be living in a dystopian version of Alice in Wonderland, controlled by an unseen hand — and they didn’t like it. If the elite pollsters and expert predictors who had failed to foresee a Trump win had familiarised themselves with American history, instead of parroting the talking points of Obama and his operatives, they would have seen a country eager for a renewal of the freedoms that the vast majority of Americans embrace as their birthright.

Seeing Americans as one people, with a common culture and character, shaped by a common history, is not something that America’s new elites know how to do, though. From kindergarten on, they are taught otherwise. Ivy League universities, the crucible in which the new class has been forged, base admissions and hiring decisions not on measures of objective performance, but on their ranking in the ever-shifting hierarchies of Party-sanctioned identity groups. The ability to sort Americans into bureaucratic categories like BIPOC, MENA, LGBTQ+ and other alphabet soup constructions is in fact the defining skill of Obama-era elites. It signifies mastery of in-group codes that help the Democratic Party manage its own top-down constituencies, which are regimented by political operatives and NGO organisers, paid for by billionaire foundations, and embodied in bureaucratic regulations, executive orders, census categories and other legally-binding schemes meant to overcome historical American notions of equality. That’s how the party machine operates.

Now, in one night, the Obama machine, which he built on the model of the Chicago Democratic Party machine, and which he used to run the country, including the prestige institutions and the media, through a combination of bureaucratic capture and social pressure, accentuated by control of large tech platforms, was finally melting down. No wonder the press was in shock. None of the lines that they had been given could be reconciled with the numbers onscreen.

A reckoning will surely come. At the very least, the time has now arrived for Barack Obama to leave Washington and exit American politics, now that his Shadow Presidency — which proved to be even more counter-productive and chaotic than Trump’s first term in office — has gone down in flames.

Meanwhile, the gap between what America’s elites believe, and what the rest of the country believes, has never been wider, probably not since the late 19th century. Back then, Gilded Age America was ruled by a tight group of tycoons and their retainers who positioned themselves as the heirs to the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, the President and the General who together led the Civil War. The further the Republican Party traveled from the Civil War, the more the busts of Lincoln and Grant resembled window-dressing for the extraordinary fortunes of a new oligarchy that traveled in private trains, summered in Newport, and bought every available Old Master painting in Europe to decorate their lavish houses. Economically and morally, the so-called Robber Barons — Morgans, Rockefellers, Goulds, Fricks, Carnegies, Whitneys, Harrimans — had an easy time of it, enjoying the benefits of cheap immigrant labour while flattering themselves as the rightful heirs of the Party that ended slavery. With the exception of Carnegie, a self-made Scotsman and innovative industrialist who gave away his fortune to establish America’s system of public libraries, history doesn’t remember them kindly.

The Democratic Party that Bill and Hillary Clinton built in the Nineties, and Barack Obama then took in a decidedly more radical direction after 2012, won’t be remembered kindly by Americans either. The father of the modern Democratic Party, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was the country’s greatest political leader during what became known as the American Century. Roosevelt kept the country going during the Great Depression, and set it on the path to victory in the Second World War while creating a social safety net for the poor. Remarkably, every American President up until Bill Clinton in 1992 was either a protegee of Roosevelt or at least a private in his army.

The political alliance between urban ethnic machine politicians, including black urban political leaders, and Southern whites that FDR led also undercut the power of the Wasp class, successors to the New England Puritans, who dominated America’s class system and the country’s economy following the Civil War. By curbing their cultural, political, and economic influence, Roosevelt made possible the rise of the American middle class, which made America great, and also more equal.

The Clintons’ embrace of Wall Street and of international trade treaties was the window through which America’s old elites — rooted both in the Northeast as well as in San Francisco — climbed back into history. The China trade flourished, as did Democratic Party’s new Wall Street clients — at the expense of the Party’s traditional working-and-middle class constituencies. Obama brought Silicon Valley’s formerly libertarian-oriented founders on board the gravy train by promising them protection from populists like Bernie Sanders and from his own crew of high-end Chicago shakedown artists. In return, they would pay taxes to the party through campaign and NGO contributions and DEI hiring. Through this new political wiring, Obama completed the transformation of FDR’s Democrats into Gilded Age Republicans.

It will be hard for Donald Trump to top that. But maybe he will. Maybe Elon Musk will entirely revamp the Federal government. Maybe he will actually colonise Mars. Meanwhile, if Trump understands one thing, it’s that America is not Europe, or Asia, or Iraq, or Brazil. American elites come and go, while the capacity for sudden, radical, wide-eyed self-invention and leaps of innovation remain the country’s defining trait.

What outsiders tend to miss is that America was never meant to be stable. It is and has always been an inferno, the epitome of the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter’s idea of creative destruction. The wonder and freedom and heartbreak of American life is that, sooner or later, everything is consumed in the furnace. For all his wealth and success, Elon Musk’s children may worship other gods. His grandchildren may end up in a trailer park, smoking meth. McKinsey consultants with Harvard degrees may wind up unemployed or selling bottled war. Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the country’s most eminent environmental lawyer and the closest thing the Democratic Party has to royalty, may become an antivaccine heretic, be broadly mocked and humiliated by the elite and by the less imaginative members of his own family, run for President, endorse Donald Trump, take on the Big Pharma and Big Ag, and Make America Healthy Again. Or not. All anyone can say for sure is that attempts to game the American system are doomed to failure.

The bigger lesson being that America is just too big — and too wild, and too destructive, and rooted in the idea of individual freedom — for any self-styled “elite” to ride the horse for very long, without being thrown off.

Trump saw the manner of his election defeat as a personal affront. Not only was the pausing of the ballot count on election night an assault on the constitutional rights of Americans, feeding suspicions that illegal ballots were being added to the tally to boost Joe Biden — but it was Trump who was the mark. He was cheated, and so were you, he told the 74 million Americans who voted for him, and they, too, felt the sting of a public humiliation. As I explain in my new book, Disappearing the President, Trump and his supporters were disenfranchised together in front of the whole world.

