On January 20, 2017, Donald Trump officially assumed the role of US president. Contrasted with the civility he briefly showed his predecessor Barack Obama and departing first lady Michelle Obama (“they have been magnificent”), his inauguration speech returned to the tone he had set during his campaign. Attacking nameless Washington insiders who prospered while the citizens languished, he painted a picture of a nation laid to waste, of “mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation”.
“This American carnage stops right here and stops right now,” he promised.
We know how that worked out; a very distinct brand of American carnage followed in the wake of his administration, culminating in the assault on the Capitol building on January 6, 2021.
Everything that has happened since has served to reinforce that, for a possibly decisive number of Americans, such carnage is not only allowable but desirable.
Journalist Masha Gessen and others have pointed out that while Trump is a distinct figure, his autocratic instincts do not represent a repudiation of American political history, so much as the logic of that history taken to a brash, unapologetic extreme. The suspensions of habeas corpus under Abraham Lincoln and George W Bush, the latter’s widespread use of torture and mass surveillance during the calamitous War on Terror, the hundreds of fatal drone strikes during Obama’s administration, Woodrow Wilson’s Sedition Act during the First World War, Nixon’s secret expansion of the war in Vietnam into Cambodia and Laos without congressional approval and the coup in Chile (let’s just say most of the Nixon administration)… Apart from regular comparisons to Nixon, very little of this seemed to factor in the breathless “this is not normal” coverage of Donald Trump’s first term.
Which is not to suggest that Trump, of course, is business as usual. His repeated, barely-cloaked signals to violent far-right groups and explicit Nazis, the sheer bounty of his lies, and the seemingly guileless candour of his corruption are, in combination, unique in any figure to hold the highest office. Just as he did in 2016, and 2020, Trump is telling his supporters that the only way he can lose is if his opponents engage in voter fraud. The rhetoric at his rallies and elsewhere has become more explicitly fascistic, at least when it is comprehensible. Coverage has once again asked if the bubbling ugliness of this week’s Madison Square Gardens event will be enough — unlike the countless outrages preceding it — to pry a meaningful number of supporters away.
On the other hand, there is Vice President Kamala Harris. The Democratic candidate joined the race late, when the incumbent Joe Biden was finally pried away from the position on account of his visibly diminished bearing. The initial optimism and relief boosted the Dem’s numbers in polling, as did the posture, adopted by Harris and her VP pick Tim Walz, to do a milder version of the Trump shtick back at him.
But the pair are now once again neck-and-neck. No-one knows what will happen, whether late incidents will prove decisive. And of course, there is the strong possibility that Trump will not accept the result if it doesn’t go his way.
Starting in Pennsylvania, the crucial swing state that has hosted endless rallies, visits from party grandees and one assassination attempt, Crikey will be on the ground in the US for the next fortnight. We will capture the chaos and colour as the nation lurches through the carnage to election day.
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