Underrated: Mike Pence

Standpoint, April 1, 2017

If the stories are accurate, Donald Trump had last-minute doubts about Mike Pence, the governor of Indiana and the person he’d just chosen as his running mate. If so, those doubts said more about Trump than Pence. The Donald would probably have preferred someone from his comfort zone: maybe Newt Gingrich, an eccentric whose glory days were decades ago, or New Jersey governor Chris Christie, a star eclipsed by scandal. He knew them reasonably well and, more importantly, understood that their last best hope of political advancement rested with him. They would know their place.

But Pence looked dangerously like his own man, an outsider foisted on Trump to reassure traditional Republicans and to bring decorum and a credible political track record to a ticket desperately short of both. To be sure, Pence faced a tough re-election fight for the governorship (which in the end he would have probably won), but he had also served six terms in Congress and had been mentioned as a potential presidential candidate for years. He had no need to jump aboard a Trump train only uncertainly connected to the rails. Worse, Pence had endorsed Ted Cruz and reportedly loathed The Donald. The Indiana governor denied that he felt that way, but it was hard to imagine a meeting of minds between a self-described “Christian . . . conservative and . . . Republican, in that order” and a chancer of no fixed party married to Ivana, Marla and Melania, in that order.

The Pence pick was enthusiastically received by GOP loyalists, and, however appalled they were by his hardline social — and not just social — conservativism, even the party’s opponents seemed somewhat soothed by the thought that, in the not-going-to-happen event of a Trump win, at least one pro would be in the new president’s vicinity. If there was a consensus, it was that Pence was a touch dull. There were mutterings too that he was not the brightest. Some of the latter can be put down to the lazy assumptions often made about religious types from flyover country, but, yes, Pence was a C student at high school and, yes, getting into law school had been something of a struggle. The vice president was not, one former associate told me, someone to get too deeply into policy details, but this former talk radio host was “good at messaging”.

That has not always been as true as it might have been. After his second (unsuccessful) attempt to make it into Congress, Pence apologised for running a campaign so negative that it backfired (that was then). A quarter of a century later, there was that looming re-election fight for the governorship. It looked trickier than it should have been, thanks partly to a battle over legislation designed to protect “religious freedom” (but seen by its critics as allowing discrimination against gays). Pence had annoyed both sides, initially by signing the law, then by agreeing to water it down.

That was unusual: Pence’s determination to stick to his principles, even if it meant defying a Republican president, had served him well in Washington after he won election to Congress in 2000. Grasping all the “legs” — fiscal, social and hawkish — of what Ronald Reagan famously described as conservatism’s “three-legged stool”, it wasn’t too long before he was on his way up.  The hardening attitudes on the Right that accompanied the financial crisis (Pence voted against the TARP bailout) and Obama’s election did him no harm either. He became a Tea Party favourite, largely without alienating more mainstream colleagues — no mean achievement. Chatter about a bid for the White House grew louder, but Pence opted to take aim first at the governor’s mansion, a shrewd choice for an ambitious legislator looking for the executive experience that could, if the opportunity arose, bolster a run for the presidency.

Four years later, an unexpected and rather different opportunity presented itself. Pence — more flexible than his reputation suggested — took it. There are dignified rationalisations, of course (patriotic duty, saw something good in Trump) for that decision, but it looks a lot like a brilliant contrarian bet. It would have been made easier to take by the prospect of that re-election fight at home and the thought that, if Trump lost, there was always 2020 and, in the interim, lucrative gigs on the conservative media and lecture circuit — a stint as a Palin, but with gravitas and a future.

Now Pence is a heartbeat, a scandal, or even a tweet away from the presidency. Quite how power is distributed in the Trump administration is opaque, but Pence is clearly much more than a state funerals’ veep, cold-shouldered onto the sidelines. He is out and about too, an ambassador for the administration: to Congress say, or attending the Munich Security Conference in February. He is professional, respectable, calming — no Spiro Agnew he, and, for that matter, no Trump either — and yet, a wise fellow, demonstratively loyal to his boss.

And if in the depths of the night, thoughts that are not quite so loyal come into this still sometimes underrated man’s head, I’m sure they are banished without more ado.

Trump Is No Loser, But Government Will Be Harder

You know the shot: “We finally really did it,” Charlton Heston contemplating the ruins of the Statue of Liberty. Well, the Statue and what she symbolises will survive the Trump presidency but that scene from Planet of the Apes leapt into my mind as I sat in a Manhattan restaurant on election night with a crowd of startled Republicans, some pleased, some not, watching another compelling drama lurch to a conclusion that most of those there, including me, had not anticipated.

So, what had “we” done? Well, by voting for Trump, or hazy Gary Johnson, the Libertarian (as I did), or crazy Jill Stein (the Green) or, in many cases, by not voting at all, Americans had rejected Hillary Clinton, the direction the country was going, or both. But it was not that much of an endorsement of The Donald. Trump has his fans, to be sure, but, even allowing for the polarisation that such figures generate, he proved to be a most unpopular populist, the most unpopular major party presidential candidate in American electoral history. He was, however, the handiest brick to throw through the establishment’s window.

What we can now expect, absent some last astounding scandal, is that Donald Trump, bully, braggart, billionaire (presumed), and defendant (currently) in some 75 lawsuits, will soon take up residence in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the first president never to have held earlier elective office or served in the military. But that won’t stop him benefiting from the way that the legislative branch — and this is a bipartisan offence — has acquiesced for some time now in the transfer of power to the executive.

Barack Obama: “We’re not just going to be waiting for legislation . . . I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone.”

Trump will also have Congress — and a Supreme Court nomination — in his pocket.

Working out what Trump will do with the power heading his way is not made easier by his pronouncements over the years.  The Donald is always sure, but in sometimes inconsistent ways. In 1999 he was sure about a one-time “net worth” tax on the very rich to wipe out the national debt. He was also sure that the Republicans were “just too crazy right” for him to remain in the party. He was “very pro-choice” then; now he is “very, very proud to say that [he is] pro-life”.

Looked at kindly, this shows a willingness to change his mind; looked at less benignly, it shows a willingness to play to whoever is in the room, but running through it all is his conviction that he has the answers.  “Nobody knows the system better than me,” Trump told the Republican convention, “which is why I alone can fix it.” I alone: what’s right is what Trump says it is — I, I, I.

Party affiliation provides less of a clue than it might. Trump, a former member of the Democratic, Reform and Independence parties, enjoys an equivocal relationship with a GOP that he has hijacked, or at the very least exploited, taking advantage of its resources, its people and its brand when it suited him, bypassing them when it did not, helped by his money, social media, the power of celebrity — and the fact that his revolt against the GOP’s establishment actually increased his appeal to many Republican voters.

In an attempt to reconcile these contradictions he hired Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, as his chief of staff on the same day as he picked Steve Bannon as chief strategist and senior adviser. Chalk meet cheese:  Priebus is establishment, Bannon is a bomb-thrower (there are harsher words), the executive chairman of the hard-right, sometimes dog-whistling Breitbart News and the former CEO of the Trump campaign. Bannon’s appointment announced that the revolution continues; choosing Preibus was a signal that members of the old regime were welcome to help ensure that it would be professionally run and, whisper it discreetly, be less of a breach with the past than some feared. As the old saying goes, people are policy. And, as I write these words, the news flashes across the screen that former Goldman Sachs partner Steven Mnuchin “has been recommended by Donald Trump’s transition team to serve as Treasury Secretary”.

Whether such recruits will be able to steady the controls on the Trump train must, however, remain an open question for now, dependent on who else is along for the ride, and who, beyond his immediate family, Trump will listen to. The operation of his fractious and chaotic campaign is not an encouraging precedent.

And how, once in the Oval Office, will Trump run his team?  One guess — the reassuring guess — is that he will set a general course and then delegate much of the day-to-day business to, maybe, his Vice-President, Mike Pence, a former congressman and current governor of Indiana, and, therefore, someone with both legislative and executive experience and good connections in Washington. He is someone who could, presumably, work well with Priebus.

Backing that up is the idea that The Donald is the dog that caught the car. In all probability, Trump never thought he’d be the Republican nominee (and nor, it’s credibly suggested, did he want to be). He almost certainly never thought that he’d end up in the White House, a job that promises the pomp he relishes, but circumstances that are a lot less fun than the billionaire frolics he has enjoyed for decades.

“If Donald,” wrote Colin Powell (no fan) last June, “were to somehow win, by the end of the first week in office he’d be saying ‘What the hell did I get myself into?’” On the other hand, Trump has sold himself — and quite genuinely sees himself — as the master of the deal. Thus he claims to favour free or, more accurately, freer trade, but not “stupid trade”, and stupid trade is, he jeered in 2015, the result of deals negotiated by “political hacks and diplomats”. The US has, he reckons, “the greatest negotiators in the world, but we don’t use them”. Something tells me that he considers Donald J. Trump to be one of those world-beaters, and that, when it comes to rewriting America’s trade deals, he plans on being very much involved. He has boasted of hiring the best and then letting them get on with it, “but I always watch over them”.

To be fair, this is what many Trump voters want him to do. The Donald has, for decades, marketed himself with remarkable success and occasional accuracy as mogul and wheeler-dealer. He has been hired as a businessman, to do for his country what politicians could not.