It’s an insult they haven’t forgotten. Most Americans are heading into the 2024 election convinced that the outcome will be affected by cheating. Polls show that 66% of the electorate are very or somewhat concerned that the vote will be compromised, including 55% of Democratic voters, 58% of Independents, and 83% of Republicans. The reason voters are worried, rightly, about the integrity of the coming election is because Trump has never stopped talking about the last one.

Does this mean that the 2020 vote was rigged? Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who founded the Election Integrity Network, framed the problem cautiously on social media. “The election process was taken over by leftwing activist groups who had burrowed into election systems across the country by the time of the 2020 election,” she wrote recently. “And they manipulated the election system in myriad ways in state after state.”

Perhaps the most significant of these tactics was mass mail-in voting, instituted ostensibly to accommodate voters’ concerns about public gatherings during the pandemic. Previously, Democrats and Republicans agreed that mail-in ballots facilitated fraud. A 2005 bipartisan report chaired by former president Jimmy Carter and one-time Secretary of State James Baker assessed that “absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud”.

But that was all memory-holed for the 2020 vote — indeed, it was censored. The Department of Homeland Security and other government agencies banned social media posts questioning the integrity of mail-in voting. The reality is that the Covid-era measures made voting by mail even more susceptible to fraud.

Previously, states required voters to file a request for a mail-in ballot and sign it. That signature was the baseline against which to check the signature on the final ballot. It was hardly a foolproof method, but it was at least a check against fraud. The Covid-era voting procedures eliminated even that. Rather than requiring voters to submit their signed requests, state election officials mailed out ballots to everyone registered to vote, which meant there was no baseline signature for comparison. The new voting system made it hard, if not impossible, to prove fraud.

And it was all done under the veil of law. No one voted to compromise the integrity of presidential elections by eliminating signature verification, but state party officials across the country took it upon themselves to send out bushels of ballots indiscriminately, while Left-wing judges turned a blind eye. Trump spoke up — then he was banished from Facebook and Twitter after the “Stop the Steal” rally on January 6, 2021 turned violent. Trump took to social media to counsel his supporters to stay peaceful but was nonetheless exiled to digital Elba.

“I had no voice,” Trump told me. “I didn’t know what to do,” he said, “because I have so many things to say, and I have so many people that want to hear them, and I had no voice.” By continuing to talk about the 2020 vote long after it was possible to do anything about it, he wasn’t looking backward, as his aides feared; rather, he was mobilising his supporters for the next round. Thus, by spring 2021, he’d locked up the Republican Party’s nomination long before the primary season began two years later.

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Will this election be different? Mitchell writes: “We are working hard to make sure that it does not happen again this time. We haven’t fixed everything in elections that the leftists spent billions of dollars breaking. But at least we know what to watch for in 2024.”

Federal and state officials appear determined to validate voters’ fears. California recently passed a law preventing local governments from requiring voters to present identification in order to vote. The Department of Justice has filed suits against the states of Alabama and Virginia to keep them from purging ineligible voters, including non-citizens, from its voter rolls. Investigations are underway in Pennsylvania where two counties are reporting evidence of large-scale voter registration fraud. And, according to Michigan officials, there is a “nationwide issue” with voting terminals preventing voters from making certain selections on their ballots.

It seems that, as in 2020, the 2024 election will stretch out past election day. Officials from key battleground states, including Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, have already warned of delays in announcing results. Fox News Channel’s Decision Desk anticipates at least a four-day delay before it makes a final call. To mollify, or mislead, voters, Pennsylvania’s Department of State posted on X that “Pennsylvanians won’t always know the final results of all races on election night. Any changes in results that occur as counties continue to count ballots are not evidence that an election is ‘rigged’.”

But delaying the announcement of election results is typically seen the world over as evidence of fraud. US officials once saw it that way, too, at least up until the 2020 election when contesting election results became grounds for indicting Trump, his lawyers, and other top aides.

For instance, delays in announcing the results of the first round of Peru’s 2000 election — which included three days for the presidential race, more than a month for congressional contests, and a “mysterious” lapse in the transport of ballot boxes to vote count centres — caught the Clinton administration’s attention. A State Department spokesman warned the Peruvian government “to take every possible measure to ensure that the next round of voting fully meets democratic standards of openness, transparency and fairness”.

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The Peruvian campaign was marked by other irregularities, too, as watchdog groups found evidence that incumbent Alberto Fujimori’s operatives had manipulated the media, forged voter registration signatures, and transported pre-marked ballots. The reason those sound like the irregularities identified in the 2020 US elections is because the distinguishing characteristics of election fraud are always the same. There are not that many ways to rig an election, and it does not take a professional election monitor to recognise fraud.

Delayed election results are correlated not only with fraud but also with violence. According to a study of African elections from 1997 to 2022: “The length of time between elections and the announcement of the official results acts as a signal of possible voter fraud, thereby increasing incentives for post-election violence.”

Likewise, paused ballot-counts and lengthy delays in announcing results in Honduras’s 2017 presidential elections led to widespread violence and 17 deaths. Here again, the US State Department took note. The irregularities, said US diplomats, indicated that “much-needed electoral reforms should be undertaken”.

Could the promised delays for this election cycle provoke further political violence? With two attempts on Trump’s life already, Kamala Harris raised the stakes when she compared him to Hitler. In a recent Atlantic article, former Trump administration officials allege that their ex-boss spoke favourably of the Führer, claims that the Harris team rolled into a press conference essentially warning against a Hitler presidency. Only Harris, her campaign promises voters, is capable of “defending democracy” — effectively the central plank in the party’s platform — against your Nazi neighbours.

The idea that Trump is a tyrant in the wings is of course absurd. But it is no more dangerous than Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign propaganda claiming that Trump was controlled by Vladimir Putin. US intelligence services used that fabrication as a predicate to investigate Trump during the second year of his presidency.

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Through three election cycles, from 2016 to the present, the Democrats have sought to present Trump, a political outsider, as somehow fundamentally un-American. At best, the Democrats dismiss Trump’s supporters as unwitting accomplices of a foreign agent; at worst, they denounce them as collaborators in a fascist plot to undermine democracy. This has proven to be the most destructive propaganda campaign in US history. No foreign power has ever divided the American public so successfully.

