Better late than never. It took eight months for Republicans to wake up to the fact that Donald Trump could make off with the party’s crown. After Marco Rubio’s clinical attacks on Trump last week, the airwaves are suddenly awash with anti-Trump attack ads. But they are almost certainly too late to stop him. That task will fall on Hillary Clinton. It promises to be a spectacle unlike anything we have seen. America should brace for the strangest contest in its presidential history.
All things being equal, the outcome should not be in doubt — Hillary’s victory. Yet, there is nothing remotely equal about America in 2016. All that is solid is melting into air. It was not just the Republicans who misread the Trump threat. Just three months ago, Nate Silver, the guru of election forecasters, stuck to his earlier prediction that Trump had only a 2 per cent chance of taking the Republican nomination. He now puts that at 45 to 50 per cent. That still seems too low.
The bookies, meanwhile, give Trump a one in four chance of becoming the next US president. That may also be too low.
How could he pull it off? The demography is stacked against him. As a rule of thumb, Democrats are assured of victory if they take 80 per cent of the non-white vote and 40 per cent of the white vote. The first part ought to be easy. Hispanics, African-Americans, Muslims and others will come out in droves to vote against Trump.
It is the white vote — and particularly white males — that ought to worry Hillary. Blue collar whites are America’s angriest people. They feel belittled, trod upon and discarded. The future belongs neither to them nor their children. Hillary personifies an establishment that has taken everything for itself while talking down to those it has left behind. Trump is their revenge.
Trump’s greatest weakness is that he has no policies. As Rubio exposed in last week’s debate, the New York property developer has little clue what health care system he would substitute for Obamacare, which he promises to abolish. Nor does he have an idea how his tax plan will work.
Much like estimates of his personal wealth, Trump’s tax cut would be huge — at $10 trillion (Dh36.78 trillion) it is far larger than anyone else’s. That is about it. The same applies to his plans to bring peace to the Middle East. He merely asserts that he would be the best deal maker the region has ever seen. The only subject on which Trump speaks with any detail or fluency is his poll numbers, which he rattles off like a caffeinated auctioneer.
But not having policies is also Trump’s greatest strength. It makes him nimble. He can discard whatever Republican orthodoxy he felt obliged to adopt and pivot to Hillary’s left in a general election. If you want to take on Wall Street — something the country is itching to do — vote for the man who has continually outwitted the banks in his bankruptcy-ridden career. While Hillary was giving $225,000 speeches to Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley — transcripts that she still refuses to release, by the way — Trump was imposing haircuts on his creditors. Trump may be a “con artist”, as Rubio is belatedly pointing out. But he knows how to make a deal. He also knows what America’s middle classes want to hear. Trump will protect their entitlements, scale down costly overseas military bases and revamp trade deals with China, Mexico and others.
The chances are that Trump would still lose in a landslide to Hillary. Over the coming days and weeks, Republican-affiliated funding groups will air advertisements that feature the victims of Trump Inc. These will include people who paid $35,000 to study real estate management at Trump University only to discover it was not what it was cracked up to be. They will feature Americans who tried to find work at Trump’s luxury Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida only to discover the jobs had been taken by imported Romanians. They will also include victims of Trump’s ruthless use of eminent domain — the power of the state to compel people to sell land needed for public projects — to evict people unlucky enough to be living near one of his casinos.
You can bet that white victims will feature prominently. Look at how Trump treats the little guy, they will say. His campaign is a fraud.
All of which may be true. But they are almost certainly too late to stop Trump’s hostile takeover of the Republican party. Hillary, on the other hand, has plenty of time to acquaint voters with Trump’s biography before the general election. Do not expect her to hold back. She will mercilessly expose his thin grasp of policy. He does not even know what a “nuclear triad” is for goodness sake. He believes global warming is a hoax dreamt up by China to con America into shutting down its manufacturing. He thinks that Mexico will pay for a wall to keep Mexicans out.
When it boils down to it, most Americans would not want such a person in the White House — or so believe the best and the brightest. A Trump presidency is too preposterous to imagine, they say. They may be right on that. But so far in this cycle they have been wrong about everything else. Should we put faith in their judgment now?
— Financial Times
Edward Luce is the Washington columnist and commentator for the Financial Times.