Trump the dealmaker will see politics as transactional and turn his talents to diplomacy, trying to rework Nato, say, or America’s poisonous relationship with Putin (“I think I’d be able to get along with him”) or with China, the last a relationship where trade disputes and great power rivalry could intersect in dangerous ways.

The greatest negotiators in the world are going to be busy, and if they apply the brinkmanship, bad faith and histrionics that typically come with big-ticket real estate transactions, the world will be in for sleepless nights, nights made more fraught still by Trump’s long-held belief that negotiation is a zero-sum game. There are only winners and losers, and Donald Trump is not a loser. 

But, for all this uncertainty, there are themes certain to be reflected in the policies that will be pursued by a Trump administration. Pre-eminent among them is his suspicion — shared by many Americans — that the US is being ripped off by its partners, whether in trade or in defence. As far back as 1987, Trump spent nearly $100,000 on full-page newspaper ads in which he maintained that Japan (then regarded as America’s main economic challenger) was free-riding off America’s willingness to pick up the tab for the country’s defence. He argued for a different approach: “Make Japan, Saudi Arabia, and others pay for the protection we extend our allies . . . ‘Tax’ these wealthy nations, not America . . . Let America’s economy grow unencumbered by the cost of defending those who can easily afford to pay us for the defence of their freedom. Let’s not let our great country be laughed at any more.” 

Nearly 30 years later, Trump was making a similar case to the New York Times (and not only the New York Times), except that the list of freeloaders now included most of Nato, run on a basis that he described as “unfair”, an adjective that, with its synonyms, has long been a bad, bad word in the Trump lexicon. In keeping with The Donald’s paranoid style, it hints at hostile conspiracy. Remember all that talk of a “rigged” election? But back to Nato: the US, Trump complained, was paying a “disproportionate share” of the freight.

He has a point. Currently America pays a little over 20 per cent of Nato’s direct costs, a number which is adjusted regularly and based on a percentage of its share of the alliance’s collective GNP. That seems reasonable enough (and, as these things go, the number is not huge), but the real problem concerns something far larger. The US effectively accounts for more than 70 per cent of all defence spending by Nato members. Some of that mismatch reflects the global reach of American power, not all of which is of much benefit to other Nato states either directly or indirectly, but even so.

More damaging still is the fact that so few Nato states meet the organisation’s decade-old commitment to spending at least 2 per cent of GDP on defence, a commitment only satisfied by five out of the Nato 28, something that also led Barack Obama to talk of “free-riders”, and he was far from the first American president to grumble. The US shells out some 3.6 per cent, mighty Greece comes next with 2.4 per cent and the only other countries to hit the target are the UK, Estonia and Poland.  France comes close with 1.8 per cent, and the other Baltic States are, wisely, scrambling to catch up. The rest of Nato falls far short: Angela Merkel may be being hailed by some as the leader of the free world in the wake of Trump’s triumph, but her country only spends 1.2 per cent. Others are even stingier: Canada, home of Justin Trudeau, hero of Davos, coughs up just 0.99 per cent.

Trump has hinted that Nato countries that don’t pay their way might not be able to count on the US coming to their aid as required by the mutual defence obligations that underpin the alliance. He has since backtracked somewhat, and the optimistic take is that those remarks were simply an example of Trump the negotiator at work, putting pressure on partners in breach of their part of a deal. Maybe, but Trump is playing a dangerous game. Deterrence must be credible. Any suggestion that America would not protect a vulnerable Nato ally increases the chance that Putin might be tempted to try his luck. This only underlines the importance of Trump’s security and diplomatic hires. For Trump to pick hawks, like, say, John Bolton, a former US ambassador to the UN, or former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, would send one message; recruiting former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (who has described Estonia as “a place in the suburbs of St Petersburg”) quite another.

But Russia’s leader is more cautious than often understood. Much has, rightly, been made both of Trump’s need to win and — how shall I put this — poor anger management skills. Putin is unlikely to want to provoke The Donald, and, contrary to the fears of some critics, he can only go so far in wooing him. Yes, both men have strong authoritarian streaks (under Trump, America will be grateful for the checks and balances still built into its system), both see themselves as tough guys and both reject the attempt to create a supranationalist world order — in Putin’s case, by word and deed; in Trump’s, so far, only by word. “Americanism”, he has declared, “not globalism, will be our credo.” But these similarities will not be enough to transform Trump into Putin’s patsy. Trump evidently (and not unreasonably) doubts that Russia poses an existential threat to the US — he seems ready to co-operate with Moscow in Syria — but if Putin pushes Trump in ways that Trump thinks matter, Trump will push back.

But what Trump thinks matters will differ from what the US has thought mattered in the past. There is some point, he has said, beyond which America “cannot be the policeman of the world”, a line that resonates with those communities, many of them in regions that voted for Trump, who have lost so many of their own in wars where the US was doing just that. 

One corollary of Trump’s more modest view of America’s role is that US allies will — if they are serious about it — have to assume more responsibility for their own defence than in the past. Another is the implicit recognition that the global political system is multi-polar, something that Putin has long claimed and the Chinese have not even had to bother mentioning. That, in turn, may well imply a return to realpolitik that is closer to Nixon/Kissinger than Reagan’s loftier vision, let alone George H.W. Bush’s nutty “new world order”. The debate — and the pushing — will not be over the existence of spheres of interest, but over the location of their boundaries, something that may have grim implications for borderlands such as Ukraine.

Trump insists he is not an isolationist, and I don’t think that he is. He is planning a major increase in defence spending. Where he sees threats, whether it’s the Iran deal or IS, he does not wish them away. That said, he does not appear to have learned enough from seeing what Obama’s leading from behind has led to. When the US withdraws, the vacuum can be filled in dangerous ways. Trump is correct that America’s allies ought to pay more for their own defence, but an overly forceful insistence on this will lead to a fraying of both the transatlantic alliance and America’s partnerships in Asia. The consequences are hard to predict, but will inevitably involve a dilution of America’s ability to control what happens next.  That’s unlikely to end happily.

These consequences will be worsened by the new administration’s policies on trade and the environment, which, whatever their merits, will be seen as further evidence that the US is going its own way. And in Europe, at least, the more hard-edged side of Trump’s domestic agenda, not to speak of the spectacle of, to some, an ugly American beyond all caricature taking up residence in the White House, will do even more to stoke up the anti-Americanism forever soiling the continent’s intellectual and political life.

That won’t deter Trump. The president-elect has already appointed Myron Ebell, a leading climate change sceptic from the Competitive Enterprise Institute think tank, to oversee his environmental transition team. Reversing Obama’s climate change regulation, much of which he introduced by executive order (and what was brought to life by the pen can be killed by the pen) while initiating America’s withdrawal from the Paris climate accord (legally, a more complex process) are obviously, so to speak, in the pipeline. It’ll mean  yet more international opprobrium, so add it to the pile. Domestically it will enrage those who are already enraged by the prospect of a Trump presidency, but it will reassure many of his supporters — who are in for quite a few let-downs in the years to come — and, as a gesture of support to Team Trump’s symbolically important coal miners, will go down well with the Donald’s crucial blue-collar supporters. 

When in 2012 Trump tweeted that global warming was, in essence, a hoax (he later said that he was joking), he blamed the Chinese: “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive.” Conspiracies, always conspiracies, trade, always trade: when, 30 years ago, Trump was attacking the way the US paid so much towards the defence of its allies in the Far East, much of his focus was on the way that the money saved had helped build up economies that, he implied, had got too strong for America’s good. Asked in 2016 by the New York Times for his view on previous presidents, he replied that one he “really liked” was Ronald Reagan but  he had “never felt on trade we did great” in the Reagan era. 

Reagan was neither a purist nor naive (he believed in trade that was free and fair). He was not above pushing “voluntary” restraint on importers and imposing tariffs when he felt had to, but protectionism, he argued, was “almost always self-destructive”. He proposed a free trade pact with Mexico  in 1980, a forerunner of sorts for the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) passed a decade and a half later. Trump recently described Nafta as “the worst trade deal maybe ever signed  anywhere”. He had opposed it even before it was approved, reportedly on the grounds that US negotiators had cut a bad deal. What Trump actually meant was that he could have handled everything so much better. 

Trump has been harping on about trade for a long time and often in a way that, reflecting his zero-sum approach to negotiation, focuses on the failure to cut a better deal. This approach slips easily into a preference for mercantilism over free trade, a choice that fits neatly under the umbrella of America First, and helped deliver the voters who had found themselves on the wrong side of globalisation, voters, particularly in the Midwest, who took Trump over the top on election day.

Trump’s victory will finish off the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with the EU, a deal already struggling even to be stillborn. The Trans-Pacific Partnership seems set for the knacker’s yard too. No new free-trade deals can be expected soon — even, I suspect with Brexit Britain. Reversing those large agreements that are already in place will be more difficult, however. Trump’s talk of imposing a 45 per cent tariff on Chinese imports if the People’s Republic doesn’t ease up on subsidies and other practices he views as unfair, would lead to higher prices in America and, eventually, slower growth, something he must understand. That 45 per cent should be seen as an opening bid in a long negotiation.

