Donald Trump came to use the line often at his campaign rallies. “Can you imagine if you lose to a guy like this?” he would say of Joe Biden. “It’s unbelievable.”
It’s not so unbelievable now. Despite record turnout, and a tighter than expected race, the US president’s blind faith in the power of positive thinking appears to have collided with the reality of a coronavirus pandemic, a chaotic campaign and the uprising of a democratic and Democratic resistance. He is the first incumbent to lose a bid for re-election since George H W Bush in 1992.
More successful incumbents have made elections about their challengers rather than themselves. But Trump could neither escape the pandemic and its economic fallout nor find a way to define Biden. With more than 225,000 Americans dead after contracting the virus, his closing rallies were held largely in midwestern states enduring record infections, hospitalisations and deaths.
The election was always going to be a referendum on Trump in general and his handling of the virus in particular.
As Trump shot himself in the foot almost daily with crass behaviour and denials of scientific reality, Biden was able to sit back and watch the implosion. His own campaign schedule was lighter, observed public health guidelines and was always sure to keep a laser focus on the pandemic.
In February, with the economy humming, Trump had some reasons to be confident of re-election. Having filed the paperwork to run on inauguration day, his re-election campaign had built a formidable war chest and data operation. He survived an impeachment trial that led some critics to accuse Democrats of overreach. The president stood in the White House and brandished a newspaper front page that declared “Trump acquitted” – but tectonic plates were shifting beneath his feet.
February would prove a squandered month as Covid-19 exerted its grip in America. Trump was given a bad hand and played it badly. He deliberately played down the threat, claiming that one day the virus would disappear “like magic”, and failed to build a national strategy.
As the pandemic wore on, he pressured state governors to reopen for business despite inadequate testing and contact tracing operations, waffled over the wearing of face masks, floated the wild idea of injecting disinfectant as a cure and failed to show empathy to the families of the dead.
Trump proved similarly tone deaf to the plight of African American killed by police, seeking instead to exploit the racial justice crisis for political gain. Biden, whose life has been scarred by loss, made empathy his campaign calling card.
The Trump campaign, which had a $200m lead when Biden became the presumptive Democratic nominee, threw away that advantage with profligate spending of $800m. Campaign manager Brad Parscale was demoted and replaced by Republican operative Bill Stepien.
But just as he had been in the White House for four years, Trump was his own manager, spokesman and salesman. He turned in a wretched performance in the first debate against Biden that was widely criticized by Democrats and Republicans. At rallies and in interviews, the president showed no message discipline, mocking the virus even as he caught it himself, pushing disinformation about Biden and threatening to destabilise American democracy.
Trump’s 2016 effort was no less erratic or prone to shedding campaign managers but succeeded in finding a narrative thread on trade, immigration (“Build that wall!”) branding his opponent “Crooked Hillary”) and a resonant brand (“Make America great again”). Even then he lost the popular vote by nearly 3m ballots but threaded the needle of the electoral college by around 80,000 votes in three states.
To catch lightning in a bottle for a second time would have been a big ask even without a pandemic.
The Democratic “resistance” found expression through activists, journalists, politicians, satirists, whistleblowers who applied checks and balances to his administration’s cruelty and corruption. In 2018 voters punished him giving Democrats control of the House of Representatives, which duly impeached Trump for seeking a political favour from a foreign leader.
Ezra Levin, cofounder of the progressive movement Indivisible, said: “You can’t tell the story of the Trump era without telling the story of the grassroots surge. This is a grassroots surge not of people who have been doing this year in and year out for time immemorial.
“When I look at the Indivisible groups or the new youth groups or the Black racial justice groups or the immigrant rights groups, these are many folks who were not politically active before but started treating democracy as a participatory sport. And they’ve changed what’s politically possible. This is what’s new and the new thing is what’s caused this new result.”
Trump’s defeat may now trigger a civil war of sorts within a wounded Republican party. Some will call for a purge of Trumpism and blow the dust off the party’s autopsy report that followed Mitt Romney’s defeat in 2012: it demanded diversification and outreach to minority groups.
But the results, and the record turnout, may suggest that the Republican party now has populist nationalism in its bones. The nomination in 2024 could even be a battle between Donald Trump and Donald Trump Jr.
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Michael Steele, former chairman of the Republican national committee, noted last week that some in the party were already trying to distance themselves from Trump as they anticipated defeat.
He said: “It’s all for the other side in which they go, ‘What? I’m just as surprised as you are that it was so bad. How did that happen? Who knew? We didn’t. Oh, my goodness.’ It’s going to be a hard sell for the country to buy that.”
Steele, a senior adviser to the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, added: “We are the party that put children in cages. We are the party that said there are fine people on both sides talking about white nationalism. We are the party that had nothing to say regarding the death of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter; we are the party that responded with law and order.
“And we are the party that responded don’t worry, white women who live in suburbia, we’ll protect you from them, they’re coming for your neighbourhood. So OK, tell me how you make that up?”
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