18 August 2016
Sliding Down The Hill
by J R Thomas
This spring, an observer of this year’s USA presidential race suggested that Donald Trump was actually a candidate put up by the Clinton campaign team to disrupt the GOP 2016 run. How we all laughed at that one – even when those wise-guys pointed out the close friendship of the Trump and Clinton families, Mr Trump’s previously known political convictions (Democrat), his lack of connections and any previous interest in Republican politics, and indeed his interventionist and corporatist views – as far from Reaganism as you can get without actually falling over Hillary Clinton.
Well, as the guy from the BBC said, we’re not laughing now.
The Donald, having become at one and the same time the most popular and the most unpopular politician in the United States, is now accentuating the unpopular side of the scale. If he in fact truly is a stalking horse sent out to deliver the election for Mrs Clinton, we have some advice for him – he is probably corpsing too soon. And if his attempt on the Presidency is genuine and he still wants to win, we also have some advice – when in holes, cease excavating. Either way, his amazing run through the primaries is turning into an utter disaster in the national contest. The reason is not that his ideas and policies, such as they are, seem any less appealing to that core group of angry and disenchanted voters that he identified in the first place. The problem is Donald’s tendency to pick the wrong fights.
We have touched before on the difficulties that Mr Trump encountered in relation to Captain Khan, the Muslim soldier serving in the US Army who was killed doing his duty, and with whose parents Donald managed to get into a disastrous fight. It was the sort of thing that no experienced politician would have done – they would have seen the danger (of attacking the parents of a dead patriot) very early on, and even if they missed it, would have repositioned very quickly to align themselves with the mood of the nation. But Donald is a businessman, a rich and successful one, and such people tend not to be good at taking advice and especially criticism from outsiders (though you might argue that to be successful in any walk of life, nice manners and an ability to listen constructively are good attributes to have).
What may be more threatening to his run, and it again comes from his business experience and lack of political hinterland, are several brewing storms. Firstly, Mr Trump’s relationship – or maybe there isn’t one – with Vladimir Putin, of whom he has said, or implied, that Vladimir could be his mate and is much misunderstood. That may in fact point to an interesting redirection of American diplomacy for the future, but it is one that will take some explaining to Mr Trump’s core supporters, who are not accustomed to think of the Russian government as a friendly lot with America’s best interests at heart.
Next problem: The Donald is not the only one in the Trump team to have East European chums. So, allegedly, has Paul Manafort, one of Mr Trump’s inner team and closest strategic advisors. Mr Manafort is a professional strategist and was involved in advising the pro-Russian former president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovich. In the course of various campaigns he is alleged to have been paid large sums of money, hardly surprisingly if he was giving key advice, but Mr Manafort denies receiving it. In a way it is not much of a story – “political strategist gets paid” should not rock the world too much – but the sums involved and the Russian connection might.
Then we have what the Democrats hope, with a little help from and much research by Britain’s Financial Times, might become as resonant as Watergate – “Bayrock”. Bayrock was a USA real estate development company owned by a Russian immigrant to the USA called Tevfik Arif. Mr Trump partnered with it in some residential development transactions which were marketed under the Trump name. In very brief, some of these deals went wrong and things ended up in the courts, where Mr Trump claimed not to know much about the ownership of Bayrock. Complex corporate arrangements are not unusual in the real estate industry, which is always on the lookout for new sources of equity money. That too is almost not a story – unless you want to be President of the USA, your ex-partners are Russians who have convictions for this and that in their past, and your core voters are people who are suspicious of foreigners and of complex corporates.
What is in little doubt is that the Democrats and their supporters have finally found Mr Trump’s soft under-belly. His public rhetoric is one thing, the reality of his past life is another. All this is not necessarily fatal to him – his supporters seem to quite like the fact that his wealth gives him independence and we have all, or most of us, found ourselves now and again in the company of persons who actually we maybe don’t care for as much as we thought we did when we first met them. The Clinton’s too have met some strange people along the road to the White House. They are just much better than The Donald at sloughing them off and explaining them away. And not so many of them are Russian…
Donald does seem to have lost his ability to talk his way out of things. There are rumours he is tired, or ill, or (certainly true, this latter) that he does not have the machine behind him that takes so much detailed stuff away from Mrs Clinton and knows what she wants and when and where and how. His troubles are impacting his poll results pretty heavily now, so whatever the problem is he needs to solve it very quickly. Pennsylvania, not normally a Republican state but one which has large numbers of Trump profile voters and where Trump was showing a small lead throughout the primary season, has now swung pretty solidly toward Hillary. In normal times the GOP would not expect to win Pennsylvania; but in these strange months, they probably can’t swing the big fight unless they do.
Up on the Hill the Republican leadership are watching all this – bad enough to have Mr Trump inside the tent, but bearable, maybe, if he is a winner. But if he is becoming a big time loser; then what to do? The Dump Trump movement has not given up yet. The autumn battle is to the Republican leadership not just about winning the Presidency – an increasingly forlorn hope from the Hill – but also about retaining power in the Senate and the House. The opinion polls suggest that the GOP is losing support in those races around the country. If that continues, the pressure for Trump to be dumped may become irresistible. Though how that would be done remains a mystery.
Meanwhile, in other news… Actually there isn’t much; the headlines are all about The Donald at the moment, and Mrs Clinton is preparing herself and her team for the intensive stuff after Labour Day, 5th September. She is quite happy to set out some broad policies, not least to see how they sell with voters, ready for a more detailed platform to be published next month. (To be fair to Mr Trump, he is doing the same – he announced an intent to cut lower and middle income taxes, and also corporate taxes – but it seems to have hardly been noticed, even by his own party.) And, if this were a box set thriller, there would now be a cut away to the headquarters of the Libertarian Party, where some dramatic dialogue would reveal that the party continues to rise in opinion polls, now polling around 10%. But can they reach the magic 15% that will get them that coveted but rarely required third podium in the national TV debates?
The closing credits of that box set would reveal that there are another eleven weekly episodes yet to run. A lot can happen in eleven weeks, folks; it certainly ain’t over yet.
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