Similarly, Trump’s threat to pull the US out of Nafta (a move a president could make on his own) and impose a 35 per cent tariff on some Mexican imports risks major disruption to the supply chains of American companies, and could trigger a trade war, higher prices in the US, and, if the Mexican economy falters, a fresh surge of illegal immigration into a certain country to the north with an as yet unbuilt wall. Once again, sabre-rattling today is likely to be no more than the beginning of a negotiation that may be noisy, but will change relatively little.

But trying to rein in globalisation is to fight a war that is largely lost and, so far as the workplace is concerned, increasingly irrelevant. US manufacturing output stands at an all-time high, but manufacturing employment has declined to levels last seen in the late 1940s. Quite a number of Trump’s “forgotten men and women” (a phrase with Depression era echoes) lost good jobs and good pay, not to the Chinese, but to automation — to the robots. Many, many others will suffer the same fate, and no politician, left or right, establishment or populist, really knows what to do about it. This time round, Trump benefited from these fresh additions to the ranks of the early 21st-century’s left-behinds, but if he cannot come to their rescue (he can’t) they will look for help elsewhere, quite possibly to a Democratic party shifting rapidly to the Left.

Meanwhile, Trump’s answer to the economy’s woes is to propose what chancellors of the exchequer once called a dash for growth, combining Reagan-style tax-cutting and deregulation with a $1 trillion infrastructure package, much of which would be financed by the private sector, incentivised in turn by tax credits. As with a great deal of Trump’s programme the details are vague, but it’s a reminder that, even if Trump is again a Republican, he is attached to no one wing of the party. If tax-cutting and deregulation is Reaganesque, upgrading the country’s dilapidated infrastructure harks back to Eisenhower, architect, among other grands projets, of the Interstate Highway System and, as National Review’s Reihan Salam has argued, to Nixon, who (unlike Eisenhower) posed as an opponent of the elite, but, like the general, saw a role for big government. Similarly, Trump will defend the big entitlement programmes — from Social Security (pensions), to Medicare (health care for the elderly) to, perhaps with some tweaks, Medicaid (healthcare for the poor). He knows what his voters want, which is why he is already signalling that his repeal of Obamacare may not be quite as comprehensive as he has promised in the past. The way that Obamacare is structured may be unloved, and the way that it functions is flawed (sharp increases in Obamacare premiums probably played a part in Clinton’s defeat), but chipping away at its benefits will be a hard sell, unless the GOP can find a more credible replacement than it has managed to so far.  

How will all this be paid for? Trump is hoping for a supply-side miracle, with another boost coming, fingers crossed, from the repatriation of corporate funds stashed overseas after the sharp cuts in America’s corporate tax rate (on some measures amongst the highest in the world) that he has in mind. On the other hand, the GOP’s green eyeshade wing, headed by House Speaker Paul Ryan, will be less than convinced by Trump’s maths and with worries over the federal government’s nearly $20 trillion debt likely to increase as interest rates move up, there will be battles to come, battles that will be a reminder of deeper fractures that Trump has opened up on the right, battles in which Democrats, at least on the infrastructure plan, may find themselves in a very strange place, by Trump’s side.

That won’t be the case on immigration. Even if Trump is already backtracking on that wall of his (some of it will be fence, apparently), a much tougher immigration regime will be put in place. The president-elect has already announced that he would like to see the deportation of 2-3 million illegal aliens with “criminal records”, an exaggerated number, which also makes no distinction between different types of criminal past. Americans are uncomfortable with the thought of mass deportations and they are unlikely to approve of breaking up a family over a minor conviction from decades ago. If Trump’s immigration plans are not to be swept away by a tide of revulsion, he may have to go more carefully than he thinks, and not just in this respect.

Nevertheless, immigration, both in its own right and as a proxy for wider ethnic and demographic unease, goes a long way to explaining why The Donald will be moving into the White House. If the country can finally assert control over its borders (and the wall is not the best way of doing so), it can regularise the position of those illegals who remain (there are currently estimated to be a little over 11 million of them in the US). Then a long-overdue serious debate over immigration can begin.

November’s election result would only have been possible in a troubled, deeply-divided nation. Time will tell whether Trump’s victory is another symptom of what ails the country, or the beginning of a cure. I’m not optimistic. Then again, Newt Gingrich (after a job?) exults that “a Trump administration is going to be among the most extraordinary, creative, inventive, exciting periods in all of American political history.”

It’s going to have to be.

Race To The White House Through The Looking Glass

Standpoint, October 1, 2016

East Anglia is not, perhaps, an obvious place to assess the American vote this autumn, but back in the UK on a brief trip, I noticed that the small section in a Norwich bookshop dedicated to the US presidential election featured almost nothing on Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump was represented by a series of biographies, exposés, comics and even colouring books. Few, if any, were admiring, but they crowded the Clintonware out. As so often, Hillary had been reduced to a grey blur (to borrow one Menshevik’s unwise description of Stalin), barely visible against the madcap backdrop of Trump’s trickster parade.

An election to decide who becomes the world’s most powerful man (or woman) is inevitably intensely focused on the character of the contenders. Even their running-mates, appointed amid brief, synthetic excitement, are speedily hauled away from the limelight, demoted to surrogates deployed to savage the opposing team in a manner that a presidential candidate cannot, or, more positively, to throw a sprinkling of low-wattage stardust over small crowds in small states.

That’s in a normal year. It’s symbolic of this campaign, dominated by the personality of one man, that few running-mates have been pushed quite so quickly into the background as Trump’s choice, Indiana governor Mike Pence. Adding respectability and good hair to a campaign with little of either, Pence is a stolid reminder that the GOP is traditionally the “daddy party”, a quality that risks being drowned out by the playground taunts of its presidential nominee.

From the tweets of Donald Trump: “@SenJohnMcCain should be defeated in the primaries. Graduated last in his class at Annapolis — dummy!”

For the record, McCain, a bright but truculent student, came not last but 894th out of 899, not quite ignominious enough for The Donald. Reducing the senator still further in the rankings was an example of Trump’s use of “truthful hyperbole,” a clever term (dreamt up by his ghostwriter for The Art of the Deal) for a clever idea. It goes a long way to explaining Trump’s success as a salesman of buildings, of stories, of conspiracies and of himself. What matters is not what is true, but what is remembered, and how.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.”

Many voters seem less disturbed by Trump’s abusive relationship with fact than they should be. They understand that Trump is true to himself if not to the truth, a proof of his authenticity even when based on lies.

But back to Mike Pence. He has been married for decades to one woman and has a surname with one syllable (something Trump reportedly believes “conveys strength”). Earlier this year, he endorsed Ted Cruz and had been said to “loathe” Trump. Trump’s Hoosier is, it turns out, not only respectable, but flexible, helpful given his role as a kind of “ambassador” to sceptical elements in the Republican establishment.

The Pence pick was muttered rather than proclaimed. He was introduced from a podium on which the Trump name was present, but the Pence name was not. The same could, for the most part, be said about the speech by Trump that followed, a typically Trump talk about Trump — with added terrorism, law and order, industrial decline, “crooked Hillary”, taxes, over-regulation, the Nafta disaster, that wall, Brexit, the building of a hotel in Washington DC (“under budget and ahead of schedule”), and triumph over the Republican party hierarchy.

From time to time, Trump remembered why he was meant to be there, and dragged his speech “back to Mike Pence” with a shout-out or two to the Indianan’s achievements, before reverting again to Donald J. Trump. 

Pence had been chosen partly for reasons of “party unity”, but The Donald’s signal was clear: this was still his campaign. And so it has proved. The election has been dominated by this most unexpected candidate, a shape-shifting, eccentric reminder of America’s infinite capacity to surprise, a narcissistic, poorly-informed, sometimes tin-eared, sometimes astoundingly intuitive post-political politician, a fantasist, a chancer who looks in the mirror and sees the future. His opponent — dull, exhausted Hillary — has been reduced to a supporting role, with the twist that is she who will limp off with the prize.

Trump’s most interesting observation in that speech was that he was “a messenger”, a humblebrag but accurate enough. His startling ascendancy in the Republican primaries, even if helped by the fact that he was taking on a divided field of rivals far weaker than the GOP leadership has ever been prepared to admit, sent a message about unhappiness on the Right.

The fact that Trump is, as I write, for all his flaws and gaffes, still very much in contention for the top job sends a broader, even gloomier message: America is not at ease with itself, a message echoed by those millions of Democrats who voted for Bernie Sanders, a grouchy Marxist lost in ancient delusion.

But it’s Trump who appears to be the messenger of those who are unhappiest of all. Early analyses of his rise emphasised the support he was winning among the embattled white working class, left behind by globalisation, job-destroying automation and sweeping demographic change (support swollen by the more traditional politics of racial resentment in his Southern and Appalachian redoubts) and reinforced by feelings of voicelessness and the suspicion that the country no longer had much room for them. It’s not only the poorest that feel this way. Read enough elite exultation, particularly in the media, at the prospect of an older, whiter America on its way to the grave, and it’s not hard to understand why some whites fear they are, in the sinister old Soviet phrase, “former people” in the making. 

