Trump: ready to steal what he can't win

Nothing Trump does surprises me anymore, but it’s still saddening to read that he’s now proposing a delay to the presidential elections.

It’s unsurprising because the US economy is in terrible condition. At the same time, deaths from Coronavirus have risen above 150,000 and are running at around 1500 a day. By way of contrast, Spain, where I live, is struggling to contain the epidemic but has a daily death toll in single figures.

The US has going on seven times the population but perhaps as much as 300 times as many daily deaths.

No wonder, then, that Trump would like the election held later, when the news, both on the economy and the epidemic, may be less damning for him.

What is even more depressing is that he’s challenging the validity of postal voting. Many prefer voting by post precisely because they don’t want to expose themselves to Coronavirus infection by attending polling stations in person. It’s true, too, that historically such votes tend to break more for the Democrats than the Republicans. That doesn’t make them fraudulent, as Trump claims against all the evidence, just less favourable to him.

Why that’s so particularly worrying is that it sounds far less like an argument for delaying the election, as for challenging the validity of the results if it’s held as planned and he loses. It’s by no means certain Biden will win, but it does look as though Trump is preparing a plan B, in the event of his losing. 

In other words, it feels as though Trump is preparing to steal the election.

Biden (left) working to win by the rules
Trump: preparing to rob him?

He could. Just imagine the following scenario.

The Democrat wins the presidential election by a small but nonetheless clear majority of the popular vote, say 50.9% to 47.9%.

And he wins the electoral college by a similarly small but conclusive margin of 39 votes over his Republican opponent.

Then things turn murky. Republicans challenge the votes of four states amounting, between them, to 20 electoral college votes, all of them for the Democrat. Removing those disputed votes from his total would leave him, exasperatingly, just one vote short of a majority – still 19 votes ahead of his rival, but not able to clinch the election.

Of course, he only needs one of the disputed electors to win. Things still look good for a Democratic victory. Republicans are worried.

After long weeks of negotiation, the two Parties agree to arbitrate the result. A special commission will adjudicate on the votes cast. It will include five members of the House of Representatives, five Senators and five Justices of the Supreme Court.

And that’s when the wheels start to come off the bus. Because on every vote, the commission splits 8:7 in favour of the Republicans. As a result, every single one of the disputed votes is awarded to the Republican candidate who emerges with an electoral college majority of just one and is duly sworn in as President.

The Democrats needed just one of those votes. They received none. And so they were defeated.

The worst thing about this scenario is that, far-fetched as it might sound, it’s no fantasy. In fact, it’s already happened.

What I was describing was the 1876 Presidential election. Samuel Tilden, the Democrat, was defeated, or rather robbed of victory. His Republican opponent, Rutherford Hayes, won the election, or rather had it stolen and handed to him. He became the nineteenth President.

Never heard of him? No surprise there. He deserves his obscurity. He achieved little and left little trace. Sadly, the same can’t be said of Trump. As the death toll from Coronavirus, and the damage to the economy, of the US and the world, have shown, his legacy is assured. Another four years, and there’s every chance it’ll be far more devastating still. And all the more difficult to recover from.

The only way to make it hard for Trump to steal the election is to make sure his defeat is so comprehensive that a challenge to any votes would not change the result.

Back in 2016, a lot of people, including friends of mine, couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Hillary. Let’s hope that this time around, whatever misgivings they may have about Biden, they understand the importance of backing the candidate best placed to beat Trump.

Electing Rutherford Hayes was a dirty business. But re-electing Trump would be a real catastrophe. And be warned: he’s preparing the ground to steal what he can’t win.

 

Postscript

Though Samuel Tilden was, no doubt, robbed back in 1876, his campaign could hardly claim to be pure or admirable. Many of his wins came in the deep south, and were only obtained because white agitators physically threatened black voters to prevent them voting. Eleven years after a Civil War during which a Republican President, Lincoln, had freed them from slavery, the vast majority of blacks voted Republican.

In other words, had Tilden won, his victory would not have been that much cleaner than Hayes’.

Rutherford Hayes (left), the Republican
Samuel Tilden saw his victory stolen and handed to Hayes

Still. This time, though, Biden is trying to play by the rules. Let’s hope that doesn’t cost him victory.

When good people do too little...

“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”

Though often attributed to Edmund Burke, we don’t really know whose the saying is. But it’s an important idea. And it’s particularly apt today.

There’s no doubt that Trump’s outbursts against four Democratic Congresswomen were deeply racist: when you tell Americans of colour, living in the US, to go back where they came from, you’re saying that the country is no home for them.

The Congresswomen Trump told to go back where they came from
They are all American. Only one was even born abroad.

Of course, as Hillary Clinton pointed out, in telling the Congresswomen the government in their home country was lousy, Trump was exactly right. Their home country is, after all, the US, and Trump heads its catastrophically bad government.

However, what’s worrying isn’t so much that Trump made his comments, but that a lot of people sympathise with him. They may not want to voice such opinions publicly, since racism for the moment still carries a stigma. But in private, or to themselves, they share his view. As he countered, when charged with racism, “many people agree with me”. As long as many people agree, it can’t be racism. The reality is that the fact that many agree doesn’t alter the racist nature of his views, it only makes them more dangerous, making it more likely that a racist might be re-elected to the White House.

What makes the quotation attributed to Burke so apposite is that there are many who dislike racism but still plan to vote for Trump. They may not be bad people, but they haven’t grasped that no good person can give racism a pass. Good people not acting will allow the evil of racism to triumph.

In Britain, too, the situation is dire. The government is in the hands of a party in which Islamophobia is rampant. But 70,000 or 80,000 members of that party are about to inflict on the whole country a Prime Minister who has expressed Islamophobic views himself in the past, and certainly has no intention of combating them today.

