Donald Trump is resilient and popular. His popularity also has severe limits. Donald Trump’s politics is based on racist and anti-immigrant rhetoric. And he has a clear but narrow definition of America’s economic and military interests. Take each of those four elements to understand events of the past week when Trump lost in a debate, survived a second assassination bid, attacked minorities, and projected himself as the candidate of peace even as a Republican elder shifted to the Democrats.
First, his resilience. There is the obvious physical courage it takes to come close to death twice in as many months and still be strong in the public sphere. But there is also the political resilience. Since he rode down the elevator in the Trump Tower in 2015 to announce his candidacy, political rivals and America’s pundits have written Trump’s political obituary at least eight times.
No one thought Trump would win the Republican nomination in 2016. No one thought he could defeat Hillary Clinton in the presidential race. No one thought he would survive the investigation around Russia’s backing for his candidacy. Few believed that he could withstand the impeachment linked to his conversation with the Ukrainian president urging him to investigate Joe Biden. Few believed Americans would forgive his unscientific mismanagement of the pandemic.
No one thought that he would remain a dominant player after he refused to accept the legitimacy of the 2020 election results and even sent a mob to the United States (US) Capitol, a failed bid that resulted in a second impeachment. Everyone wrote him off after the Republicans lost the Senate and barely won the House in the 2022 midterms. And no one believed he would survive a criminal conviction and the cases. Trump defies critics each time. Today, he is more popular than ever and controls the Republican Party. That’s why the Democrats remain cautious about November.
Two, Trump’s popularity has severe limits. After his day of triumph in November 2016, he has lost almost every single election where either he was on the ballot or where he led the Republican Party, his loyalists dominated the list of candidates, or where issues he has championed were being tested.
This includes the 2020 presidential election which Trump lost. It includes the 2018 midterms where Republicans lost the House under a Trump presidency. It includes the Georgia Senate run-off race in January 2021 where the Democrats won the seat and flipped the Senate. It includes the 2022 midterms where far-Right Trumpist candidates were defeated in Senate races from Pennsylvania to Arizona. It includes all the referendums on abortion in states that have put the issue on the ballot. Trump may have become more popular. But under him, the Republican Party has consistently lost and its appeal to the wider electorate has diminished.
Three, racism is embedded in the Trump campaign. After spending time at the Republican National Convention, going by the sheer composition of the base and representation in leadership ranks, it was clear that Make America Great Again was essentially Make America White Again. Trump’s politics around illegal immigration appeals to a reasonable impulse, the sovereign desire for safe borders. But his rhetoric is meant to stoke prejudice, hatred and fear.
In the past week, Trump and JD Vance have hurled baseless claims that illegal Haitian immigrants in an Ohio town were eating pets; neither are the town’s immigrants illegal nor are they eating pets. Trump’s avid supporter, the far-Right social media influencer Laura Loomer, who accompanied Trump on the plane to the debate and a 9/11 memorial, launched a racist attack on Kamala Harris’ Indian roots. And Trump himself has used racist tropes against Harris. All of this is not a bug but a feature of the Trumpist White Christian project. Parts of India’s Right that celebrate Trump should keep this in mind.
Four, Trump speaks to an America that has a much narrower conception of its interests than both the Democrats and older Republicans did. This is not necessarily isolationism, for even Trump’s world understands deep global interconnections. Indeed, in his first term, Trump brokered the Abraham Accords, boosted America’s posture against China, sanctioned operations against Iran, engaged with North Korea, all of which indicates he will remain globally engaged.
What Trump detests are American financial and military obligations that come with being the dominant player in the international system. He doesn’t quite see the benefits that come with it or pretends these benefits don’t exist. He has instead framed globalization and America’s global role as bleeding American jobs, deepening inequities, and helping a military-industrial complex. This is more in tune with the everyday sentiments of Americans, burnt by Afghanistan and Iraq and frustrated by the chaos in Ukraine and Israel. Indeed, Dick Cheney’s endorsement of Harris proves to Trump’s base that he has cleansed the party of people who were responsible for bad wars, of which Iraq is the most obvious example. This projection as the peace candidate committed to basic US interests and focused on its economic well-being is a major source of Trump’s appeal. But this vision also upsets older assumptions and is contested by those who want a more internationalist role, as the assassination bid by an avid Ukraine sympathizer over the weekend showed.
Trump is popular but not dominant and triggers robust opposition. This explains why it is difficult to predict the election with certainty. Trump borrows identity-based chauvinism from the Right and criticism of liberal economics and foreign policy from the old Left. This explains why Trump is hard to box into an ideological category. Whether enough Americans like his personality, policy mix and the chaos that comes with it remains the central question of 2024.
The views expressed are personal