Trump’s tax-cutting agenda (the numbers don’t add up, but Trump is hardly alone in being guilty of that) will only be of limited appeal to many of these voters. But they do appreciate much of the rest of what their champion has to say, both for its specifics, however implausible, and, no less, for how it feels. “Make America great again” is more than patriotic swagger. It’s a reproach and a promise, a wild, exhilarating swing against contemporary orthodoxy — on immigration, on free trade, on multiculturalism, on bearing too great a burden abroad and on much, much more besides. The Wall Street bashing, however incongruous from a millionaire/billionaire/whatever in his tower, plays well with this crowd too.

Whatever some alarmists might say, this is not fascism (as that term is properly construed) or anything like it. Despite Trump’s fondness for jutting his jaw like Il Duce, his rise is better understood by looking not at the Europe of nearly a century ago but at its current populist surge — of Left, Right and something of both: Syriza, UKIP, the Finns Party and all the rest. It was no coincidence that Nigel Farage shared a platform with Trump in Mississippi in August. Trumpism (yes, it’s a word, even if no one, including Trump, quite knows what it means) is part of a wider revolt against ruling establishments, on either side of the Atlantic, affluent, post-national and condescending, and not as competent as they like to assume.

While the Trump campaign is defined and often overwhelmed by the man at its centre (thus its chaos), the personality cult on which it is, if only partly, built comes with a wink. For all the towers, hotels, casinos, headlines, women and bankruptcies, Trump would not be where he is today without his decade (and more) in reality TV, something that has propelled him to the rostrum while subtly undermining his place there. He takes himself seriously — very seriously — and yet there is more than a trace of self-parody about his performance, which the fans and followers (in Trump’s case, often interchangeable categories) who have watched the evolution of his media image over the years, understand very well. It helps explain why they hold him to a lower standard than they would a more mainstream candidate. As Trump draws closer to the White House, that’s not a comforting thought. There are good reasons to believe that this thin-skinned, occasionally vindictive man might attempt to abuse the powers of the presidency to an even greater extent than some of his predecessors.

But if Trump tried to overreach, he would almost certainly be stopped. Whatever else can be forecast about this election (full disclosure: my predictions have not proved exactly infallible so far), we can be sure Trump is not going to win by a landslide. The electoral twists that might take him to victory would also secure a GOP-controlled Congress, but one where many of the Republicans who sat there disapproved of their man in the White House. Many more would be profoundly worried by what Trumpgate could mean for their political future. The elections that followed Nixon’s disgrace were not kind to his party. Historical memories in America are short, but not that short.

Much of the electorate, including a good percentage of those who had voted, noses held tight, for Trump, would be watchful and on edge, the financial markets — already nervous about what Trumpenomics might mean — would be twitchy, the judiciary would be on its guard and business would be suspicious. The bureaucracy would be uncooperative and, often, outright hostile. America’s defence chiefs would fret about what Trump could mean for the country’s security, their apprehensions fuelled by the useful idiocy of Trump’s footsie with Putin, his undermining of Nato and those fabled tiny fingers coming too close to the nuclear button. As for the media, well, what do you think?

One prominent conservative journalist, no never-Trumper, told me that impeachment proceedings against a President Trump would be a matter not of if, but when. It wouldn’t altogether surprise me. And in that respect, not only Trump’s future conduct, but also his past could possibly make for difficulty. He has, after all, spent years making and losing money in construction and casinos, two businesses not known for their spotless reputation. And he still has to contend with litigation over Trump University, an institution that allegedly preyed on just the sort of regular folks he has pledged to defend. Then there’s the matter of what might be lurking in Trump’s still mysterious tax returns. Meanwhile, doing his bit for the cause, New York’s (Democratic) attorney general has announced an investigation into Trump’s charitable foundation. If there are any skeletons to be dragged out of Trump Cupboard, they will be.

On the other hand, there are legitimate questions about the extent to which the checks and balances (explicit and implicit) built into the American system would act as a brake on President Hillary Clinton, an authoritarian herself and dogged by questions about her integrity that stretch all the way back to her improbably successful cattle futures trading as first lady of Arkansas.

She’s an establishment figure and the establishment would be more inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt, not least out of gratitude that it had dodged the Trump fusillade. There’s also a decent chance that the Senate, if not the House, would be under Democratic control in the event of a Clinton win. What’s more, the behaviour of the civil service in recent years suggests it wouldn’t be too keen to push back against misbehaviour by a Democratic president. Writing in USA Today, University of Tennessee law professor and influential blogger Glenn (“Instapundit”) Reynolds argued that “Federal employees overwhelmingly vote for Democrats, donate to Democrats, and, by all appearances, cover for Democrats as a routine part of doing their job.” That’s not so much of an exaggeration as it should be.

As for scrutiny by the media, well, what do you think? Whining by the Washington Post, the paper of Watergate no less, that “the Hillary Clinton email story is out of control” signals what lies ahead.

As a reminder, that story revolves round Clinton’s decision, while Secretary of State, to use a private email server on official business. This was against the rules and had potentially (and quite possibly not just potentially: was the server hacked?) damaging security implications: The FBI grumbled about “extreme carelessness” in the “handling of very sensitive, highly classified information”, but found no criminal intent. Other Clinton critics asked whether she had arranged matters in this way because — this did not take a major imaginative leap — she had something to hide, questions not made any easier to answer by the fact that thousands of “private” emails had been erased. The affair, which has contributed — and continues to contribute — to Clinton’s perceived lack of trustworthiness with voters, rumbles on, but even the Justice Department’s eventual decision not to pursue criminal charges against her has come at a cost: it bolstered the impression that the Clintons are above the law, not a reputation to celebrate in an anti-establishment year.

Nevertheless, for all Clinton’s stumbles, both literal (we’ll come to that) and figurative, barring a major extraneous event (a massive terrorist attack, say, or some suitably embarrassing leaks via interestingly connected hackers) the best bet is, to repeat myself, that, despite some turbulence in the polls, she will be taking the oath of office in January. Trump’s core problem is that there simply are not enough white working-class voters (a group that amounted to some two-thirds of the electorate in 1980, but barely more than a third today), a problem reinforced by the fact that the rhetoric that wins them over to his side alienates their more upmarket counterparts. Mitt Romney won the support of 59 per cent of white voters in 2012, but he still lost the election. Continuing demographic change (whites are forecast to cast around 69 per cent of the votes this year) and Trump’s even greater unpopularity with minorities will mean that he would have to beat Romney’s 59 per cent by some margin to have any realistic chance of victory (on some estimates he would need to reach 65 per cent). That would involve scoring very well indeed with college-educated whites, but an early September poll showed that Clinton was beating Trump among such voters in 31 states.

This was, I suspect, the constituency at which Clinton was aiming when, in during a speech at a fundraiser in Manhattan in early September she divided Trump’s voters into two “baskets” of roughly equal sizes. The first “contained people who feel that government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them . . . They are just desperate for change . . . they don’t buy everything [Trump] says but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different.” The second was a “basket of deplorables . . . Racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, you name it.” They were, she said, “irredeemable”, an unsettling choice of adjective.

Clinton sometimes says what she believes and on this occasion that’s what she did, although in a later sorry-not-sorry comment she conceded that she had dumped too high a percentage of Trump supporters into the deplorables basket. But the message she wanted to deliver will have survived. Voting for Trump was the mark either of a loser or, worse still, of a racist/sexist/homophobe/xenophobe/Islamophobe. By contrast, ran the subtext, a vote for Hillary was proof of being none of those things, an attractive pitch to some suburbanites, not least because of the way it chimes with the misgivings that they already have about those who have jumped onto the Trump train. Clinton’s comment was widely seen as a gaffe — insulting voters is not normally seen as a good idea — and angered many, but it may play well with the decisive few at whom, I reckon, it was really directed.

It was widely assumed that, once Trump won the Republican nomination, he would — to use the fashionable term — pivot. He would, it was thought, reach out to centrists and minorities and, more generally, just make an effort to come across as rather more presidential, all shifts likely to appeal to those college-educated whites. Occasionally that’s what happened, even if some of those pivots have, in the words of Republican Senator Jeff Flake (who has, at the time of writing, refused to endorse Trump) been “360-degree pivots”: “He pivots and then pivots right back.”

Nevertheless, there have been signs of a more sophisticated and even conciliatory approach, especially since Trump’s appointment of Kellyanne Conway, a veteran pollster well-known in Republican circles, as his latest campaign manager. It could be seen in Trump’s nuanced and clever response to Clinton’s baskets. He picked up on its unmistakably authoritarian tone (“She divided people into baskets as though they were objects not human beings”) and the sneer that accompanied it (“You can’t lead this nation if you have such a low opinion for its citizens”), while deftly playing his class card (Hillary “mocks and demeans hard-working Americans” while living a “sequestered life behind gates and walls and guards”), a reflection of his ability to, so to speak, descend from his penthouse. Trump’s wealth is a badge of success, spent without pretension. It’s Clinton’s, a grandee of a governing class that disdains money while somehow managing to amass it, that is resented. Shortly after Clinton’s remarks, Trump announced a, by Republican standards, generous maternity leave plan. Populists of the Right know when to lean left, and when to appeal to women, a constituency that needs some convincing to vote for Trump.