In particular, he refuses to denounce the toxic bilge coming out of the White House as the racist slander it is. Boris Johnson claims to speak for British independence, in his support for Brexit, but he’s so anxious to dance to Trump’s tune that he can’t bring himself to condemn his most poisonous pronouncements.

Opposite him stands a Leader of the Opposition who has just been rightly told by some of his party members in the House of Lords that he had failed the leadership test. And why? Because instead of addressing the problem of antisemitism in his own Party when whistle blowers warn him of it, he’d prefer to deny the truth of the message and then denounce the messengers.

You have failed the test of leadership

This isn’t his first offence. Ever since the Brexit referendum, he has refused to endorse a pro-EU stance, for fear of alienating those xenophobic voters who backed the Leave camp. Here was a chance to denounce racist thinking and back an internationalist position, and he refused to endorse it.

Another failure of leadership.

Ever since I first saw it, I’ve loved Shaw’s play Arms and the Man. At one point the protagonist, an artilleryman who’d commanded a machine gun battery under attack from cavalry at a recent battle, describes how they’d laughed when they first saw unprotected horsemen attacking their powerful weapons:

… but when the sergeant ran up as white as a sheet, and told us theyd sent us the wrong cartridges, and that we couldnt fire a shot for the next ten minutes, we laughed at the other side of our mouths. I never felt so sick in my life…

[Those aren’t typos, by the way: Shaw didn’t like apostrophes…]

Unloaded guns won’t defeat an enemy. Labour has at the top a man who has failed the leadership test. He’s a gun that can’t fire. And with this we are to confront a racist and puppet of a racist, in the most powerful office in the land.

Corbyn may well not be an antisemite. But he’s soft on antisemites. Why? Sadly, because many of them are keen supporters of his anti-Israeli stance. And to retain their support, he’s prepared to backpedal in his fight against racism. Just as he was prepared to accommodate xenophobic leave voters to keep them on side (an approach which, as it happens, has failed).

So in both main parties in Britain, as in the United States, some of the most evil ideas to have poisoned human life down the ages, culminating in the terrible racist atrocities of the twentieth century, are allowed to grow from strength to strength. Merely because good people won’t stand up against them. “Corbyn’s a man of principle,” they say, “he has some great ideas on the economy or foreign affairs. Let’s pretend there is no antisemitism in the Labour Party.”

And the corrosive effect spreads further. Evil moves towards its triumph. Because the good do too little to stop it.

A sneaking admiration for Trump

I never thought I’d write these words, but I feel a little wry admiration for Donald Trump right now.

Even more amazing, that admiration is about the level of intelligence – or at least cunning – he’s shown. That’s surprising because I’ve come to think of him as one of the dumbest politicians around. Isn’t it odd how the Republican Party has managed to outdo itself each time it’s won the White House recently, following an accelerating downward trajectory? 

It’s clear these days that Reagan was already suffering from the Alzheimer’s that fully declared itself after he stepped down. George H. W. Bush was staggeringly incoherent. Dubya needed documents summarised for himself, presumably using short words only. And now Trump’s smartest comment on the presidency was that it turns out to be harder than he thought (“I thought it would be easier”).

What a brilliant insight that is.

Against that setting, you just have to pause in at least a little wonder at the way he’s handled the firing of James Comey as Director of the FBI. 

Trump and Comey: a drama of craftiness. Nastiness too

Follow the steps carefully.

First Comey revealed, on 28 October 2016, that the FBI was investigating another batch of e-mails of Hillary Clinton’s to establish whether they were evidence of a criminal act. 28 October. The election took place on 8 November, just eleven days later. On 6 November, he announced that there were no grounds for a prosecution – but that was only two days before the election and the damage was done. 

The fault for losing was certainly Hillary’s, for a poorly run campaign, but there’s no doubt that Comey nailed her coffin lid shut: without his intervention, states like Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania which Trump won by excruciatingly tight margins, might have tipped into her camp and her victory in the popular vote would have been turned into a victory overall, giving her the White House.

But then Comey turned on the man he’d helped elect. He let it be known that the FBI was actively investigating links between the Trump campaign and the Russian secret services. However enthusiastic it was about the 28 October revelations, the Trump administration was unlikely to be quite as pleased about these ones. 

It’s hard to grasp what Comey could have been about. Was he trying to be even-handed? If so, it turned out to be misguided.

Next Comey appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee on 3 May and gave blundering testimony which had to be “clarified” (i.e. corrected) later.

Now comes the final act. This is where Trump displayed his cunning. On 9 May, Trump fired Comey – but not for the Russia investigation. Oh, no. For his actions in the Clinton case.

Talk about win-win. Trump gets the bump eleven days out from the election that the revelations provided. Then he can use exactly those revelations to fire the man that made them, when he became embarrassing in turn.

Pretty cunning, isn’t it? Low cunning, maybe, but cunning all the same.

Except, of course, if I can see through it, so can most people. It’s a pretty crass manoeuvre obviously guided by pure self-interest. And whatever Trump does, the pressure on him isn’t going to let up. In fact, the pressure keeps growing precisely because of what Trump does.

Not cause for all that much admiration, then. But when you’re talking about Trump, you don’t wonder about how much admiration you can have for him. You wonder at feeling any admiration at all.

Be careful what you wish for...

Do you remember FBI Director James Comey announcing, just eleven days before the US presidential election, that he was once more investigating Hillary Ciinton over allegations about her time as Secretary of State? Only once the damage was done did he let it be known that no charges were going to be brought. Many believe his intervention may have cost her the election.

It’s particularly galling that it has now come out that Comey was investigating Trump at the same time, for the contacts between his team and known or suspected Russian agents. Comey said nothing about that. Imagine the impact on Trump’s campaign if it had come out before the election that his campaign had clandestine contact with a foreign, and not particularly friendly, intelligence service.

Comey may have been instrumental in putting Trump into the White House, but that hasn’t stopped the President he helped create rounding on him. Trump now claims that Comey “saved Hillary Clinton's life” by not recommending charges against her. Comey may have given Trump the shove he needed to get in, but he has no control over him now.