The catch is that Harris doesn’t have many options. Some say the Hitler ploy is evidence that her campaign has run out of steam, but the problem is more fundamental: owning the Democratic Party’s signature policy initiative from the last four years would be disastrous. Since Biden took office in January 2021, the administration has ushered millions of illegal aliens across the southern border. Because no one is stopping the migrants from crossing and record-keeping is deliberately careless, no one knows how many have entered, though estimates range between seven and 25 million.

Even officials in Democrat-run polities such as New York, Boston, and Los Angeles are starting to have second thoughts about their status as “sanctuary cities” now that illegal aliens are exhausting their resources while also spiking crime rates. The proliferation of cheap, undocumented labour has suppressed the wages of working-class Americans or pushed them entirely out of the workforce. And because no Democrat in their right mind wants to take credit for burdening taxpayers with billions of dollars in public services for non-citizens, no one dares look into the future when automation will make millions of illiterate foreigners redundant.

Trump’s plan, the cornerstone of his campaign, is to send them back. If they want to move to America, they have to go home and start the process lawfully. In the meantime, Republicans are worried that illegal migrants are being registered to vote and their harvested ballots may help Harris win battleground states.

However, some GOP officials I’ve spoken with say there’s little evidence yet of mass registration of the Biden-Harris administration’s illegal migrants. At present, say my sources, the migrants are largely being relocated to Democrat-run states and cities, replacing Americans who vacated these areas in the last few years, driven out by draconian Covid lockdowns and mandates. These millions of Americans have left the Democratic enclaves on the East and West coast and moved to the sunbelt and other Republican-dominated regions to free themselves from the policies that have made life more dangerous and expensive. That exodus is a problem for Democrats since congressional seats are allocated according to population size. When conservative voters leave majority Democratic regions in droves as they have recently, those areas lose seats. And so, to win elections and hold power, so the theory goes, the Democrats need to keep the borders open, maybe forever.

This is why Trump supporters believe that the election will decide whether America remains a real country, with secure borders and secure elections, or is destined rather to become a tax farm for oligarchs in a geographical zone ruled by a single party. It’s no wonder Americans are on edge — Harris voters are worried that Hitler will be re-elected, and Trump supporters fear a repeat of 2020 that will lead to an unrecognisable America. Accordingly, voters are more galvanised by the electoral process than ever before, watching polls like political professionals.

Americans aren’t accustomed to this level of political urgency. For much of US history, most voters assumed that regardless of the outcome, the ship of state would rest in relatively steady hands whether it was a Democrat steering it slightly left or the Republicans charting a centre-right course. After the eight-year campaign targeting Trump, his aides and supporters, hardly anyone believes that anymore. Today, there’s little voters are willing to take for granted, including evidence of Trump’s growing lead as we head into Tuesday’s election.

Such a pairing would make for a politically fertile synthesis: while Vance built his electoral brand on his working-class roots, Moreno has advertised himself with a more traditional set of Republican credentials — namely those of a small businessman or, to be more precise, a car dealership owner.

Between these two poles, the outline of a post-realignment GOP may be sketched. Where the Reagan coalition of the Eighties united Wall Street with Main Street business (with some working class defectors), the emergent Trump coalition of the 2020s and beyond will be different. Because of the exodus of the corporate and college-educated segments of America to the Democrats, it will most likely be composed of a more solid pool of working-class voters allied with the petit-bourgeois class of the red-state and hinterland regions, sometimes known as the “American gentry” and stereotypically represented as rock-ribbed conservative car dealers, like Moreno. Yet while much ink has been spilled trying to understand the mindset of the MAGA working class (Vance’s 2016 bestseller Hillbilly Elegy was about precisely the kind of people who would go on to vote for Trump), comparatively little attention has been paid to the Bernie Morenos of America.

A 2023 account of these car dealers by Slate’s Alexander Sammon recounts the awesome scale of their collective wealth and influence on Republican politics: “Auto dealers are one of the five most common professions among the top 0.1%”; they (along with other gentry professions like gas station owners and building contractors) make up “a majority of the country’s 140,000 Americans who earn more than $1.58 million per year”; members of the industry association donate to Republicans “at a rate of 6-to-1”, through which they have worked “to write and rewrite laws to protect dealers and sponsor sympathetic politicians in all 50 states”. Such figures help to make sense of Moreno’s and his fellow car dealers’ status as the cream of the crop among America’s local elites.

Coverage of the gentry more generally diverges along partisan lines: Right-wing commentators usually praise their innate cultural conservatism and strong attachment to place, while Left-wing and libertarian critics decry what they see as the reactionary and racket-like nature of their enterprise, built as it is on intensive lobbying efforts to ensure their entrenched positions as middlemen standing between manufacturers and consumers. Given their political weight, it is surprising to see the dearth of analysis on the future trajectory of this class (other than prophecies that anticipate their extinction) in the context of debates about the fate of the US auto industry, not to mention the role this gentry should play as the Republican coalition lurches away from the Reaganite consensus.

Indeed, a case can be made that the central question for the future of conservatism revolves around this class. It is not whether they will embrace a populist-nationalist political outlook — this much should already be clear to any observer of American politics in the last eight years — but whether they will become populist-nationalist in their economic preferences as well? For beneath their reputation as regressive opponents of change, it should be remembered that it was this unheralded elite of small-town millionaires who came out early and overwhelmingly for Trump in 2016, rejecting free-market orthodoxy and legitimising previously heretical stances on trade and the need to re-industrialise. It was to their ears as local elites spread out across the country that Trump’s incessant calls for rebuilding America’s “bridges, tunnels, freeways, and airports … our great plants and factories” were most resonant.

