Trump: Winners and Losers

In Latin America, it seems the question, “why are there no coups in the US?” is answered, “because there’s no US Embassy there”.

The US Embassy, in any capital, is the base from which the CIA operates. It’s fully capable of spreading false information about politicians the US doesn’t like, whether they’re in office or simply on the way towards it. It may also circulate fabrications designed to discredit elections that bring opponents to power. Equally, it can encourage or even support armed forces aimed at bringing those opponents down.

Watching Donald Trump at work recently, I wonder whether his latest delusion is that there is now a US Embassy in DC, and he’s the CIA head of station there.

Trump: made small again. As small as he always was

Unfortunately, for him, though fortunately for the rest of us, he’s not a very good head of station. As with pretty much everything else he’s turned his hand to, he sucks at this new job. His attempts to undermine the legitimacy of the elections he’s just lost are feeble and look set to fail. After all, he needs a case that would lead to a massive reallocation of votes to him, and not just in one State but in several. What complaints he has seem only to affect numbers of votes far too small to have a substantive effect, even if they proved to have some kind of basis, which it doesn’t look like they do.

Clearly, if the US Washington Embassy CIA station had any existence outside Trump’s fevered imagination, one of the first tasks on Joe Biden’s plate would be shutting it down. 

In reality, Biden has much bigger but more useful challenges to face. An uncontrolled global environmental crisis. A deepseated racism at home at the core of growing discontent. A judiciary stuffed with Trump appointees. A Covid pandemic still far out of control. And an economy in a tailspin as a result.

Fortunately, he’ll have a much better team to tackle these problems. Or perhaps I should say ‘good’ not ‘better’, because to say that it’s better than Trump’s is setting the bar far too low. One of the stars of that team will be the first woman, and the first woman of colour, to be elected to one of the top two offices in the US: the next Vice President, Kamala Harris. He and she are likely to be facing a hostile, still Trumpian Senate, but they’ll have a clear mandate to guide them, with a good majority of the popular vote in support.

That all worked out in a curious way. The outcome didn’t follow T S Eliot’s lines:

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but with a whimper

But those of Will Roscoe on Twitter:

And this is the way it ends
Not with a bang but with a WI/MI/PA

It was Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania that gave Biden his victory. Specifically, it was when Pennsylvania was called for him that he was recognised as being the new President-Elect, which must have been particularly gratifying, since it was the State of his birth and most of his childhood.

The election results
Across the top, right to left: the three states flip and Biden/Harris win

All three States flipped from 2016: Trump won them narrowly in 2016 but lost them in 2020. They belong to what is known as the ‘rust belt’: States once prosperous thanks to their manufacturing industries, that have fallen on hard times as that base has shrunk.

There are two explanations of what went wrong there for Trump.

The first is that the Democrats have engaged in massive election fraud, and done it so ingeniously that no one not gifted with the exceptional insight of the Donald can see any trace of it.

The second is that Trump won those States in 2016 by promising them rebirth as he brought back manufacturing to them in a huge way, and lost them again when he failed to deliver on his promise.

Trump naturally favours the first explanation, and to be fair he has nothing to gain from his assertion except the chance to hang on to the White House after all which, apart from being rather a fine thing in itself, may well prove to be the only way he can keep out of gaol.

Others, and I have to confess that I’m among them, think that the second explanation has more merit.

There’s a lesson in that for Britain, too. In the last UK general election, the Labour Party lost seats in the North of England and the Midlands, in seats previously so unassailable they were regarded as a ‘Red Wall’. A lot of those seats are like the US rust belt, home to manufacturing firms, mines or docks that have closed or shrunk drastically, wiping out thousands of jobs and crucifying many communities. 

Of the voters lost to Labour, many felt, like white working-class supporters of Trump in the States, that the political elite had abandoned. And they’re not wrong. Labour in Britain, like the Democrats in the US, haven’t paid anything like enough attention to their needs.

Many of those voters have reached for right-wing solutions to their problems. In Britain, for instance, that has driven support for Brexit, just as xenophobia and fear of immigrants played a major role in the States too. Labour and the Democrats don’t have to go along with that thinking, but they can make a far greater effort to address the real underlying causes, by stimulating investment to create jobs, and providing better services in housing, education or healthcare.

That’s a task they should take on with some optimism. After all, WI/MI/PA have shown that the delusion woven by populist promises can quickly evaporate, when the promises are broken. The populist falls when it becomes clear, as it has both with Trump in the US and with Johnson in Britain, that he cares no more, and probably far less, for these voters than the other side did.

That brought down mega-Trump in the White House. It could well bring down mini-Trump in Downing Street. Who, right now, must be feeling terribly lonely.

Well, there were always going to be losers as well as winners from this election outcome. Most of the rest of the world and a majority even in the US are the winners. Thanks to Karmala Harris, women, Indian-Americans and Black-Americans are winners.

Among the losers, the obvious big one is Trump himself. During the campaign, he said that if he lost to Biden it would mean he’d been beaten by the worst candidate in political history. That’s one more thing he has to learn to live with now.

Johnson in Britain is having to come to terms with losing a supporter in the White House, for his pet project, Brexit.

And a further loser is another leading Brexiter, Nigel Farage, who lost a £10,000 bet on Trump winning. It may surprise you to learn that this loss hasn’t made me shed any tears.

A lousy politician who made a lousy call

But let’s end on a positive note, with another winner from this process. Like a great many people, I wonder how long it will be before Melania Trump, freed from the obligations of being First Lady, sues for divorce. But there’s a problem: does Trump actually have the money he claims, and maybe she believes, he has? Will she be able to cash in on the new pre-nup she negotiated with him at the start of his term?