James Comey: is Trump biting a hand that once fed him?

And what about Comey’s other investigation? Whether or not it ultimately discovers any wrongdoing by the Trump people, it’s fairly clear Putin was keen on a Trump victory and prepared to do what he could to facilitate one. Like Comey, he may be wondering now how wise that attitude was. Though candidate Trump was more than complimentary about Russia and Putin, during his visit to Moscow on 12 April, Secreatry of State Rex Tillerson described US-Russian relations being “at a low point”. In that, he was echoing Trump’s own views.

Meanwhile, Trump is finding it hard to deliver on his domestic pledges. Like so many other inept and authoritarian leaders, he’s resorted instead to military action. It’s so much easier to fire missiles at Syria or drop a massive bomb on Afghanistan, than to make deals with Congress (the “great deal-maker” Trump is proving he doesn’t deserve even that title), far less to improve incomes or extend employment opportunities at home.

Like Comey and Putin, many of those who believed Trump’s pledges to help them out of their difficulties, may soon be wondering whether they were as smart as they might have been in backing an amateur’s bid for the White House.

Meanwhile, back in Britain, it’s becoming increasingly clear that leaving the EU won’t increase opportunities or improve trade. On the contrary, the country is likely to find it hard to sign trade deals that would be as beneficial as the arrangements it currently enjoys with its European partners. Nor does it seem that Brexit will even lead to any decrease in immigration – Britain needs the foreign manpower – even though that was the principal aim of many Brexit supporters.

Comey and Putin may just be the tip of the great wave of disappointment likely to sweep the US and UK in the coming years. It would be gratifying if that disappointment would drive people back towards more sensible positions than backing Trump or Brexit. Sadly, disappointed people aren’t always the most rational. The reaction may be a switch to even more extreme positions.

We’re going through difficult times. They may become a great deal more difficult still. But we need to get through them if there’s to be any hope of resuming progress once this retroactive period is over.

In the meantime, it’ll do none of us any harm to be a little more careful what we wish for.

Our age of political dilettantism...

Ken Loach is a great film maker. I could perhaps have done without the hackneyed story line of The Wind that Shook the Barley, but The Navigators or Sweet Sixteen are masterpieces as is, in a different genre, The Angels’ Share.

So I have great admiration for him in film, the area where he does outstanding work.

A scene from Sweet Sixteen: film-making is what Loach does best

Sadly, however, he’s recently decided to speak out on politics. Here his performance strikes me as rather more underwhelming. In fact, it strikes me as a pity that he’s wandered into this field at all – forbearance might have suited him much better.

He was quoted in the Guardian saying, “The deselection of MPs is presented as a threat [but] it is not a job for life. Labour party members have the right to be represented by someone they choose.”

Labour Party members, and I speak as one myself, have no such right. We shouldn’t try to arrogate it to ourselves. Our right is to select a candidate. Our duty is to try to choose one who is the best placed to represent the interests of those most requiring protection in the system in which we live. In other words, we should select candidates who, if elected, will be particularly good at representing those the Labour Party is committed to serve.

That doesn’t necessarily mean representing their views, but their interests. But it doesn’t mean representing them – voters and, above all, the least privileged of voters – not the membership of the Labour Party.

To me, the lesson of Loach’s foray into Labour politics seems that it’s probably better not to let amateurs (like him or, indeed, like me) call the shots. Which makes it all the more frightening to contemplate the other great political amateur of the day. He, sadly, hasn’t just made some silly statements about politics, but has been elected to the most powerful political office in the world, the Presidency of the United States.

Elected, that is, not by winning a majority of voters – he received 1.7m votes fewer than his opponent Hillary Clinton – but by dint of winning a majority in the electoral college that ultimately chooses the president. That makes him president-elect but it doesn’t make him the choice of the people, even though he speaks as though he had the authority such a mandate would give him.

Another popular vote that he certainly didn’t win was that of the British electorate. In Britain, he has all the authority – unfortunately – that holding the world’s most powerful office confers. He holds no authority to speak for Britain. So it was amusing in a dry kind of way when Donald Trump told the British government that it ought to appoint Nigel Farage as British ambassador to the States.

It was no surprise that Trump should make that particular choice. Farage leads the United Kingdom Independence Party, UKIP, a thoroughly toxic organisation which uses xenophobia for a cover for what is actually downright racism. He is, in other words, a man very much after Trump’s heart.

What was more surprising was that Trump seemed to feel that his election, which will mean a huge change in personnel in Washington, would lead to a similar night of the long knives in London. Above all, he felt he had a say in the process.

In a long and not always salutary history – British behaviour towards the Americas left a lot to be desired, for instance, and there were far more deplorable incidents elsewhere – Britain has at least developed a reasonably sophisticated way of dealing with bumptious fools in diplomacy. liked pleased with the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary's response to Trump’s suggestion for a new ambassador.

“There is no vacancy,” they said.

From opposite ends of the political spectrum, Loach and Trump illustrate the same point, that amateurs do best to keep out of politics.

Loach is a man of huge talent. He ought to focus on the area where he shines. Trump, of course, is talentless.

Perhaps he could just sink into deserved obscurity at the earliest opportunity?

Drive people to despair and they do desperate things

Many of those US blue-collar workers, the natural constituency of the Democratic Party, who voted for Trump were driven by anger and frustration. Many find that even holding down two or three jobs, they still can’t make ends meet. Feeling let down by the system as it is, and feeling that the leaders they previously trusted are simply part of that same system, they turned to a more radical alternative.

In Britain, seven million people are now in precarious employment. They are in jobs in which they have no guaranteed hours, but they still have to make themselves available, with no assurance that they will be given anything to do or any pay for doing it. Others are given workloads that are all but impossible to clear, or require multiple hours of unpaid overtime to finish. It’s become easy and the norm for companies that hit any kind of financial problem to shed staff, so executives who have failed to achieve their own, often deeply unrealistic targets, can make others take the fall for their poor decisions.

