The U.S. election: hold on to your butts
Donald Trump is uniquely unfit to be handed the presidency for a second time, and yet America may do just that. I still don't get it
Early in 2017, I went to Houston to cover the Super Bowl. Just as the week’s festivities were beginning, Donald Trump issued an executive order that banned foreign nationals from a number of predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States.
The Trump travel bans, as they came to be known, were one of the first major indications that America was in a different place. Trump had mused about such a ban, saying he would order one “until we can figure out what the hell is going on,” but it was a vague enough promise that it seemed possible he would never follow through. And then he did, and there was airport chaos, and families were separated, and it was suddenly quite evident that there were consequences to electing someone like Donald Trump. A lot of his voters had supported him for shits-and-giggles — he was an outsider who mocked the Washington elite — but the result wasn’t so funny in practice.
That Super Bowl included the New England Patriots, who had two of the sports world’s most famous Trump backers, Bill Belichick and Tom Brady. Early in the week, there were many attempts to try to get either of them to comment on the travel bans, and to no one’s surprise, neither of them came close to giving a meaningful answer. Focused on football, et cetera. The NFL, in the official transcripts provided to media after the interview sessions, expunged any of those questions and the resulting non-answers from the record.
Not quite eight years later, the whole controversy seems kind of quaint. The Biden administration reversed the travel bans in 2021, and Trump doesn’t even talk about them anymore. Instead he’s taken the theme of scary foreigners and blown it up into the centrepiece of his campaign, one that delights in claiming that illegal immigrants are terrorizing the United States. You have no doubt heard some of these statements, but the absurdity is that much more clear when you see Trump’s full anti-immigration pitch. I wrote about it for a column in the Toronto Star a couple of weeks ago.
By this point, listing he reasons why Trump is unfit to regain the job he lost seems almost silly, because the point is so obvious. He refused to admit defeat last time, he incited a mob that stormed the Capitol, he committed various felonies and would almost certainly have been unable to seek the presidency had the U.S. justice system moved faster, he seems a truly awful human in so many ways. That last part is the thing that sticks with me. Even if you allow for the fact that some Republicans will always support the party first and that some voters quite like Trump’s non-subtle pandering to white Americans, he just seems like an incredible prick. Even if you imagined him to be a smart businessman and maverick politician in 2016, I don’t know how you could still hold that view today. How do people like Tom Brady and Jack Nicklaus, or the millions of relatively normal Trump supporters who are not famous ex-athletes, maintain the idea that he’s just a plain-talking nice fella who likes golf? Honestly, watch 10 minutes of one of his speeches. Any 10 minutes of any speech, and you will see a guy who meanders through a list of complaints, grievances and boasts, sometimes in the same sentence. He both thinks that he was the greatest U.S. President in history, and that anyone who thinks otherwise is a moron. He can’t just say that he disagrees with his opponents, he has to call them idiots. Evil idiots, even.
It has been interesting to see how Kamala Harris has dealt with this. Last week I wrote a piece for the Star on the challenge of her closing message: how do you appeal to the normal concerns of voters while also raising the alarm about a uniquely unserious opponent?
My feeling was that she should smash the alarm button. AWHOOGA, AWHOOGA. And she did, not that the Harris campaign was taking my advice. There are reports that she is going positive for the final day, talking up her message instead of warning of the dangers of a second Trump presidency. I do not claim to know if this is wise, but at the same time voters who don’t understand the stakes at this point are probably not about to have a eureka moment on the way to the polling booth.
I think I am cautiously optimistic about Tuesday’s result. Very cautiously optimistic, perhaps, because I still remember 2016. I’ve read some pieces recently that make the argument that there is a large chunk of the U.S. electorate that is not consumed with Trump’s dire message and which is basically sick of his bullshit.
I very much hope that is true.