Trump also made a well-received visit to Louisiana, hit by massive flooding and (strangely, given Hurricane Katrina) neglected by Clinton and, initially, President Obama. He flew to meet Mexico’s president and has appeared (it’s complicated) to refine his immigration agenda: more emphasis on enforcement and border security (complete with that wall), less talk of mass deportation of those already in the country, a notion that makes many Americans very uneasy. Trump also showed up in Detroit to visit his “brothers and sisters” in an African-American church, a gesture that will be unlikely to win him many black recruits (most polls show him scoring in the low single digits with black voters, although there have been some intriguing outliers), but may play well with whites understandably turned off by some of the rougher edges of Trump’s rhetoric and, for that matter, support.

Trump will score somewhat better among other minorities (it would be hard to do much worse), but dismal polling, as at the time of writing, among Latinos (19 per cent, according to an early-September poll: Romney managed 27 per cent at the last presidential election) hint at the immensity of the challenge that faces him, a challenge reinforced by the suspicion that prejudice against one is a prejudice against all. Shortly after Trump had — on essentially ethnic grounds — attacked the impartiality of a Mexican-American judge presiding over some of the Trump University litigation, a Chinese-American acquaintance, no leftist, told me that this was the last straw — another vote lost. One April poll found that 40 per cent of registered Asian-American voters would not vote for a candidate “with strongly anti-immigrant views” even if “they agreed with him or her on other issues”.

If this emphasis on ethnicity rather than policy as a basis for voting for one party or another sounds ominous, so it should. Over the last half-century, America has combined acceptance of mass immigration from all over the world with a rejection of its earlier assimilationist approach to new arrivals. The insistence on assimilation had worked very well. It has been replaced with a multiculturalism that works nowhere. The result is Balkanising the nation, changing unum into pluribus, a transformation that, if history is any judge, or the divisive identity politics of the country’s universities any foretaste, leads nowhere that America should want to go.

American attitudes to immigration are complex and conflicted and made more so by the way that, in often unacknowledged ways, they overlap with attitudes to race and, now, multi-culturalism. That said, when Trump looked at the challenge he faced in the primaries, he saw the opportunity presented by the failure of his Republican rivals, for the most part products of a lazily (or in Jeb Bush’s case, enthusiastically) immigration-friendly GOP establishment, to respond to the unease felt by many of their voters over this topic. In his own crude fashion, Trump then made immigration his issue, a brilliant — and calculated — move that took him to the head of the pack. The paradox, however, is that The Donald’s aggressive and often obnoxious stance on this question will buttress the Democrats’ gains from the demographic changes that mass immigration has brought in its wake. As a result, they will be even more determined to persevere with the immigration policies and identity politics that could, in the worst case, eventually culminate in some sort of Yugoslavia.

Turning to the more immediate future, Republicans will be (quietly) hoping that, without Obama at the top of the Democratic ticket, minority turnout will be down. It might, and that would be troubling for Clinton, but the Democrats and the media will hype the dangers of a Republican candidate, who can even now be relied upon to help the hype with suitably incendiary gaffes. His handlers can only do so much. As Trump could discover to his cost, casting a vote against can be almost as good a reason to show up at the polls as a vote for.

Then again, voting against crooked Hillary will be a pleasant task for many on the Right (and for quite a few, far easier than voting for Trump). But Clinton, who was first lady before some of today’s voters were born, has been on the political scene for a long time. Some of the fury she used to attract has subsided. Even the conspiracy theorists have seemed weary (how many murders was it, anyway?), at least until persistent rumours about her health began to gather pace, a worrying development for a candidate for a job on which so much rests on one pair of shoulders.

In early September the National Enquirer, a disreputable if enjoyable supermarket scandal-sheet and one of the few publications to have endorsed Trump, “revealed” that the 68-year-old Hillary, “frail” and “overweight” is “infected with a crippling killer virus, suffers from alcoholism, has been devastated by three strokes and is battling severe mental disorders”, as well as, possibly — Job in a trouser suit — multiple sclerosis and muscular dystrophy. Were that to be true, it would be testimony to Hillary’s resilience that she was so quickly back on her feet after her fainting episode (first blamed on the heat, then on pneumonia) at New York’s 9/11 memorial, the incident that took speculation about her health away from the checkout lane and into the headlines.

Her return to the campaign trail may have been speeded along by comments by former Ohio governor Ted Strickland (a Democrat now running for the Senate) just two days later. Clinton’s running-mate, Virginia senator Tim Kaine, was, noted Strickland, “a wonderfully prepared person to be . . . the president if that ever became necessary”. Strickland knows what many people know: Senator Kaine, a mainstream Democrat and a former governor of his state, would run better against Trump than Clinton does.

Making matters worse, Clinton’s perceived evasiveness over what was ailing her sharpened questions about her honesty. According to one poll roughly half of all voters believed that she had “given the public false information about her health”. To David Axelrod, a former senior Obama adviser, this was an own goal. “Antibiotics,” he tweeted “can take care of pneumonia. What’s the cure for an unhealthy penchant for privacy that repeatedly creates unnecessary problems?” Unnecessary? I wonder.  But voters’ familiarity with the Clinton style has bred complacency: The email mess has hurt Hillary, but it has not proved to be the cancer on her candidacy that it once might have been, and the genuinely disturbing murk that surrounds yet another source of controversy, the Clinton Foundation — a nest of actual and potential conflicts of interest with a stink of pay-to-play about it — has yet to seriously disturb an electorate too jaded to care overmuch.

It’s not all gloom for Trump — far from it. Traditional loyalties, a widening gulf between the parties, the belief that The Donald is the lesser of two evils, and the manner in which the election process has “normalised” the idea of a Trump candidacy have all led to a far larger proportion of Republican-leaning voters rallying behind their party’s nominee than once was thought possible (the same is not true of the divided right-wing commentariat). Even so, in a contest where Trump will need to haul in every voter who could conceivably be his, quite a few will make their excuses and leave.

Some will defect to Gary Johnson, the former Republican governor of New Mexico now running as the Libertarian candidate with another former Republican governor as his running mate. By repositioning the Libertarian party in an unaccustomed role as a “sane” (to use, as Johnson does, that infuriatingly smug term for centrist) alternative to Trump and Clinton, Johnson will take votes (in greater numbers probably than any third party for two decades) from both, perhaps more from Clinton than Trump, but it is unlikely to be so many as to make a difference, although his seeming appeal to young voters may be a sign that Hillary is not doing so well with this key Obama constituency as she should. On a more reassuring note for the Democrats, it doesn’t look as if Clinton need worry greatly about the threat to her left from Jill Stein’s Greens, a party in no hurry to re-label itself as sane.

Put everything together, add in the way that the maths of the electoral college favours the Democrats and then throw in her campaign’s superior organisation, and the odds, despite some wobbles, still favour Clinton, a candidate described by a possibly demob-happy Barack Obama as the “most qualified” candidate ever to run for the presidency — leaving, therefore, predecessors such as Thomas Jefferson (principal author of the Declaration of Independence, Governor of Virginia, ambassador to France and, ahem, Secretary of State) behind in the dust.

The defining achievement of Clinton’s time as First Lady — other than sticking with Bill and polarising the nation — was a failed healthcare reform. Despite courageous efforts to tackle the video game menace, she achieved very little in her eight years as senator, and her time as Secretary of State is remembered mainly for the unsuccessful “reset” with Russia and the slaughter of four Americans in Benghazi, including the US ambassador to Libya. She also, it’s noted on Wikipedia, “greatly expanded the State Department’s use of social media, including Facebook and Twitter”.

There is very little excitement over Clinton’s candidacy. At the end of August Trump was recording extraordinarily high (63 per cent) unfavourables in the polls, but so was Hillary (56 per cent). It took something to pick a candidate who could actually lose to Clinton, but that’s what the GOP’s primary voters did. That said, Trump’s core supporters seem more passionate, more involved, and more likely to vote. In a thought-provoking reprise of the Sanders campaign, he has been attracting impressive amounts of money from an impressive number of small donors, a phenomenon worth watching if it continues. The GOP’s voter registration drive has being going surprisingly well in some key states.

By contrast, efforts to whip up some enthusiasm over the prospect of the election to the presidency of a rich, entitled grande dame as a feminist milestone are falling, like her speeches, just a little bit flat. With her metallic voice and weirdly forced facial expressions, there is something robotic about Clinton. Trump’s wild talk is often alarming, but rarely dull. To watch Hillary is to be left with a vague sense that a mechanic will need to be called in.

To be fair, it’s not easy to generate a lot of excitement when running for what will inevitably be seen as the third term (always a political challenge) of a sitting administration, and, to a degree, of a past one — her husband’s — too. And that’s what she’s doing. Broadly speaking, a Hillary presidency will build on the status quo, with additional shifts to the left on regulation, tax, climate change bossiness, immigration and (albeit in a move likely to find considerable bipartisan support) trade: The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) with the EU will, to steal a phrase from Obama, go “to the back of the queue”. After Trump and Sanders, the votes for a further extension of free trade are not there. On the other hand, she is likely to be more assertive than Obama — a low bar — internationally, and, unlike what Trump appears to have in mind, no dangerous games will be played with Nato.

Her freedom to act will be constrained if the Republicans manage to hang on to the Congress. At the time of writing, earlier fears that Trump would cost the GOP its majorities appear overdone. The Republicans seem well-placed to hang on to the House and they are still in with a chance of retaining the Senate. But however well or badly they do, the questions posed by the rise of Trump, a candidate who seems set to cost them a presidential election that they should have won, are not going away. Trump himself is a one-off, 70 years old, and, if some recent Senate primaries are any indication, not yet in a position to remake the GOP in his own image. But the changes to which his rise is a response, changes which are only going to accelerate, will have to be confronted by a party that has no clue how to do so.