We haven’t yet had a Trump in Britain. What we have had, however, is nearly seven years of government by the Conservative Party, alone (now) or as the dominant partner in a coalition (up to 2015). In its early days, it liked to claim that “we’re all in this together”. Now, under new management, the government claims to want to assist the “just about managing” or “JAMs”, the very people driven to desperation in the States, the ones who have to swim with all their strength to keep their noses just below water.

A new study shows, however, that without a major change of course, life for the JAMs is likely to get harder to the tune of £2500 a year less income by 2020. For all the pledges, desperation is set to increase for the already desperate.

If that kind of despair gave us Trump in the States, it’s likely to have as damaging an effect in Britain too. Or in France, where Le Pen lies in wait, or the Netherlands, where Geert Wilders is the likely beneficiary, or in a host of other countries where the far right is building a head of steam.

As American voters will discover over the next four years, the sad truth is that the leaders who come up with the simple answers – “get out of the European Union”, “drain the swamp”, “build a wall” – only make matters far worse for the very group that puts them in power.

What’s the alternative?

It has to be a leadership as radical and inspiring as Trump’s, but genuinely committed and not merely committed in words, to addressing the problems of those who are suffering such hardship today – and far worse hardship tomorrow. Unfortunately, in most countries those who should be providing that kind of leadership seem, like Hillary Clinton, to be tied to the system that creates the problem and unable to inspire confidence in those they ought to be representing.

The Democrats in the US are facing a particularly toxic Republican in the White House, whose party controls both Houses of Congress and will entrench a majority that shares its views in the Supreme Court.

The Socialist Party in France has led a failed government and is now expected to go down to comprehensive defeat in elections next year.

In Britain, the unions inflicted on the Labour Party a leader, Ed Miliband, who was likeable and intelligent, but could never convince voters that he could be Prime Minister. Now a majority of Labour’s membership has elected Jeremy Corbyn, not once but twice. He too seems likeable and intelligent; he certainly has a radical message but seems not to be getting it through to anything like sufficient numbers: Labour is languishing ten to fourteen points behind the Conservative Party, far too wide a margin to be attributed to the simple and now notorious inability of polling organisations to achieve accuracy.

Homelessness, on the rise in Britain, as is the use of food banks

Worse off by £2500 a year, by 2020. That represents around 10% of the median income in Britain today. A drop of that scale will drive up homelessness, hunger and disease among people who are already struggling. That is the price being paid by those least able to pay any price at all.

And it’s the price of Labour’s failure to win traction in the electorate. It underlines the urgency of addressing that problem today. For a lot of people, not just in Britain but across the developed world, tomorrow may be far worse.

As the election of Trump demonstrates.

The trump, trump, trump of repressive boots

Nothing excuses the German election of a ranting, bigoted demagogue in the 1930s. But at least one can understand the trauma of a nation that had been beaten in a ruinous war, only to stumble into an unprecedented financial crisis in which the cost of living rose fifteen-fold in just six months of 1922; barely had they stabilised their currency than they were hit by the great depression and watched unemployment climb to 30%. One can understand the despair and therefore the blind groping that drove a large enough minority (the Nazis never won a majority) to choose an inexcusable, and false, solution to their problems.

But what explains the Americans? One of the wealthiest nations on Earth, the United States has 4.9% unemployment and inflation inching towards 1.6%. So why choose another hate-filled merchant of fear? The worst problem economically in the US is that wealth is so badly distributed, so that a small percentage of enormously rich individuals can hire or fire at will, forcing others to live precariously and on inadequate incomes – but the Americans have just chosen one of those individuals to occupy the White House.

Indeed, he has promised to do away with the one significant achievement of Obama’s White House, the one measure designed to alleviate the inequity of wealth, the Affordable Care Act (‘Obamacare’).

They have chosen a man who has promised the impossible: to bring industries back to the rust belt, to build a wall against illegal immigration, to prevent terrorists gaining entry to the US. He can only disappoint but he’ll wreak terrible suffering along the way: arrests, deportations, denial of basic rights.

Along that road, women will lose essential rights over their own bodies, and the major social progress of the last half century, towards toleration of minorities, most notably of LGBT communities, will be at least partially rolled back. And yet many women voted for Trump in preference to Clinton, though they know he holds them in contempt. Indeed, the only white demographic in which she won a majority was among educated white women – and even then, she only took 51%.

One of the more telling images of this most divisive election

The key word in that last paragraph is “white”. Something ugly has happened in the US. I can’t help feeling that what’s going on is the re-emergence of a white supremacist temptation that many feel, and most had learned to suppress in recent decades. Obama had seized the White House and, though he pulled off the feat of re-election in 2012, I suspect there is a widespread feeling among many whites that his success showed blacks getting altogether too uppity. With a candidate who openly expressed these feelings and therefore seemed to legitimise them, far too many were prepared to turn to him.

They did so despite the clear warnings he’d given of the damage he would do with the power they were handing him.

Trump’s is the victory of fear and hatred over reason and tolerance. Sadly, that’s by no means a purely US phenomenon. It emerged strongly in Britain too, in June, when the country voted to leave the European Union. At the time, there was much talk of the need to protect sovereignty and put an end to the erosion of supposed British rights. The reality was clear before and has been confirmed since, that the true concern was with keeping minorities at arms’ length.

Even Theresa May has been openly proclaiming that what the electorate voted for was tighter control of immigration. In other words, just like the white American voters fearful of people who look different from them, or have sex differently, or worship differently, Britain voted to throw up the walls and keep the foreigners out. I know a number of long-term foreign residents in Britain, and there have been media reports of many others, who were asked within hours of the referendum vote when they’d be leaving.

