On a chilly Saturday in late January 2016 during a campaign stop in the university town of Sioux Center, Iowa, Donald Trump joked that he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue in New York City, shoot somebody and not lose any votes.
This week, without wielding a firearm, he proved his point.
That swaggering declaration was made eight months before he won the presidency the first time. But his second, even more emphatic, victory is the one that underlines the potency of it, coming on the heels of a felony conviction for falsifying business records, indictments for alleged mishandling of classified documents and alleged election interference, and civil court judgments against him for sexual harassment, defamation and fraud.
Trump’s opponent, the Democrat vice-president, Kamala Harris, and her running mate, Tim Walz, lent hard on the argument that the Republican nominee was “weird”. For all his erratic behaviour – the 40-minute dance routine at a campaign rally and the bizarre, racist and fabricated narratives around Haitian migrants eating people’s pets – much of the US has embraced him.
In fact, the more nuts it got, the more it seems to have helped him. His propensity to falsehood has worked in his favour. Lying is now Donald Trump’s brand. It is seen as him being authentic.
This week’s Trump comeback triumph says something about the fickle role that character plays in modern American politics, especially when it’s in competition with security – financial and physical – as a potential vote-swinger. Whether what it says is applicable beyond American shores may be up for debate. But to candidates in democracies everywhere, it would seem not entirely irrelevant.
Here on the other side of the Pacific, both major parties are shaping to make character a feature of their election campaigns. Peter Dutton is borrowing from the strong-man playbook, saying Anthony Albanese is weak and no longer the in-touch bloke from council housing he may once have been. Albanese says Dutton is negative, nasty and focused on his own political interests.
Neither Albanese nor Dutton is quite in Trump’s Teflon league and neither have had similar encounters with the justice system.
But they will be looking to what the US result says about the things voters generally will – and won’t – forgive. And if they’re not looking, they should be.
Former ambassador to the US Joe Hockey had some interesting hot-take reflections the morning after the US result. The former Liberal treasurer wasn’t explicitly drawing parallels with the contest in Australia but what he said was resonant.
Speaking to ABC radio on Thursday, Hockey summed up Harris’s key campaign message as “I’m not Donald Trump”.
“And that just wasn’t substantive enough,” he observed.
He said voters’ hesitation about Trump’s character had been outweighed by their policy concerns and their desire to elect someone who they believed would address them.
“It is the case that Americans are hurting, and whilst every major economic indicator may say, ‘Oh, it’s not too bad’, you simply cannot tell people to feel better if they don’t feel that they’re getting a fair go,” Hockey said.
It’s a particularly prescient observation as the Albanese government embarks on its re-election bid with a push to instil optimism in the electorate about the nation’s economic prospects.
In a cost-of-living crisis, an incumbent government faces a special kind of challenge to position itself as the solution to a problem when the problem has peaked on its watch – never mind that the problem is now an existential, intergenerational one not resolved by a few extra bucks back on tax, or a rebate on the power bill.
Providing a laundry list of the things you’ve done to address the problem also doesn’t cut it if people are still hurting. By definition, if they’re still hurting then they probably think you haven’t done enough. Assuring them things are getting better might not quite cut it either, unless the promise is accompanied by a clear and concise explanation of what else you’re going to do, structurally speaking, to make sure it is so.
Harris ran foul of such incumbency-related difficulties, even aside from the fact that she entered the contest with a significant time handicap. There’s much to be analysed in the US result – issues around race, gender, age, income, location – but arguably people’s financial circumstances and sense of insecurity swamped them all.
Harris failed to differentiate her own agenda from that of the president, Joe Biden. She didn’t lay out that clear economic plan. And she didn’t – couldn’t – adequately demonstrate that she understood the anxiety Americans felt by distilling their unease into a message and repeating it back to them. That is also something that’s very hard for incumbents to do.
Trump, on the other hand, nailed that with a single question: “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?”
It’s a card only challengers can play, and it worked.
Back here, two things on the government’s laundry list that seem to resonate are the number of jobs it has created and its success in raising the wages of low-paid workers. Few people are reporting that they feel their jobs are under threat and the wage rises are welcomed.
But are those messages enough to overcome Dutton’s challenger’s advantage of being able to reflect voters’ pain back to them and promise the world without being judged on recent-past delivery?
Some within Labor are seeing a political upside to the Trump win, suggesting it provides an opportunity to show Australians what they might get if they roll the dice with Dutton. That thinking presumes people don’t want a hard-right conservative strong-man ex-cop to lead them. Is that what American voters were saying?
For the incumbent Australian government, the big question is whether the fear of what a Dutton government would do is enough to dissuade Australian voters from choosing the same course.
After the events of this week, leaning too hard on that assumption really would be nuts.
Karen Middleton is Guardian Australia’s political editor