Seen from 2020, 2016 may look pretty good.

Turning Trump

Prospect, May 23, 2016

New York City, June 2016 © Andrew Stuttaford

In July last year, former Texas governor Rick Perry, then running for the Republican presidential nomination, took aim at Donald Trump, then—as now—amazing just about everyone (full disclosure: including me) by how well he was doing.

Trump, warned Perry, offered “a barking carnival act…a toxic mix of demagoguery, mean-spiritedness and nonsense that will lead the Republican Party to perdition if pursued.” Trump’s candidacy was, he added, a “cancer on conservatism.”

That was then. Last week Perry said that he would be prepared to serve as vice-tumour. If Trump needed somebody with his experience then Perry would not say, “Aw shucks sir, I’m gonna go fishing.” No sir, he would do his duty by his country.

Leading figures in the Republican Party are coming round to the political reality that Trump’s success represents. For some that’s a matter of personal ambition (absolute power may corrupt absolutely, but the whiff of power does a pretty good job too). For others it’s the product of hard-eyed, if bleak, calculation. They are unlikely—despite recent polling suggesting a swing in Trump’s direction—to think that the Donald can win the presidency (or to agree with what he stands for), but they may well have concluded that losing as a relatively united party would be less harmful than any of the alternatives.

Ordinary Republican voters are finding it easier to rally behind Trump. Those who, just a month or two ago, were telling pollsters they would not vote for him in November are falling into line. And fewer are holding their noses as they do so. In April, Wall Street Journal/NBC News polling showed that around 40 per cent of GOP voters regarded Trump negatively. That’s now dropped to 25 per cent. Politics are tribal. With the primary fight over, most will unite behind their leader despite earlier misgivings.

It helps that Hillary Clinton, the presumed chieftain of the other tribe, has been a bogeywoman to the Right for decades (and she’s not too popular with anyone else: her unfavourables—astoundingly high for a candidate in her position—are only exceeded, if by a narrowing margin, by Trump’s). It helps too that Clinton’s standing with the wider electorate is being hurt by the brawl with Bernie Sanders. In some recent polls, Trump has pulled ahead of Clinton. I doubt that lead will endure once the Democrats reunite, but to the degree that it does, it will induce even more Republicans into the Trump camp. After all, if he has a chance….

There’s something else. Trump’s mood music (it would be an exaggeration to describe his programme as much more than that) sounds sweeter to many Republicans than their leadership might like. Tough on immigration: Check. Tough on trade: Check. Rejecting Bush-style interventionism abroad: Check. Preserving Medicare (health care for the over-65s) and Social Security (pensions): Check. Trump’s voters may revere Reagan the man, but they are unconvinced by Reagan the mantra. Trump achieved lift-off with the help of a white working class that believes, not without reason, that it has been “left behind” (the parallels with today’s UKIP are obvious), struggling to prosper in a rapidly transforming America in which it no longer feels at home. It has had quite enough creative destruction, thank you very much.

But in an age of insecurity it is not only blue collars that are being felt. Trump’s campaign may owe its launch to working class Republicans, but it was boosted into orbit by supporters from far beyond the Appalachian hollows and Rustbelt towns of reassuring caricature. The collateral damage of globalization and automation is spreading ever higher up the social scale. Trump’s coalition of the anxious is considerably broader than the GOP’s high-ups seem willing to acknowledge, and, tellingly, was not soothed away by the social conservatism peddled by the Donald’s rivals. To say Trump makes an unexpected standard-bearer for a party that includes a prominent (if often misunderstood) religious right is an understatement, but that’s what he will be. Priorities change.

To be sure, Trump threw the Reaganite wing of the party a bone in the form of a supply-side-on-steroids tax plan of such absurdity that the kindest way to look at it is as a statement of intent (welcome enough from someone who has supported higher taxation in the past) that he won’t increase taxes. In another conciliatory gesture, Trump has released a list of potential Supreme Court nominees designed to appeal to the Right. If he were to abide by this promise, wrote Jim Geraghty of the conservative, Trumpsceptic National Review (of which I am a contributing editor), “justices like these would make autocracy, a likely nuclear exchange, the collapse of the dollar and the dissolution of NATO easier to bear.”

Jim was not, I think, being entirely serious, but, there’s no mistaking his underlying concern that Trump simply cannot be trusted with the presidency. To the extent that Trump has an ideology (he has changed his party affiliation five times since 1987), it’s best described as a mutation of early Twentieth Century American Progressivism—something that’s a long way from contemporary GOP orthodoxy—but ultimately Trump is about Trump. Being Trump has enabled him to get to where he is now, but being Trump will ensure that, however horrified Republican voters might be at the prospect of another Clinton presidency, there will be a number of them who will not vote for their party’s candidate.

Some will worry that a Trump victory in November would be even worse for the future of the GOP than defeat. For others, the fears may run deeper still. A month or so back, a Midwestern Republican told me that Trump would, for the most part, be a better president than Clinton. But the worst of Trump could, he fretted, be far worse than the worst of Hillary: “He could blow the country up.” That was not a risk he would take. He hasn’t changed his mind since.

That’s just one voter, but I suspect he’s not alone.

Republicans Cannot Go On As 'The Party of No'

Standpoint, January 1, 2014

Times Square, New York City, October 2013 © Andrew Stuttaford

Wakes are not only for rainy days. The weather outside was glorious in that New England fall way, but the mood inside a room in Yale’s Linsly-Chittenden Hall was a touch funereal. We were a bunch of rightwingers there for a conference on the future of conservatism but, to quite a few of those attending, the past seemed altogether more promising.

The timing was not the best. Just a few days before, the ill-conceived and unpopular effort by congressional Republicans to defund Obamacare, a ploy that made the charge of the Light Brigade look well thought-out, had collapsed in an eminently predictable fiasco. This stoked fears that the 2014 midterm elections were now doomed to end in disaster. Always implausible hopes of retaking the Senate looked delusional and even GOP control of the House of Representatives appeared to be at risk.

But not long after, Republican hopes began to rise. The end of the shutdown left the Obamacare website, launched a week or two earlier amid general derision, alone in the coconut shy. As I write, healthcare.gov is a gift that is still giving. Obama’s approval ratings have sunk below 40 per cent.

But the site’s issues are being ironed out, and with the help of  supportive media, will be reclassified as teething problems to be rapidly forgotten. Nevertheless, there is a decent chance that lingering recollections of the cack-handed roll-out will poison the way in which many voters will still be viewing Obama’s signature legislation when the mid-term elections come round next November. That might give the GOP a helping hand then, but the idea that this will also be enough to propel a Republican into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in the 2016 elections is a stretch.

That said, Obamacare — never a particularly popular plan — may give Republicans something they can exploit in their campaign to retake the White House. The Obama administration shies away from the word, but the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is redistributionist, not only in the narrow sense (higher taxes on the wealthy), but in its broader operation: it directly or indirectly transfers healthcare resources away from a majority of Americans and reallocates them to the much smaller number previously shut out of the system. Crudely understood, there will be more losers than winners.

Simply undertaking to repeal Obamacare will not be enough to do the trick. The system being transformed by the ACA may have been better than usually understood in the UK, but it was nonetheless restrictive, bureaucratic and expensive and, thanks to the way it was often linked to employment, alarmingly tenuous to the millions of Americans who worry how secure their jobs really are. If Obamacare is to go, the GOP will have to explain what it will put in its place. Journalists and think-tank denizens on the Right have been offering up their suggestions for a while, but as two of the most recent to do so, Ramesh Ponnuru, a senior editor at National Review, and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and Yuwal Levin, the editor of National Affairs and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, observed in a November article in the Wall Street Journal, congressional Republicans have “with a few honourable exceptions” failed to join in.

That’s a problem. Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana and something of a Republican star, warns that the GOP cannot just be the “party of no”. Maybe, but to attempt to define what it is for is, for the Republican politician who dares to try, dangerous ground indeed.

To start with, it will involve recognising that there is rather less remaining of the America that elected Ronald Reagan than many Republicans seem prepared to accept. The US population has ballooned by more than 90 million since 1980. It has changed in ways that reflect more than the passing of the years. Usefully didactic memories of the 1970s have faded. Recollections of the Lehman collapse are all too fresh. New generations have reached voting age after a lifetime immersed in the soft-left certainties of the American education system. Meanwhile, stagnating household incomes and what look like permanently higher levels of unemployment or underemployment threaten to chip away at support for America’s free market(ish) model. Democrat Bill de Blasio’s success in winning the mayoralty of New York City was (mostly) a Gotham thing, but obvious public concern over rising inequality — the Occupy movement was an early harbinger — signals a coming shift in the ideological landscape that will not help the Republicans one bit.

Above all, decades of mass immigration have transformed the country’s ethnic, cultural and political make-up in ways that pose an enormous challenge to the GOP. It says something that if the America of 2012 had had the demographics of 1980, Mitt Romney would have won by a wider margin than did Ronald Reagan back then.