Xenophobes and white supremacists felt legitimised in Britain by the Brexit vote, as they did by the Trump campaign in the States.

On both sides of the Atlantic, a small majority of closed-minded individuals, driven by basic – and base – feelings of hatred and fear have taken control of the destinies of us all. There are grim times ahead. There will undoubtedly be regression, on many fronts. Hard though it is, we have to keep up our spirits and continue pressing as effectively as we can for a return to progressive, tolerant, open-minded attitudes. We have to maintain our hope that in time those better values will prevail.

With, I’m afraid, absolutely no guarantee that they will. Though if we don’t keep up the pressure, we can guarantee they won’t.

Beware the man of providence, for he’s a danger to us all

It’s bad news when people start looking for the Providential Man (the capital letters are, naturally, mandatory).

It doesn’t matter whether it’s Napoleon in France, or Franco in Spain, or Pinochet in Chile. When you get to the point that salvation seems to depend on a single man, you’re on the edge of deep chasm. That's because a providential man always comes with a refusal of dissent – after all, the darling of Providence can’t be wrong, so why should one tolerate disagreement with him?

At the Republican National Convention, when Donald Trump accepted the party’s nomination for US President, he listed many of the problems that beset American society. And then he announced:

I am your voice. I alone can fix it. I will restore law and order.

He alone can rise to the challenge of his times. He alone can speak for his followers. He alone has the answers.

It’s no surprise, then, that he wants to build a wall. The only difference between him and other providential men dabbled with totalitarianism, is that he wants to build a wall to keep others out. But walls are walls, and once you’ve got into the way of building them, you’re likely to build a lot more. And some of them will be to keep people in.

Just as revealing has been his reaction to the Democratic Party’s Convention. There, Khizr Khan paid tribute to his son Humayun, a Muslim who also happened to be a Captain in the US army, killed in Iraq in 2004. He had told his men to step back from a suspect car but went forward himself to check it, only to have it blow up and kill him. Trump’s proposal to prevent Muslims entering the US would catch a man like the dead Captain, if he travelled outside the country and wanted to return.

Khizr Khan rightly criticised Trump for trampling on the rights of fellow Americans, including those who are prepared to put their lives on the line like his son. With his wife Gazala standing sad and silent by his sid he brandished a copy of the US Constitution and offered to lend it to Trump so that he actually read it.

Khizr Khan offers Trump a copy of the Constitution to read
with Gazala by his side

And Trump’s response? He was ‘viciously attacked’ by Khan. Worse still, he asked why Gazala had remained silent: had she been forbidden to speak?

She’s explained since that she found the sight of the photo of her son, projected behind the stage when her husband was speaking, simply too moving.

So Trump, far from moderating his proposals against Muslims, has attacked the father of a dead soldier and extended the attack to the bereaved mother too. That may sound callous, but don’t forget that he’s the only man who can save the United States. To question his thoughts, therefore, is to question a providential man – and who can arrogate to himself the right to speak against Providence?

At the moment, Trump’s behaviour seems to have hurt his standing in the polls, leaving Hillary Clinton with a good lead over him. But that means that over 43% of US voters still back him. I’d like to say it’s despite the kind of bigotry he expresses but, sadly, it may be because they share that bigotry.

They’re dangerous, those providential men. Providential man Trump poses a great danger to the US, as Khizr Khan pointed out so powerfully. And, don’t forget, as the world’s only superpower, a dangerous US is a danger to us all.

Clinton: showing how to beat reaction

They do say that, in politics, you shouldn’t build a campaign on nostalgia for the past, but on promise for the future.

It was the problem faced by John Major, British Tory Prime Minister after Maggie Thatcher, when he launched his “Back to Basics” campaign. Going “back” is never appealing. And there’s nothing particularly inspiring about “basics” either.

As a slogan, it had none of the spark of Tony Blair’s “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.” The truth is that once he was in power, Blair concentrated on being tough on crime and much less determined in rooting out the causes, but as a slogan, it certainly had appeal, helping position him to take on the Tories and win.

Hillary: wrong on some things, right on many others, turning
into quite a campaigner. And hugely to be preferred to the alternative

That all came back to me when I saw Hillary Clinton’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. Because, faced with Donald Trump’s slogan, ‘Make America great again’, so easy as to be simplistic, she answered with words suggesting that America is great still.

We have the most dynamic and diverse people in the world.

We have the most tolerant and generous young people we've ever had.

We have the most powerful military, the most innovative entrepreneurs, the most enduring values, freedom and equality, justice and opportunity, we should be so proud that those words are associated with us.

Now, you can agree or disagree with the sentiment. You can’t question the impact. Trump is looking backwards, to a supposed time when America was great, just as Major hankered after days when, allegedly, we were back with basics. Clinton proclaims the greatness of America today. And because she believes in today, she can paint an appealing picture of tomorrow.

Democrats, we are the party of working people.

But we haven't done a good enough job showing we get what you're going through, and we're going to do something to help. So tonight I want to tell you how we will empower Americans to live better lives.

My primary mission as president will be to create more opportunity and more good jobs with rising wages right here in the United States.

From my first day in office to my last, especially in places that for too long have been left out and left behind, from our inner cities to our small towns, from Indian country to coal country from communities ravaged by addiction, to regions hollowed out by plant closures.

And here's what I believe. I believe America thrives when the middle class thrives. I believe our economy isn't working the way it should because our democracy isn't working the way it should.

Clinton’s not naïve though, or a newcomer to politics. While she wisely presented a positive, forward-looking programme, she also knew that it was no use being good and kind and decent in politics. To win supporters, you also have to beat the other guy. When that guy’s Trump, that’s all the more important than ever, but also a lot easier for the opportunities he gives you.

… don't believe anyone who says I alone can fix it.