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In other words, by anointing a brash New York City businessman as their tribune, it was the gentry that arguably did the most to light the spark of the populist-nationalist revolution, though a combination of inertia and diversion prevented a fully-fledged nationalist programme from taking shape when Trump was in office. However, in the years ahead, a more forceful break with laissez-faire policy on their part along with an embrace of state-guided industrial policy would bring them into much closer convergence with the material interests of the working class, and should actually enable Republicans to follow through on the promise that launched Trump’s insurgency: to restore America’s strength and prosperity by bringing industry back to the heartlands. But it remains to be seen how a conservative class of provincial entrepreneurs can be made to support a nationally-directed interventionist agenda.

Turning to history will reveal that it isn’t as much of a long-shot as it seems: after all, it was small business elites — not unlike today’s gentry — who fuelled American industrialisation in the late-18th to 19th centuries under the banners of the Federalist, Whig, and early Republican parties, when the term “nationalist” meant precisely support for the federal government’s role in directing modernising investments toward the country’s developing regions and frontiers. Henry Clay’s “American System” was the most ambitious expression of this philosophy, and later served as the inspiration for Abraham Lincoln’s programme for reshaping of the American economic order during the Civil War. But what would be the equivalent programme for revitalising today’s moribund post-industrial economy?

The answer may have to do with Trump’s unexpected and ingenious proposal, made during a speech at a Moreno rally in Dayton, of letting Chinese firms build car factories in America as the only way around a new 100% tariff wall he’d place for Chinese cars made elsewhere. This would seem to contradict his image as the ultimate China hawk. But as David P. Goldman points out, Trump is a dealmaker first and foremost, and his idea (coverage of which was lost amid furor over Trump’s “bloodbath” comments from the same day) would not only diffuse Sino-American tensions but deliver benefits to US workers, consumers, the auto industry (in the long-term), and yes, the car dealer gentry. The Chinese themselves are in need of new markets, and as Politico reports, for them, “the United States market is the holy grail”.

Trump has claimed, under this proposal, US workers would get to work in the car factories, though the scale of automation involved and the advanced skill set required could mean that most of the existing American workforce may not be qualified enough to man such factories. In any event, manufacturing would still create lots of “spillover” jobs in the communities that receive the factories. Just as American consumers would, of course, benefit from access to the latest Chinese EV models — such as the BYD Seagull.

The auto industry, meanwhile, despite having to deal with fierce new Chinese competition initially, would nonetheless be able to, as Goldman put it “appropriate their IP the way they appropriated ours”. This may sound like a flippant statement, but historically this is how catch-up industrialisation worked, through subtle processes of IP transfer from the more advanced to the less advanced economies, in which case a new cycle would just be repeating itself — this time, to America’s advantage. Or as Goldman wrote: “It’s easier to let [China] bring industrial automation to the United States than to try to catch up after the fact. That’s the path of least resistance, and one that Trump has opened up.” (Though as a means of cushioning the effect of China’s market entry, its factories could be brought in at a controlled pace and assigned to limited geographic areas so as not to overwhelm domestic competition totally.)

But the greatest beneficiaries may be the car dealers, who, in this scheme, would be the ones to sell Chinese cars to consumers. In theory, car dealers should be able to sell EVs such as the Seagull the same way they sell gasoline-powered cars, but in practice, it hasn’t worked out that way because of a number of factors, namely the more expensive costs of servicing EVs and lack of available technical expertise. This is why Moreno and the gentry have been consistently hostile to EVs; and it also doesn’t help that Tesla has sought to market its models directly to buyers through online sales.

But there is another instructive example from the annals of American economic history, namely the state-sponsored mechanisation of agriculture in the New Deal South, where an ultra-conservative local oligarchy profited from state subsidies that allowed them to pay for modern farm equipment, thereby reducing the cost of innovation and helping the semi-feudal South of the Thirties to develop and industrialise. A similar effort to subsidise costs for any EV transition, in which the US government transfers funds and capital assets directly to the dealers, would both accelerate the adoption of new technologies and preserve the civic leadership of the gentry. Such a programme would smooth the economic transition for them–— if not the cultural one, which may prove more difficult, given their engrained suspicion of EVs. In any event, electric would still be far off from becoming the mainstream of the US auto industry and will likely co-exist with traditional and hybrid models for some time: but this endangered class would nonetheless be given a chance to not just survive but thrive amid an otherwise disruptive paradigm shift.

Furthermore, the accompanying new infrastructure of such a programme would be incredibly costly, to say the least, and neither the Chinese nor the US government should be expected to foot the entire bill. This is where the state can step in to channel private capital into the underdeveloped regions where the gentry live by setting up such things as infrastructure banks, guidance funds, and shared manufacturing facilities as the pillars of a modern-day equivalent to Henry Clay’s “American System”. Best of all, through such a programme, Washington — under Trump or any future Republican president — could pressure the financial sector to disgorge its hordes of stagnant capital into these new developmental institutions and stimulate re-investment into the heartland. This would, in effect, create a massive wealth transfer from Wall Street to Main Street, reversing the logic of the Reaganite coalition in which Wall Street called all the shots.

Of course, many things would have to go right for this scenario to take place. The Republicans could fumble their chance at leadership and go back to more Paul Ryan-style tax cuts, which would do nothing but enrich increasingly Democratic-aligned corporate America; or they could actually base their policies on the interests of their primary elite constituency, the gentry, along with the working class. Realising this possibility would require a future Senator Moreno to imbibe the heterodox ideology of his colleague J.D. Vance, as he employs his entrepreneurial skills to convince his fellow Republicans to entertain a programme radically different from the free market dogmas of the past. After all, it was the American gentry that started the Trumpian populist-nationalist revolution: they may yet be the ones to finish it.

“What’s so special about Congressman Phillips?” is a question that Phillips has failed to answer convincingly, not even with the help of some powerful friends in Silicon Valley and Wall Street. He has staked his case on his relative youth, but Democrats seem fine with the octogenarian incumbent. He’s argued for more hawkish positions on immigration and the national debt but, again, these issues failed to resonate with the party’s voters. And yet, there remains one area in which the Phillips campaign may ultimately stand out: the uncharted intersection between presidential politics and artificial intelligence.