What to do? To begin with, the conventional wisdom is that Republicans need to scale back their opposition (much of it driven by the Right) to current efforts to “regularise” the position of the nearly 12 million illegal immigrants now thought to be present in the country. The argument — made with varying degrees of enthusiasm and cynicism both by the party establishment and erstwhile Tea Party darlings such as freshman Florida senator (and possible presidential candidate) Marco Rubio — is that an anti-immigration stance makes it easy for the GOP’s opponents to caricature the Republicans as a “white” party hostile to minorities. With Democrats and the media trumpeting just that tune, it’s an argument that has some weight.

Throw in some of the more inflammatory talk sometimes heard from the Tea Party and other sections of the “nativist” Right, as well as the clumsy language of Republicans often tone-deaf to ethnic sensitivities (Mitt Romney’s 2012 reference to “self-deportation” for one) and it’s easy to understand why the Republican share of the growing Latino vote fell from some 40 per cent in 2004 to 27 per cent in 2012 (Asian-Americans were even less enthusiastic: only 26 per cent voted for Romney). That minorities are more sceptical about immigration than often assumed only reinforces the point that what matters is not the policy itself, but the message that it is believed to deliver.

Yet the electoral mathematics will deteriorate still further if anti-immigration Republican congressmen who, for now, are holding the line, agree to an amnesty for illegals. For all the talk about Latinos’ attachment to enterprise and family values (more nuanced than the stereotype would suggest), their votes will tilt heavily Democratic for decades, just as did those of the Italian-Americans with whom they are so often compared. The same is true of the other immigrant groups now reshaping America, a disturbing prospect for the GOP given that the country is accepting something like one million new legal immigrants a year. That’s an inflow that the Democrats have every reason to welcome, but there is little sign that many Republicans will be prepared to stand in the way of those arriving legally, quite possibly even if that total is — as is also being proposed — significantly bumped up. The idea of the nation of immigrants has an emotional appeal that stretches across America’s ideological divide. More prosaically, there is also a bipartisan understanding that business donors appreciate the cheaper workers and increased demand that immigration brings in its wake.

Republicans are thus running up an escalator that is moving down. Resisting amnesty will slow the pace somewhat, but the longer-term trend is clear: to win, the party will have to win over more minority voters. Quite how to do so remains a mystery. The greater number of high-profile GOP leaders (Jindal, Texas senator Ted Cruz, Rubio, South Carolina governor Nikki Haley and New Mexico’s promising Susanna Martinez, to name a few) drawn from ethnic minorities is a start, but no more than that.

To be sure, the Taft-sized Chris Christie — in the derogatory sense of the word — secured re-election as Republican governor of strongly Democratic New Jersey with some 60 per cent of the vote in November, a tally boosted by his success in attracting the support of over 50 per cent of Hispanic and (it’s sad that this counts as an achievement) around 20 per cent of African-American voters.

This was a feat that owed as much to his refreshingly blunt persona as to his attempt to steer his state in a more frugal direction. For while there is still a very distinctively American constituency for smaller government — check out the “don’t tread on me” flags brandished at any Tea Party rally — it is unlikely to be enough to return the White House to Republican management. In part, this reflects the fact that the country’s finances have deteriorated to a point that leaves little room to make a good case for Reagan-style tax cuts. The number is distorted by a sluggish economy, but federal tax receipts as a percentage of GDP (approaching 17 per cent) are lower than when the Gipper left office. Meanwhile publicly- held federal debt as a percentage of GDP has risen from 26 per cent in 1980 to around 73 per cent today, nearly half of which is now held by intrinsically more jittery international investors.

Total federal debt (roughly $17 trillion) is calculated before factoring in the contingent liabilities arising out of underfunded entitlement programmes such as Social Security and Medicare that, according to Republican deficit hawks such as Oklahoma senator Tom Coburn or former vice-presidential candidate Congressman Paul Ryan, could amount to four, five or more times that figure. To be fair, those estimates are hotly disputed, but still . . .

On the other side of the ledger, that the sequester (a crude budget-bludgeoning device triggered by the current impasse in Washington) has so far not proved anything like as damaging as the Obama administration originally predicted should not be allowed to conceal the fact that any attempts to take America back to fiscal respectability on the back of expenditure cuts alone would involve taking a chainsaw to entitlements. According to a Bloomberg News poll last February, most Americans accept (or claim to accept) that Medicare and Social Security must be overhauled, but they view tax increases as part of the solution.

That’s anathema to many on the Right, an attitude enshrined in, and enforced through, the “Taxpayer Protection Pledge” designed by Americans for Tax Reform, a pressure group formed by the influential libertarian-leaning Republican activist Grover Norquist. The pledge is essentially an undertaking to reject any net increases in tax, and it has been signed by the overwhelming majority of Republicans in the Senate and House. Sadly, even if the pledge has sometimes been interpreted more sinuously than its stern wording might suggest, it no longer is in tune with economic reality, but the political reality is that declining to sign it (let alone reneging on it) is likely to cause trouble for any Republican at primary time. That will change, probably at about the time that seniors (56 per cent of the over-65s voted for Romney in 2012) realise that their benefits are in jeopardy, but that moment has not arrived.

All this almost certainly dooms the faint chances of a bipartisan grand bargain over the federal budget at least for now. Given the current balance of political forces, this may not be such a bad thing. But it also discourages Republicans from mounting any serious effort to redesign America’s archaic and destructive tax system in ways that would make it generate more revenues while inflicting, at least in some respects, less pain. In that connection, one avenue worth exploring is the introduction of some sort of federal consumption tax, partially offset by a lower, flatter, simpler income tax. From time to time, some Republican leaders have floated variants of this, including Ryan and former Indiana governor Mitch Daniels (one of the more disappointing absentees from the 2012 race). Even Mitt Romney refused to rule out the introduction of a value added tax, a position that led a staffer from the reliably shrill Newt Gingrich campaign to snipe that Romney had been looking at “European socialist ideas”. A somewhat more subtle critique has come from Norquist, long suspicious of a tax that he believes to be too efficient a money-raising machine to be trusted.

So what else is there? Republican Senator Mike Lee (Utah), cheered on by the likes of Ponnuru and the AEI’s James Pethokoukis (someone, incidentally, open to a consumption tax) is arguing for a redrawing of the tax system that incorporates a very substantial expansion of child tax credit. This family-friendly move, part of a broader drive in, to quote Ponnuru, a more “communitarian” direction, is unlikely to fly this time round, but it points to a possible future for the GOP as something closer to Western Europe’s Christian Democrats. Such an evolution in my view is not particularly desirable, but given America’s changing political environment, may be wise.

A better guide to what may come next comes from Pethokoukis’s observation in National Review Online that the 2012 campaign saw a plethora of tax-cutting proposals by Republican hopefuls seemingly “more interested in signalling their supply-side bona fides to primary voters than in offering realistic blueprints for governance”.

Ah yes, the primaries: the road to the nomination runs, of course, right through them, and I mean Right. White evangelicals and Tea Party supporters (they are not always the same people) represent a very large percentage — well over a half — of the primary vote. They are not in the mood for compromise. According to a July 2013 Pew Center survey, 69 per cent of Tea Partiers believe that the best course of action for the GOP is to move in an even more conservative direction. To design an alternative to Obamacare and a plausible budgetary fix that both manage to appeal to those voters and have a chance of convincing the wider national electorate is a very tall order, and that’s before we have begun to look at the question of the so-called “social issues” (primarily abortion and same-sex marriage) that weigh so heavily in Republican primaries.

The rise of the Tea Party was a classic populist insurgency, a revolt of country against court, propelled by disgust over the bailouts that followed the financial crisis, anxiety over the state of America’s finances, contempt for the Republican establishment and fear of what Obama might be planning. It revitalised a party sunk in deep depression after Obama’s trouncing of John McCain, and made an enormous contribution to the GOP’s bounce in the 2010 midterms. The contrast with the not entirely dissimilar folk at UKIP “pissing into” (to borrow LBJ’s entertaining terminology) the Tory tent is one that British Conservatives tut-tutting over the Tea Party would do well to note. As revolts tend to do, however, the Tea Party has not infrequently overshot, most notably by promoting candidates more on the basis of their ideological purity than their ability to win.

In doing so, they were encouraged by a segment of the conservative hierarchy already, ironically, well entrenched in Washington. To a degree unimaginable in the UK, the Right in America has a lively, powerful and well-financed intellectual, media and political infrastructure. That’s generally to the good, but it has come at a price. One or two speakers at the Yale conference complained about conservative neglect of that most essential of political skills — persuasion. Instead of reaching out to the unconvinced, conservatives have primarily been pursuing a conversation with themselves. Such conversations have a way of degenerating into a contest designed primarily to show who can be more pur and who more dur.

There was no better example of this than conservative (and famously socially conservative) South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint’s comment in early 2009 that he “would rather have 30 Republicans in the [100-strong] Senate who really believe in principles of limited government, free markets, free people, than to have 60 that don’t have a set of beliefs”, an expression not of conviction, but of a fanaticism unmoored to any realistic plan for winning back power. When the Tea Party moment dawned, DeMint and others like him jumped in front of the parade, reinforcing the revolutionaries’ zeal to purge so-called RINOs (Republicans In Name Only) and throwing some money their way too. To be sure, this has led to the injection of useful new blood into the party’s ranks, but it has also led to the selection of some candidates so inept, unsuitable or outright strange that the GOP threw away hopes of winning or retaining a series of crucial senate seats — from Nevada to Delaware to Indiana and beyond — that could have transformed the political calculus of recent years. Regrettably, there are signs — not least in the aftermath of DeMint’s move to the Heritage Foundation, formerly the most influential of all the conservative think-tanks — that excesses are not yet through.