Yes, those were actually Donald Trump's words in Cleveland. And they should set off alarm bells for all of us. Really? I alone can fix it? Isn't he forgetting troops on the front lines, police officers and firefighters who run toward danger, doctors and nurses who care for us, teachers who change lives, entrepreneurs who see possibilities in every problem, mothers who lost children to violence and are building a movement to keep other kids safe? He's forgetting every last one of us.

Americans don't say "I alone can fix it." We say "we'll fix it together!"

And I particularly liked:

He spoke for 70-odd minutes, and I do mean odd...

That got a furious Twitter reaction from Trump. Rather confirming something else Hillary said:

A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons!

She was feisty, she was positive, she was forward-looking. She’s well ahead in the polls. She may not say all the things you, or I, would like but she has a message worth listening to. And boy, she's preferable to the alternative by light years.

Let’s hope she’s stays in front, right through to polling day and beyond.

And for us, back here in Britain, let’s hope we too can find a campaigner as effective as she is.

Toxic title

One great advantage of a value system based on belief in God is that it provides a bedrock on which to found certainties.

It’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven because that’s the way God has organised the universe. Whether you favour the notion or dislike it makes it no difference: it’s a fundamental law. Although that specific principle belongs to Christianity, it wouldn’t take long to find similar tributes to the poor in most religions.

For those of us who see little evidence around us for the proposition that the world is anything but profoundly godless, there’s nothing on which to ground such reassuring certainty. We instead are probably safer to assume that there’s nothing whatever to guarantee rights to the poor or, indeed, the less than wealthy, to enter any gateway let alone heaven’s. We can count only on what we extract by our own efforts.

Rights are won, they aren’t granted, and they certainly aren’t guaranteed.

The underlying problem is neatly encapsulated in the idea of entitlement. Rights for the poor are being rapidly eroded in the prosperous nations, as employment becomes increasingly precarious, large swaths of wage-earners are obliged to give up relatively well-paid jobs and take work at lower income, or find no work at all, while at the bottom of the pile, the unemployed or the ill enjoy diminishing support. All this is happening at a time when trade union power is at its weakest for a century or more, and that’s no coincidence: when it came to forcing rights from power, no one achieved so much as the unions.

What this means is that increasing numbers of people are discovering that what they believed was their entitlement, they had not title to at all. They had exercised rights, but those rights could only be retained by constantly defending them. Giving up the instruments to wage that defence, or indeed switching their support to those who opposed the rights in the first place, put them in jeopardy.

At the other end of the scale, there are those who know all about sustaining their entitlement. Take Mark Cutifani, for instance. He’s the Chief Executive of mining company Anglo-American. Corporations, particularly in Britain and the US, have only one overriding obligation: to deliver value to their shareholders. Employees or the community generally count for next to nothing in comparison.

So when Anglo-American lost three-quarters of its share value last year, you might think the company’s executives would take a proverbial cold shower. After all, they justify their high salaries by the responsibility they take for performance.

But that’s to leave out the notion of entitlement. Cultifani has just run into some anger from shareholders because his proposed remuneration is £3.4 million. That’s equivalent to the income of some 130 British households on median earnings.

Britain is facing the increasing deterioration of its health services, as salary levels fall becoming unattractive to new recruits. Recently, it was announced that we are heading towards a critical teacher shortage, for exactly the same reason. However, it seems we’ll never run out of candidates for the top levels of industry, where incomes remain as attractive as ever, if not more so. As Cultifani shows, there isn’t even a requirement to perform to receive that level of reward.

The beauty of such salaries is that they leave plenty of small change to invest in worthy causes. Like, for instance, buying a political party. It is people like Cultifani who fund the British Conservative party or the US Republicans (indeed, as Hillary Clinton demonstrates, a lot of Democrats too). So we get entitled people running our political establishment as well – men like David Cameron or London Mayor Boris Johnson, born with silver spoons in their mouths, educated at the most privileged institutions in the country, and then following a yellow-brick path into the top offices of state.

Obama with Cameron in London
Britain outside the UK might be at the back of queue

Johnson is perhaps the more interesting case of entitled thinking. He’s a leading voice in the movement to get Britain out of the European Union. As leading international figures, such as Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, speak out for the UK staying in, warning that leaving would serious disadvantage the UK specifically in its trading relationship with the US, Johnson has hit back. Apart from a racist dig at Obama for being “part-Kenyan”, he has argued – as have other anti-EU politicians – that the US and others among our major partners, would just have to come to terms with us.

You see, these are entitled individuals. They regard the nation as entitled too. The US can’t possibly deny us privileged trading status! Why, we’re Britain. We can simply demand better treatment than that. They may be in for a shock. For which we’d all pay the price.

What about the rest of us?

What’s happening to the health service and education should be an object lesson. We have no entitlement to them. Or to proper policing, a fair justice system, decent transport or any of the other things that we think we can count on for a reasonable life. If we leave it to the entitled, concerned only with their entitlement, we shall lose all those rights, as we are losing them now. 

We have no title to any of these things. Only hard-won rights. They need protecting – from the entitled.

Trump blunders. But is his fall what we should wish for?

It seems the age of wonders is not past. Even Donald Trump has had to backtrack at last. He’s trying to wriggle out of what he told MSNBC about abortion. It’s left him looking just like any ordinary politician who has “misspoken.”

Initially, he said that abortion should be made illegal. Then he went one step further, arguing that women who nonetheless persisted in having an abortion – an illegal abortion – ought to be subject to “some form of punishment.” Finally, he nailed his colours to the ‘pro-Life’ mast.

CNN reproduces Trump's unfortunate interview on MSNBC

It seems he may, finally, have made one gaffe too many. Across the Republican party, the statement was greeted with horror. The Guardian quoted Mallory Quigley, speaking for an anti-abortion Political Action Committee, who questioned Trump’s commitment to the ‘pro-Life’ cause and added, “If Donald Trump wants to be a leader, he has to demonstrate that he understands the pro-life position.”