Even if Phillips wakes up to the fact that he has next-to-zero chances of winning the nomination and drops out of the race tomorrow, he has already earned a notable and quite peculiar historical distinction: that of being the first presidential aspirant to be turned into a working, real-time AI bot, albeit very briefly. And though Phillips’s bid could end up a mere blip so far as the dynamic of the 2024 race is concerned, it could have a broader significance beyond this election as the opening chapter for what is to come as AI technology becomes a mainstream tool of political campaigning.

There was nothing in Dean Phillips’s record as a nondescript Democratic backbencher from Minnesota to suggest that he had any special affinity for artificial intelligence: he entered Congress in 2019 as a campaign finance reform advocate opposed to the influence of big donor money. However, upon announcing his presidential campaign in October, he began to be seen around wealthy and influential figures in the tech world. As a political novice with no national base or constituency, it perhaps only made sense for Phillips to seek the patronage of new benefactors, who could potentially make a big difference in improving the odds of his long-shot run. Soon, he was describing Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, as “an extraordinary thinker and friend and voice of counsel”, while figures including Elon Musk, Andrew Yang and Bill Ackman have expressed their support, with Ackman even donating $1 million to his campaign. Phillips, the populist foe of plutocracy, suddenly became its sympathetic friend and admirer, prompting one former ally to point out that it was “a disgrace to see how far he’s fallen”.

In November, these increasingly cosy connections with Silicon Valley yielded a shift in the direction of the Phillips campaign. We Deserve Better, a Super PAC headed by Matt Krisiloff (formerly Altman’s chief of staff) and now funded in part by Ackman himself, was founded to aid the candidate, who began to sound exceedingly bullish about AI and cryptocurrency — two subjects which Phillips had previously had little to say about, but which are near and dear to many of the lords of Silicon Valley. In December, Phillips appeared at an event called “Stand with Crypto”, in which he claimed that AI and crypto should be allowed to flourish without too much regulation, echoing the libertarian ethos that predominates in the Valley. He said: “We should make sure we don’t stifle innovation, that we don’t stifle decentralisation when it is thoughtful and supportive of our national interest … that’s true in crypto as it should be in AI.” At another event in which Phillips was introduced by Yang, he boldly predicted that he would be “the first AI president in American history!”

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Perhaps in an attempt to manifest this, in the middle of this month, Krisiloff’s Super PAC launched “Dean.bot”, a chatbot built with the help of the AI startup Delphi that could speak to voters and answer questions with Phillips’s voice and mannerisms. It was constructed using samples drawn from his speeches and interview appearances, and differed from Delphi’s previous political AI voice applications, which could only respond with pre-written answers. In other words, this was the first candidate bot one could have a free-flowing, real-time conversation with.

However, there was a problem: the chatbot was powered by ChatGPT, the LLM software owned by OpenAI, which prohibits its use for political campaigns. Delphi’s account was accordingly suspended by OpenAI and the developer has since taken it down. Krisiloff has signalled that other open-source software may be utilised to maintain the chatbot’s linguistic and interactive abilities, while tech researchers warned against its potential for spreading misinformation through the malicious impersonation of candidates. In any event, Dean.bot remains offline, for now.

It may seem insignificant, a novel experiment in AI that lasted all of a few days, but a Rubicon has surely been crossed and Dean.bot’s fleetingly short lifespan nonetheless offers a preview of what AI is capable of when brought into the political arena. As the demise of Dean.bot illustrated, the cultural climate is not yet ready to accord free rein to the use of this kind of technology in this context. But the fact is that such applications are here and they have proven to be easily deployable: it’s arguably only a matter of time, perhaps a few election cycles from now, when resistance to it eventually wears down and the experiment is repeated by campaigns in the future. It’s not difficult to imagine OpenAI or other firms announcing that, after much deliberation, they have determined the right set of standards to govern the use of AI in politics before lifting their prohibitions. From then on, the introduction of AI, like the introduction of social media a generation ago, would be treated as both desirable and inevitable.

After all, the American political class has often displayed an overeager attitude to the adoption of new technologies, borne of the Whiggish faith in unfettered progress that underlies their culture. And has ensured their all too ready deference to the wishes of the tech industry. As Phillips himself claims: “I come from a Congress in which… we have very few people who even understand it. And if you do not understand it, all you want to do is regulate it…” This is another way of saying that those who made the technology are the ones best suited to regulate it and government should, therefore, stay out of the way.

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It’s a stance that mirrors the establishment’s initially fawning and effectively laissez-faire approach to social media in the Obama era, before the same technologies were blamed for destabilising American democracy in 2016 and became objects of intense suspicion. Today, the cycle seems to be repeating itself with AI: multiple rounds of hype and optimism at the early stages to be followed by an existential reckoning later on. Despite recognition of its ills, however, social media hasn’t perceptibly changed from what it was before. Likewise, it’s anyone’s guess if public authorities, as currently constituted, will even have the capacity, or, indeed, the political will, to redirect AI in any meaningful way.

For their part, Sam Altman and other leading Silicon Valley figures have espoused maximalist positions on the possibilities of open-ended AI development, even to the point of welcoming the emergence of new forms of consciousness. As Altman wrote in a 2017 essay speculating about “The Merge” of human and post-human intelligence: “It’s going to get a lot weirder. We will be the first species ever to design our own descendants. My guess is that we can either be the biological bootloader for digital intelligence and then fade into an evolutionary tree branch, or we can figure out what a successful merge looks like.”

These philosophical currents resemble the tenets of what has come to be known as “effective accelerationism” or “e/acc”, an influential ideology in tech circles arising from the writings of “Dark Enlightenment” thinker Nick Land. “Nothing human makes it out of the near future,” Land wrote, with his followers concluding that AI in particular and capitalist progress in general are forms of non-human super-intelligence that will eventually consume and supersede humanity itself. And though Altman doesn’t openly identify as an accelerationist, he and others from OpenAI, such as Krisiloff, have already done much to bring Land’s vision closer to fruition. Through their engagement with political figures including Phillips, such ideas and sentiments may soon find receptive outlets in the political mainstream.