No less destructively, some of the more outlandish candidates on the Right have tarnished the broader Republican image, especially when they have sounded off on social issues. Would-be senator Todd Akin blew his chances of winning a Missouri seat in 2012 when, in defending his opposition to abortion in cases of rape, he explained that victims of “legitimate rape” rarely became pregnant, a view that held some sway in the Middle Ages, but is today something, shall we say, of an outlier in obstetric circles.

Social issues have for years been essential to the Republican party’s ability to compete (there is no majority for the socially liberal, economically conservative programme favoured by libertarian-leaning or many moderate Republicans) but they have come with costs, hitting the party’s capacity to attract elite support and its appeal to women (particularly single women), the young and voters in the north-east and west. These costs are likely to rise. Same-sex marriage has won the acceptance of roughly half of all voters, and in another reminder of how the country is changing, roughly a third of all under-30s describe themselves as “religiously unaffiliated” (Pew Research, October 2012), the highest total ever. On the other hand, roughly 50 per cent of Americans now claim to be “pro-life” (Gallup, May 2012), although that’s a stance that comes with plenty of loopholes: more than half of these pro-lifers believe that abortion is acceptable under certain circumstances.

What seems to matter to centrist voters is how social issues are framed. They are prepared to vote for anti-abortion candidates, say, but not for those who push the issue beyond what is rather mistily defined as reasonable, or if they detect a wider agenda at work, such as the distaste for contraception displayed by former senator Rick Santorum, an oddball Beltway Savonarola who enjoyed a brief and alarming surge in the 2012 primaries. When they notice executive competence, as so often they do in the ranks of the GOP’s expanding tally of governors (30 in all, close to the record set in the 1920s), they appear to be willing to live with a conservative social agenda so long as it is not pushed à l’outrance.

So what now? More budget fights in 2014 will enable the Democrats to rekindle memories of this past autumn’s shutdown and, with them, images of the Republicans as mad, bad and dangerous to vote for. A dose of class warfare is sure to be on the agenda too. Against that, the fallout from Obamacare’s uncertain launch may still be reverberating and the programme’s deeper problems may be coming into sharper focus. The economy is likely to be walking rather than running-the labour force participation rate is the number to watch-and a foreign policy foul-up cannot be eliminated. The best guess at the moment is that the midterms will leave matters pretty much as they are now.

The ideological divisions between and within the Right and the remaining “moderates” in the Republican Party, stirred up further by would-be presidential candidates out for primary votes, will mean that a credible alternative to Obamacare and a sound fiscal plan will both remain elusive even after the midterms. Being the “party of no” may well have to do. The longer-term outlook for the GOP will continue to deteriorate, but if “events” co-operate, nay-saying buttressed by at least some ideas on what might replace the ACA could, fingers-crossed, just possibly be enough to do the trick in 2016 if the primary process can avoid the own goals of 2010 and 2012. At the presidential level, the primaries need to avoid attracting the clown posse that we saw last time (Santorum is said to be contemplating another run), or selecting a candidate (Cruz, say, or Kentucky’s Senator Paul) too hardline to have any prospect of winning back the White House, a temptation made more difficult to resist (what’s to lose?) by the failures of establishment Romney and establishment McCain. Even a more conventionally viable candidate will have to avoid being dragged into unelectability by the positions he has to take to prevail at the primaries. Despite conservative suspicion, some baggage from his past, and an occasionally spiky and difficult personality, Chris Christie might just be tough enough to pull it off.

But 2016 is a long way off. And then there is Hillary.

 Note: Bridgegate broke about two days after this article went to press in late December, but before the issue appeared on newsstands. Them’s the breaks.

Hollywood Ten

National Review Online, August 8, 2000

Is there no end to the empathy? It's a long, hard GOP convention for the hard-hearted among us, a grim procession of blind mountaineers, teachers, "the children," breast-cancer advocates, diabetic beauty queens, and deaf ones too. Tonight, though, twenty minutes or so after the showing of a "compassion video," the podium will brighten up. As the Republican's convention website boasts, a "film icon" is coming to town. Hepburn? Bacall? Well, no. It's Bo Derek, actually, more of a poster than an icon, perhaps, but a welcome visitor nonetheless. And who'd have thought it? Bo Derek, a cheerleader for George W. Yes, that's right, THE Bo Derek. You know, cornrows, the 10 girl, sex goddess of the later disco era, the seductress clad in a wet swimsuit, and, often, gloriously, much much less.

It turns out that she's on the right, an unlikely star for an all too strait-laced party. She's a Republican and has been for years. Back in 1996, she was quoted as saying that her heroes included General Schwarzkopf and Presidents Reagan and Bush. As for Bob Dole, well, "the man was an absolute superman. His energy wiped me out." And that was before the Viagra.

Bo's no Barbra Streisand, though. Sure, she'll speak at the convention for a minute or two, but for the most part she's happy to play the supporting role. She isn't a Hollywood wonk, with a program for every problem, hectoring and haranguing the peons as to how they should live their lives. As she has explained to Fox News's Bill O'Reilly, "movie stars…live in a bubble…and for me to give my opinions and maybe influence anybody is absurd."

Her Republicanism seems practical, unideological. As a younger woman she saw herself as a Democrat. She thought the Democrats were "nicer people" who cared about people more. Then filming abroad opened her eyes: "You can't help but compare America to other countries the more you travel, and that's when I just realized in looking [at] different issues that I was a Republican." The free market, she realized, works. Welfare is fine "when people really need help, but as a lifestyle, I don't think it's good for the people receiving it…It discourages dignity and incentives."

She is no social conservative. It would be better to see her as a R-rated Christine Todd Whitman. A (generously illustrated) profile in the current issue of Cigar Aficionado describes her as pro-gay rights, pro-choice and, on occasion, anti-clothes. "We're born nude and it just seems like the most natural thing." There's a brief nod in the direction of some feminist piety (something about women voting the same way), but I suspect that Bo is never going to be one of the sisters. She had an unforgivably happy marriage to a much older guy, she took off her clothes in a lot of movies and, let's face it, she just looks too good.

However, her opinions don't make her look good in notoriously liberal Hollywood. It is even hinted that Bo's politics may have held back her career. Well, maybe, but when that career includes Bolero, Tarzan the Ape Man, and Ghosts Can't Do It, there may be another explanation. Nevertheless, when she describes the reaction to her views, her story rings very true. "It's really tough to have a nice, open conversation," she told O'Reilly. Apparently, her entertainment-industry pals "get really angry…and they treat me as though I'm some hateful monster."

Yes, I bet they do. They are liberals, supporters of that other cigar aficionado, the one in the White House. And, as we all know, the Left doesn't have much time, or respect, for anyone who dares to disagree with them. As Bo's clearly discovered, Democrats are not "nicer people." She's brave to speak her mind, but she's going to be lonely. Conservatives in the movie business are few and far between, and they are likely to stay that way. There's Moses, of course, our own Charlton Heston, and some of the more secular action heroes, Willis, Norris, Schwarzenegger, but these guys do have a touch of the last stand about them. TV isn't much better, although it was good to see Rick Schroder, NYPD Blue's Lieutenant Sorenson, at the convention on Tuesday night. He was smart, compelling, and — unlike most of Republican showbiz — under 40. Otherwise, the Right is only left with a presence in country music (and I'm not so sure about that k. d. lang) and wrestling, of course: the Rock, the thinking man's Jesse Ventura, is in the GOP line-up.

Sadly, this isn't going to be enough, and even more sadly, this matters. In our tranquil, ill-educated times, showbiz sets not only the cultural, but the political agenda. The drip, drip, drip of a predominantly liberal message in the movies, TV, and the other entertainment media is bound to wear through to the ballot box. We saw this in Britain, where a hostile cultural scene proved to be the harbinger of the crushing Conservative defeat in the 1997 election. Writing in the London Sunday Times the following year, the newspaper's then-resident leftist, the writer Robert Harris, noted — with, probably, some satisfaction — that he couldn't think of one single "important" British writer or, for that matter, a film director, theater director, composer ("apart from Lord Lloyd Webber"), actor, or painter who was a Conservative.

As Mr. Harris went on to point out, "the entertainment and fashion industries are now two of the biggest economic sectors in the world. Never have we lived in a time more conscious of style, and never in democratic history has it been less stylish to be on the right."

Now, he was writing in a British context, but, like it or not, it's not too difficult to see the same process gathering pace over here. It's not going to be easy to reverse. On this battlefield, the Right are simply too few. Sure, Republicans have got the Rock, but the Democrats have the (Sharon) Stone. Bo Derek may turn some heads, but she's not enough to turn the tide. Suggesting a solution to this problem is beyond the scope of this article, but to those who say that this all doesn't matter, that substance will prevail over style, I have only three words to offer: William Jefferson Clinton.