Trump’s now trying to row back from his statement. It seems his approval rating among women is down at the 25% level, which could make it hard for him to win the Presidency, seeing as women are a pretty significant part of the electorate (53% of the turnout at the last election). More immediately, he’s not doing well in the next primary to be held, Wisconsin, where he’s trailing Ted Cruz in the polls.

It’s a fascinating development, isn’t it?

The first aspect that struck me was the language used. I’ve talked about this before. This notion of being ‘pro-Life’ really gets me. What are these characters saying? That the rest of us are in some sense anti-Life? That we like to see a bit of death around the place, just to brighten up our day?

The truth is that we’re neither pro-Death nor even pro-Abortion. It’s hard to imagine who would favour abortion, or why. Those of us in the other camp from Mallory Quigley’s aren’t pro-abortion, we’re simply for a woman’s right to choose. It doesn’t tend to be a light decision to take, and what we maintain is that a woman should be entitled to take it without the moral pressure of the ‘pro-Life’ movement and free of a legal prohibition against it (at least up to a reasonable point in gestation).

Pro-Life? The reality is that they’re opposed to freedom of choice. Which is curious, isn’t it, as they tend to flock around the libertarian right for whom freedom of choice, at least in other fields, is a cardinal principle?

The other aspect of this incident that caught my attention was the effect on the Trump campaign itself. It could very well derail it. Now, I never thought I’d say this, but it worries me if Trump is denied the nomination at this stage – because the damage he’s done to his own standing means that he’s unlikely to beat a Democratic opponent, whether Clinton or Sanders, in November.

What worries me is the thought that Cruz might sneak in and take the nomination, because he could prove harder for the Democrats to beat. He may be a quieter man, but underneath the surface he’s at least as dangerous as Trump, possibly more so. In particular, there’s no doubt of his ‘pro-Life’ credentials, in other words, his vehement opposition to freedom of choice for women.

It’s a lot of fun watching that buffoon Trump blunder and shoot himself in the foot. Just as long as we don’t end up with Cruz instead. Because then the last laugh might be a very bitter one indeed.

Opening our eyes to how we got where we are... and where we may be heading

Every now and then one reads a book that opens your eyes to what’s going on around us.

It was the case for me with Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century. He shows how the era of reduced inequality between the First World War and the 1980s was historically exceptional, and that since that time the process has gone into reverse, with inequality growing rapidly and reaching dangerous levels.

It was the case again with Michael Lewis’s The Big Short. This is a far shorter book, which has its appeal, and it’s also a great deal more entertaining – I found myself repeatedly irritating my wife as I chuckled over certain passages and insisted on reading them out to her. But it was also an extraordinary eye-opener.

Lewis, whose Liar’s Poker did an excellent job exposing the seamy and ultimately worthless work that was being done on Wall Street in the 1980s, generating huge fortunes without creating any value, has an extraordinary talent for describing the underbelly of finance and doing it with clear, compelling writing.

What he shows in The Big Short is that the entire market that grew out of dealings in sub-prime mortgage bonds in the first decade of this century was based on essentially a lie. An increasing proportion of the financial instruments traded were based on worthless loans, far too many of which never had the slightest chance of being repaid. But while huge, and inadequately regulated, Wall Street firms could continue to be astronomical paper sums of money from them, the incentives were on to keep making the loans, issuing the instruments, and trading them.

This was part of the trend towards inequality so well analysed by Piketty. It was also a direct consequence of the Reagan-Thatcher years of active deregulation of the finance world in particular, and of industry more generally. As Michael Lewis points out, it wasn’t so much the greed of the firms that was to blame – the greed was always there. It’s that they were allowed to engage in business that they simply didn’t understand: not the people who were producing the instruments, not the traders trading them, not the executives who were paid eye-watering salaries to keep them in control.

The firms they led also put pressure on the ratings agencies to keep rating the bonds highly – triple-A, the top value – even though they were based on junk loans. The ratings agencies, the last line of regulation, proved completely inadequate to the task. But then they too are private companies, and subject to the blackmail that if they failed to provide a top rating, they’d lose the client to someone who would. Though it’s unlikely they had any understanding of the instruments they were rating.

No one understood.

Well, that’s not quite true. A handful of people did, and that’s the core of Lewis’s story. He tells the story of that handful and of the way they bet against the sub-prime mortgage market. When people claim today to have known what was happening then, check that they were part of that tiny group – if they weren’t, they’re lying.

Michael Burry: perhaps the first to have foreseen the 2007 Crash
And he made a packet by betting against it...

The book’s well worth reading, if you want a pacy, exciting, amusing and clear description of how the biggest financial crash the world has seen since 1929 took place. They got it right, and they made a packet out of betting they were right – betting, in fact, that the sub-prime mortgage market would fail. That's the ‘Big Short’ of Lewis’s title: this handful of clear-sighted individuals made a lot of money by shorting, betting against, the certainties that dominated Wall Street and banking around the world. 

In passing, the charge made by many British Conservatives that the 2007 crash was in any way attributable to the Labour government, in power at the time, is of course self-serving rubbish. If any political force is to blame, it’s the conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic, who so enthusiastically pursued deregulation all those years ago. As Piketty points out, they’re creating a world in which the  top 0.1% or 0.01% endlessly enrich themselves at the cost of all the others, and 2008 was merely a pothole on that road.

At most, one can accuse Labour and others on the Centre-Left of having done too little to roll back Conservative laxness towards the finance sector.

The saddest lesson from the experience? The journey on that road continues. Trump is an enthusiastic driver in that direction; it’s not clear that Clinton would do little more than moderate the speed of travel. In Britain, we have a new leadership of the Labour Party that might be able to force a change in course, but while the Conservatives cling on to power, we too will go that way. And the picture around Europe, or in Russia, China or India, is hardly more encouraging.