In the not-so-distant future, when AI candidate bots are accepted as a normal feature of politics, the prospect of an “AI president” thus becomes much more plausible, though perhaps in ways radically different from what Phillips intended: less The West Wing, and more Black Mirror. And it is in this context of technology’s unexpected consequences that experiments like Dean.bot ought to be evaluated. For if Dean Phillips is the first “accelerationist candidate”, he certainly won’t be the last.

What ties the impeachment drama that began the year together with the pandemic, months of political violence and faulty predictions of a Biden blowout, is a system-wide failure of expert knowledge and elite institutional response. “Where were all the experts?” asked New York’s governor Andrew Cuomo in April, at the height of his state’s Covid outbreak. Cuomo blamed more or less every wing of the sprawling structure of elite expertise, pointing the finger for what happened on his watch at “the international health community… the WHO, the NIH, the CDC… the intelligence community… the New York Times… the Wall Street Journal”.

Sure, the governor’s complaint was self-serving given his own disastrous handling of the pandemic, but it wasn’t wrong. Weeks earlier, the Center for Disease Control, after months of declaring face masks ineffective and imploring the public not to wear them — a position echoed by the US Surgeon General, by Biden’s soon-to-be chief medical advisor Dr Anthony Fauci, and by most of the media — abruptly reversed course and endorsed face covering as vital to containing the spread of Covid.

Masks were the most visible representation of this: a year defined by politicised expert opinion detaching itself from reality and undergoing sudden reversals. Mass gatherings went from deadly superspreader events to being practically mandatory as a matter of public moral hygiene, with the rise of the BLM protests in May. Covering up such absurdities required the combined effort of ideological enforcers in the press and on social media, brute intimidation by people with hiring and firing power, and the constant appearance of a new crisis to distract from the last.

The compound effect was a cleavage in which half the country now rejects the legitimacy of America’s nominally non-political institutions. Tucker Carlson, whose relentless criticism of the ruling class has made him the top-rated cable news host in the country, summed up the sentiment in a recent segment on how the “experts have been exposed as frauds”. But this is not only a right-wing or populist phenomenon. From the liberal centre, Yascha Mounk wrote in late December about “losing trust in the institutions”.

The first important lesson from the past year is that this revolt against the experts is not a fringe phenomenon driven by QAnon loons, hysterical anti-vaxxers and other untouchables. It is widespread and its consequences are already profound. On the surface, people are simply rejecting the authority of institutions such as the CDC, which now openly advocates for racial preferences and places political calculations before the public good. But beneath that rejection, there is a cultural shift at the level of animating beliefs.

For millions of people, a disenchantment has broken the spell which upheld their faith in rational, scientific knowledge as the best means to tame the natural chaos of reality and administer the business of society. On top of all the other disenchantments undermining America’s founding myths, this one erodes the foundation on which the entire technocratic regime of modern society rests.

Given the rather obvious importance of public health officials in the midst of a pandemic, why not seek to replace them with a better class of expert, instead of attacking the basis of expertise? The answer to that is in the second lesson of 2020: far from losing status after the repeated errors and deceptions of the past year, America’s institutional elite is more powerful than ever.

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When will my fellow liberals learn?

By Mark Lilla

Perhaps some reputational damage has been inflicted on the experts who warned that the real threat of the coronavirus was overreacting, or worse, racism, and on the elite activists who advanced a deeply unpopular police abolition agenda ahead of national elections, and on the scientific establishment that declared “white supremacy” to be “a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19”.

But those costs are marginal compared to the material and political gains. If you are one of the people or organisations which repeatedly got the coronavirus wrong, abetted wanton political violence and destruction, or once again misread the American electorate, odds are very good that your funding streams, political influence, institutional power and leverage over your fellow Americans are going increase over the next four years of the Biden administration.

The collective fortunes of the experts who failed Andrew Cuomo and the citizens of New York have run in parallel with those of the governor. Cuomo oversaw a fiercely politicised coronavirus response. He made costly mistakes, including his mandate that nursing homes accept discharged Covid-19 patients without testing to determine if they were still contagious, a policy that resulted in thousands of deaths (we don’t know exactly how many because he refuses to release the numbers). And yet, somehow in the midst of a death toll approaching 40,000 he found the time to write a book touting “leadership lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic” and do a victory tour.

He’s laundered his reputation in a way that can only be compared to the Russiagate diehards. The political actors and intelligence operatives claiming a Trump-Putin conspiracy who were exposed as, at best, delusional frauds have faced no consequences. Rather, they’ve been rewarded with campaign contributions, book deals, TV appearances, and other tokens of commercial and cultural prestige. The vast surveillance apparatus that engineered the domestic spying operation has been legitimised as a tool for correcting against unfortunate errors in democracy when the will of the people gets it wrong.

The future is looking bright for the DC foreign policy elite whose combined wisdom produced the Iraq War, abetted the catastrophe in Syria, scoffed at Trump’s efforts at a peace deal in the Middle East, and who now fight tooth and nail to keep US troops stranded in a lost war in Afghanistan.

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In the last week of December, that paragon of public expertise, Dr Anthony Fauci, gave an interview to the New York Times in which he admitted to lying to the American public. “Fauci acknowledged that he had slowly but deliberately been moving the goal posts” on the necessary threshold of vaccinations before America would achieve herd immunity, according to the Times. His reason for misleading the public? “His gut feeling that the country is finally ready to hear what he really thinks.”

Sometimes, good leaders deceive the public in moments of crisis to achieve a greater good. But that is not the case here. If you are bragging to the media about it, it was not a noble lie. Fauci’s lie appears to have served no vital purpose related to public health — as if anyone opposed to vaccination would be moved by a 10-point spread in Fauci’s estimates. I don’t envy any leader charged with directing policy in the midst of a plague, but Fauci’s problem is not that he made errors but is so utterly unaware of that fact; that insulated by political celebrity and bureaucratic sinecure, he would choose to conspicuously gloat about his deceptions in the Times. On the same day, the interview appeared, the good doctor received a birthday serenade from Joe and Jill Biden.

