By Jeremy Sare.
What has amazed the British public regarding the forthcoming US Presidential election is the seemingly unending degree that Trump’s outrageous statements have consistently failed to impact on his polling numbers. How can these insults, wackjob policies, clumsy gaffs and flirtations with prejudice never be considered as ‘going too far’?
Trump began his assault on the White House with an unprovoked attack on Sen. John McCain who I recall was shot out of the sky over North Vietnam and spent years in prison suffering isolation and torture. On a score for patriotic hero, it’s hard to give McCain less than the maximum. Yet Trump deliberately belittled his service, “I prefer people that weren’t captured.” The first jaw-dropper of many.
Then followed a catalogue of increasingly disgraceful remarks underlining his credentials as the slayer of political correctness but equally exposing himself as a thin-skinned bigot with a crude worldview and the vocabulary of a privileged yet foul mouthed 12-year old.
His campaign is blunt, negative and artless. It is a strategy borne out of stupidity, which thinks it is smart. His pitch to the African American vote, “what have you got to lose” is about the most insulting I have seen in any democratic election. It implies that to be black and American means you are necessarily uneducated and close to destitution. It shows he only has psychopathic talents to persuade. It is the equivalent of being on a first date, saying to a potential partner, “your hair’s terrible, your nose is too big and you dress like a tramp. So you why don’t you sleep with me….no-one else is going to.”
In Britain, we look to the States for future social and political changes which invariably come later across the Atlantic – it all appears increasingly dystopian.
The main tension among the US electorate appears to be between those who will vote on the basis of what they think (Clinton) and what they feel (Trump). ‘Psy Ops’ was a very important factor in or disastrous Brexit vote. The arguments in favour of leaving the European Union were either deliberately illusory or entirely false. But enough people felt like they wanted some sense of change and to shake up the establishment. The worrying parallel would be if Trump could mobilize the many millions who don’t usually or who never have voted.
That kind of operation means a massive ground game across many hundreds of counties. Fortunately, it appears Trump can’t be bothered to spend that kind of dough so would rather be parachuted into various swing states, point his hat at the whooping crowds and insult women, African Americans, media, etc. This cannot play out for him, even with a strategy of winning only Pennsylvannia, Michigan, Ohio and Florida. He may not see it past his Zeppelin-sized ego but, from over here, it looks like there are simply not enough angry white guys for him to win.
Great Britain has traditionally favoured the Democrats, like Roosevelt and Kennedy, even preferring Carter to Reagan. I personally only know one person who would vote Trump over Clinton. Our politicians have felt free to attack him on an unprecedented scale for a major party candidate. Former British Prime Minister, David Cameron described Trump’s proposed ban on Muslims entering the US as ‘divisive, stupid and wrong’. Recently elected London Mayor, Sadiq Khan called the policy ‘ignorant’. Trump’s subsequent demand for a comparison of IQ tests with the Mayor shows he struggles to understand the difference in meaning between the words ‘ignorant’ and ‘stupid’. That’s quite an irony.
There is concern here that the lack of honesty around private email servers could derail Hillary Clinton’s bid. But any simmering disdain for her dubious IT practices are massively outweighed by Trump’s adulation of Putin and his reckless approach to NATO as the basis of the West’s defense strategy since WWII.
Trump has certainly made a conscious decision to rip up the election rulebook while Clinton follows a fairly traditional path. But his strategy appears suicidal by pouring contempt on the main bastions of Republicanism such as Fox News and the senior members of the GOP.
But America hasn’t yet forgotten what it’s about just yet. At last his polling suffered when he chose to carry on verbally attacking the parents of a soldier, Humayun Khan, who fell in Iraq. But behind these boorish remarks lies something more troubling that challenges the traditions and legal tenets of American society. His bar room threat to ban Muslims and create a deportation squad are prima facie in contradiction to any citizens’ rights under the Constitution.
America means, to us, a land of great bounty and opportunity where people are not judged on religious grounds and rights are protected under constitutional law. To defy that through policies of direct discrimination as Trump has, is not what we expect of America, in fact it appears from England to be, in essence, un-American.