So read The Big Short for its qualities as a book and for the lessons it teaches. Then, once you’ve learned what it tells you about the recent past, ask yourself whether you’re prepared to see us heading for something similar in the future.

Because there’s only ourselves who can stop that happening…

Uneasy lies the head that wields a vote

It’s been fun to be out here in the US and see a bit of the Presidential race up close, even if briefly and only in a thoroughly unscientific and anecdotal way.

Most of the people I’ve met over the last week have, I believe, been Republicans. They’re coy to admit it, but that’s how I read some of their comments and their body language. Perhaps their coyness too.

Most strikingly, they’re stumped.

How can they help decide who should win their party’s nomination? Cruz, the candidate placed second to Trump, is far too right wing, it seems.

“What,” I asked, “is Cruz to the right of Trump?”

“Way to the right,” I was told, “because he really is of the far right. Trump’s just erratic. You have no idea what his position is on anything until he takes it.”

“And not even then,” I was tempted to add.

It’s tough. Since Kasich and Rubio aren’t going anywhere, the choice seems to be between Cruz and Trump. Which is a choice between the unbearable and the unconscionable – and it doesn’t much matter which you consider to be which.

So most of the Republicans I met seem increasingly resigned to voting, against their conscience and their inclinations, for Hillary Clinton in November’s general election. No one is inspired by her. No one particularly trusts her. But given the likely choice of candidate on the Republican side of the fence, most of the people I met are resigned to having to vote Democrat and, specifically, for Hillary. And to do so only because their own party is going to put up a candidate it would be horrific to see in the White House.

Which creates an even deeper dilemma if Bernie Sanders pulls off the unlikely feat of beating Clinton to the nomination. He seems to be generally viewed as more honest and more likeable but, as I have been so frequently told, “this country isn’t ready for a socialist president.”

Preferable but unelectable? Believe me, we’re familiar with that dilemma in Britain.

Trump, Clinton, Cruz, Sanders
Decision time. And it’s a tough choice...

Equally, we British have often had to vote with a clothes peg on our noses, as we choose candidates we dislike only to avoid something much worse.

In France, too. I was there back in 2002, when the Centre-Left presidential candidate Lionel Jospin ran such a lacklustre campaign that he was knocked out in the first round, leaving only Conservative Jacques Chirac to face off to the far-right Jean-Marie Le Pen in the second. That was certainly clothes peg time, and Le Pen was trounced by more than four to one.

Funnily enough, Le Pen is one of the foreign politicians to have endorsed Trump, as is Vladimir Putin. There’s a French saying, “tell me who you hang out with and I’ll tell you who you are.” Putin and Le Pen: appropriate company, one can’t help feeling, for the authoritarian Trump.

As it happens, there are also plenty of foreign leaders lining up against Trump. Unsurprisingly, the Mexican president and two of his predecessors have denounced him, but then Trump is proposing a wall to keep Mexicans out and, to add injury to insult, wants to charge them for it. But the Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has spoken out, as has the German Vice Chacellor Sigma Gabriel, and even British PM David Cameron.

That’s unusual: the convention is that politicians say nothing that could be interpreted as an attempt to intervene in another country’s elections. But if he’s anything, Trump’s unconventional. Even so, voices in the US are being raised against foreign interference. For instance, although she’s not a Trump fan, Republican and foreign policy analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, Danielle Pletka, pointed out:

It’s none of their bloody business. This is our election, not theirs.

Well, up to a point. When you’re talking about the wealthiest nation and most powerful military power on Earth, choosing a leader with at least a modicum of rationality is a matter that affects us all.

On the other hand, seeing how much Americans who actually have a vote are struggling with the decision, perhaps it’s no bad thing we don’t have to. Or would it be any kind of struggle at all for voters outside the US?

Polarisation of opinion: boldness or recklessness?

Looks like we’re once more being cursed to live in interesting times.

Divisions, on both sides of the Atlantic, are becoming starker, more polarised. We’re rejecting the dull middle, the conformist and customary, and opting for the edgy, the bold, the different. Trouble is, the bold is exciting but can also be dangerous.

Charles the Bold, for instance, is often thought of as Charles the Reckless. It’s easy for one to slip into the other. Charles himself (briefly) made that discovery, as he lost his life at the Battle of Nancy in 1477.

Charles.
Could have been the bold. Turned out to have been the reckless.

In Britain, we in the Labour have elected ourselves as leader a man, Jeremy Corbyn, who identifies himself as a socialist. Meanwhile, in New Hampshire, another man who makes the same identification, Bernie Sanders, has won the primary in the race for the Democratic Party presidential nomination.

“Together we have sent a message that will resonate from Wall Street to Washington, from Maine to California,” he announced after his victory, “and that is that the government of our great country belongs to all of the people and not just a handful of wealthy campaign contributors, and their Super PACs.”

Refreshing stuff. His is a nation, as Lincoln pointed out, founded on the principle that all men are created equal, and its government today is in hock to the men (and a scattering of women) with the deepest pockets.

Sadly, as Sanders won his primary, comprehensively beating the candidate of the middle and the establishment, Hillary Clinton, one of those deep-pocketed men was wrapping up the primary for the other party.

“We are going to start winning again,” Donald Trump made it clear, referring no doubt to his surprise defeat in Iowa, “we are going to make America so great again.”

Trouble is his view of making the US great isn’t to reassert the founding principle of equality of creation, it’s to chuck a lot of people out and build a bloody great wall to keep them out. The notion is ludicrous, of course, if only because it massively underestimates the ingenuity of man in getting around walls, and the sheer scale of the task of guarding any barrier 2000 miles long. All his idea would achieve, if it were ever put into practice, is to improve business for people-traffickers, who would be able to charge more to defeat the wall and trump Donald.

All the same, the idea’s gaining traction among a certain and far too large section of the US electorate.

And that’s the trouble with polarisation. It’s great if things go one way. Catastrophic if they go the other.

As happened to Charles the Reckless.