The political elites of both parties are ending the year on top. The Democratic leadership defeated the populist threat from Bernie Sanders and now has one of its own, Joe Biden, leading the country. The Republican leadership has its own reasons to be happy about a Biden White House. The GOP got very comfortable adopting the symbolism of Trumpism while blocking White House policies like stimulus spending and ending the war in Afghanistan. With Trump out of office, Republicans can drop the balancing act and go back to satisfying the party’s donor base with cheap labour, austerity policies, foreign military adventures and the distraction of permanent culture war.

Underwriting the growing power of this interconnected media-administrative-political elite is the new American oligarchy led by Silicon Valley. The same tech industry that led a heavy-handed approach to the pandemic, censoring non-expert opinions while amplifying institutions like the World Health Authority, while the WHO at various points opposed wearing masks, criticised travel bans as ineffective, and disputed that the virus is highly contagious — all while lavishing praise on China. The US is down 10 million jobs since the start of the year. One hundred and sixty thousand small businesses have shuttered. Children are going without school and friendship, ordinary people are languishing in isolation and despair. But with government stimulus spending facilitating an immense upward transfer of wealth, the top tier of corporate profits has soared along with the stock market.

“The tactics that helped many corporate titans thrive — laying off thousands of workers, going deep into debt, and grabbing market share from struggling competitors — will shape the recovery for months, if not years,” the Wall Street Journal reported in December. In the past year, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Apple have added a total of $2 trillion in market value between them.

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The spillover from that record-setting cash grab will go directly to subsidising the failing elite institutions and expert bodies that are cutting off the oxygen to American society. But the crucial question is why elite institutions that are so error prone, and so untrustworthy, don’t suffer for their repeated failings.

The answer begins with understanding the nature of their power. In a society with a useful class of elites, their legitimating authority would be bound to the national interest and derive from the benefits they produce for the larger society. Likewise, in a functioning technocratic establishment the value of expertise would be a function of how accurately it can assess complex events, explain reality and forecast outcomes. But that is not what we have. For the American ruling class, expertise is a ceremonial costume conferring power through mystifying rituals. The mantra of this cohort, “believe science,” says it all. It’s an incantation in a cheap magic act, one that has nothing to do with science.

If you still think science is above this kind of thing, too important to be compromised by ideology and self-interest, just look at the US military. The military has transformed into an institution in which the highest level of leadership is so estranged from its fundamental purpose — to win wars and secure peace at home — it responds to losing wars by absorbing the logic of defeat into its essential operations. The fact of America’s failure in Afghanistan becomes the reason to stay.

The iron law of the American elite is that as long as everyone fails together, everyone fails upwards. Regime loyalty is the herd immunity of the ruling class, a protection against the consequences of their own failures. This is why the loss in authority that manifests in the “crisis of experts”, while real, doesn’t diminish their power. But it’s also why the regime has to become more ideological and nakedly coercive — for a kingdom of experts without reliable expertise falls back on propaganda and state power.

Read them and it looks like Covid-19 spells the end for Donald Trump — and the argument is not hard to make. America has now plunged into the worst recession since the Great Depression. Unemployment has surged to a post-war record of almost 15%. More than 33 million Americans have lost their jobs in just three months while nearly 84,000 have died from a virus that has been poorly managed. Trump’s approval ratings are slipping. And of the 50 most recent polls, he has only led his Democrat challenger, Joe Biden, in one.

Biden is not only averaging a comfortable 4-point lead nationally, but has also been ahead in many of the recent swing state polls in Florida, Michigan and Pennsylvania. And then there is the point about the big Trump rallies, which some have argued were central to allowing the incumbent to win these states in the first place: there probably won’t be any this time, for obvious reasons. I don’t know about you but I cannot see thousands of Americans flooding to mass rallies any time soon.

All of this explains why legendary Democrat strategist James Carville recently claimed that Trump has “no chance” at the election. “This whole thing is just like a crumbling empire right before your eyes”, said Bill Clinton’s former chief strategist, who went on to claim that Trump’s advisors know they will lose and are now only in the race for the money.

If this is right, then Trump is destined to become the first one-term President since George H.W. Bush and only the third since 1945, the other being Jimmy Carter (not including JFK, who was assassinated and Gerald Ford, who took over from Nixon and was never elected).

But is all of this right?

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Will Gen Z recover from Covid?

By Matthew Goodwin

I don’t share Trump’s politics, but as a political analyst, I do think that we should heed the lesson of the past decade and challenge conventional wisdom a little harder.

Already, there is lots of talk about how economic crises hurt incumbents and help challengers. The obvious examples are Carter in 1980, the first George Bush in 1992 and then heavy Republican losses in 2008 in the middle of the finance crisis.

But are these really comparable? Is what is unfolding in America (and elsewhere) a ‘normal’ recession?

Analysts are already using models that treat this downturn like any other. But on the ground, I suspect that most ordinary Americans do not see this as a normal recession. On the contrary, and as pollster Nate Silver has pointed out, they probably view this as something that is more akin to a “wartime economy”, as opposed to an economy that has been poorly managed by an irresponsible and incompetent incumbent. It is also a crisis that quite clearly started outside of America.

The idea that Trump might not be blamed in the way that an incumbent usually would be is backed up by data. Look at the polls, and you find that the president’s numbers are actually not that bad.

Since the crisis erupted, his approval ratings have certainly slipped a little. But they are now basically back to where they were shortly before Christmas. And if you look under the bonnet you find a lot of variation; nationally, he might be on 44-46% but no fewer than 91% of Republicans say they approve of his presidency. Last week, the pollsters Ipsos reported that while only 42% approve of Trump as president, when it came to the economy and jobs his ratings were noticeably higher — 51% and 52%, respectively.

Perhaps his handling of Covid-19 is what matters?

Maybe, but again if you look at last week’s data, while only 44% of Americans approved of how Trump is handling the crisis, this figure jumps to 52% among whites, 76% among self-described conservatives and 88% among Republicans, all of whom are critical to his re-election hopes. Partisanship, as they say, is one hell of a drug.

Nor is there much evidence that the unfolding economic crisis is translating into an in-built advantage for Biden.

“It’s the economy, stupid” is the immortal line that Carville and Clinton used to win the presidency. But when Americans are asked whether they think their economy would get better or get worse if Biden were in the White House, only 30% say ‘better’ (and 38% say ‘worse’). The equivalent figures for Trump are 36% and 35%.

Last week, another survey found that just one in three Americans feels confident in Biden’s ability to handle the worst economy since the Great Depression, and then this week polling by CNN suggests that while Biden still leads Trump nationally he is trailing him across more than a dozen battleground states, where voters give Trump significant 17-point lead over Biden on the economy.

Sure, these might be outlier polls. And we should always treat polls with reasonable caution. But I do think that they are picking up on something significant — major scepticism about Biden and his ability to be an effective president.

Allegations of sexual harassment and lingering doubts about his mental health might also have something to do with the fact that, nationally, just 41% of Americans think favourably about him, a figure that falls to 34% in the all-important Midwest, a heavily blue-collar region that we were repeatedly told only Biden could win back. Worryingly, his approval ratings are even lower among self-identified independents — just 28% like him.

Compare and contrast Obama’s performance during the unfolding of the Great Recession with Biden’s performance during the unfolding of the Great Lockdown; the one leading the debate and the other  curiously absent.

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Populism isn't about class

By Matthew Goodwin

And Americans seem to have noticed. The fact that only one in three feels confident in Biden’s ability to deal with the coronavirus crisis, while more than two-thirds are ‘uneasy’ or ‘not sure’, should also be ringing alarm bells. These numbers remind me of how the British people viewed the opposition Labour Party at the time of the biggest debate of the day: Brexit. During these big moments of crisis people want a clear, confident and comforting message. If they are unsure about where you stand, or how you will act, then you’ve got problems.

Trump does have a clear pitch. Regardless of its validity he will argue something along the lines of: “Under my presidency the economy was growing, we had one of the longest bull markets in history and the lowest rate of unemployment since 1969. Keep me in office and I will bring it back”. And he will urge Americans to remember what was happening to their pensions and savings during that market rally.

Some readers will inevitably quibble with this, asking who really benefitted in Trump’s economy. But the fact remains that shortly before the crisis exploded more than two-thirds of Americans thought that their economy was ‘very’ or ‘fairly’ good. Trump will urge them to remember this. Biden will hope they forget it.

We also know that when it comes to forecasting the result of presidential elections, while these economic indicators are important, they still only take you about half-way to explaining these outcomes. Other things also matter.

One reason why national populism has been on the rise in recent years is because it has been attacking on two flanks: economy insecurity and cultural insecurity. Liberal progressives tend to only talk about one.

One issue that will also play a key role this year is immigration, which Republicans are a lot more concerned about today than they were four years ago. Inevitably, Trump will pitch to this anxiety by pointing to his recent immigration ban and warning over and over again that Democrats will open the borders. This will, almost certainly, veer into xenophobia but it might also be enough to hold his coalition together.

Turn the clock back to the summer of 2016 and one reason why I argued that Trump was about to pull off a surprise was because of this strong pitch to a loose alliance of blue-collar workers as well as older and affluent social conservatives who shared their values. They wanted to slow the pace of social change, reduce overall levels of immigration and loathed much of the liberal establishment that seemed deaf to these concerns.

Another issue that lies outside of economics, and which has entered the popular psyche, is China.

Politics, in its purest form, is never really about lofty appeals to universal principles. More often than not it is about something else, something more fundamental, potent and darker: the attribution of blame. And who will Trump — and most Americans — blame for this crisis?

Last week, two-thirds of all Americans pointed the finger at China — a view shared by more than half of all Democrats and more than eight out of every ten Republicans. A plurality also said that their country should take action to punish China for the pandemic, which was followed by Republican lawmakers introducing a bill that seeks to impose sanctions on China if it does not cooperate with an investigation into the pandemic, release democratic activists and close its wet markets.

American views of China were already deteriorating before the crisis but since the arrival of Covid-19 something has certainly changed. As an array of different surveys and polls suggest, Americans have become far more convinced that China poses a “major threat” (62% think so), have become more likely to hold unfavourable views of China (66% now are) and are more likely to say they have no confidence in President Xi (71% have no confidence). Nearly three-quarters want their country’s relationship with China to change.

These views cross traditional party lines; they cannot be dismissed as the ramblings of a loony fringe. Disliking China is quickly becoming one of only a few things that appears to unite most Americans. They want to talk about localising or near-shoring supply chains and they have begun to think about China in a way that they have not had to think about any other power since the end of the Cold War: as a serious, systemic threat.

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By Justin Webb

Liberals are quick to lampoon Trump’s “economic nationalism”. But advocates of free trade should remember that our post-Covid world is one in which a large majority of Americans — 75% to be exact — think that their country should end its dependence on China for key goods, such as medical supplies. The Commerce Department rolling out tax incentives for businesses to return to America is a sign of things to come.

There is a button here to be pressed and let’s not kid ourselves: we all know that Trump is going to press it. Some commentators will dismiss this as pandering to xenophobia and Trump will probably prove them right. But this should also not distract us from the point that there is still a legitimate debate to be had about China, its role in this crisis and in the global order more generally. Democrats will need to somehow engage with this debate while navigating a populist who ignores the normal rules of debate.

This helps to explain why Biden has also toughened his line on China and why, most likely, we will witness a verbal arms race in terms of who can be most ‘anti-China’. Trump will inevitably claim that he got there first and that Democrats were slow to recognise the threat. “Voters prefer the original to the copy”, as French populist Jean-Marie Le Pen put it.

Listen to podcasts around the Trump campaign — which talk of “Beijing Biden” and the “CCP-friendly candidate” — and it is pretty clear what the strategy this autumn will be.

So, while there is an emerging consensus around Trump’s impending defeat, a view that draws a crude and simplistic line from economic recession to defeat, I think that this election is still a coin-toss. In fact, if the election were held tomorrow then I would probably gamble on Trump to win. Just like four years ago, we have more than a few reasons to be sceptical of Groupthink. Democrats should not get complacent: they are in for the fight of their lives.