‘Most presidential candidates go away after being rejected by voters,” says Professor W Joseph Campbell of American University, Washington in tones of mingled bafflement, frustration and a little – just a little – awe. “But Trump has not.”
Indeed not. Despite losing the 2020 election to Joe Biden, despite 91 indictments against him for federal and state crimes including racketeering, hoarding classified documents and conspiracy to defraud the United States, despite multiple attempts to keep him from the ballot, Trump is still with us. And he looks set to succeed in his nomination as Republican party candidate for 2024. Polls give him the edge over Biden in several key states. “In theory,” says the presidential historian Lindsay M Chervinsky, “we could have a president serving from prison.”
Enter, or rather re-enter, Robert Moore – ITV’s Washington correspondent during Trump’s first term and part of the only television crew to film inside the US Capitol as it was being stormed three years ago and to try to interview the Stop the Steal protesters as they streamed in. Trump: The Return? is an hour-long attempt to divine the future from the present mood of contradictions, competing ideologies, extremes, madnesses and glories that is the US.
We begin with footage of Trump on what is being accurately nicknamed his “Retribution” tour. We watch as he rallies the ever-more faithful to the cause by likening “radical left thugs” to “vermin” and to people “poisoning the blood of our country” and promising via more fascist-adjacent language to cleanse the home of the brave, the land of the free of it all.
Moore outlines one of Trump’s new strengths for the coming election. For loyalists, Trump’s indictments – and any convictions – will simply shore up his status as a maverick hero. A victim now of a legal system weaponised by Democrats, trying to neutralise this man of the people. That’s a fantastic defence. How do you breach that? How do you curtail the activities of a man who has co-opted all your possible next steps as part of his combat narrative? This, of course, is exactly what drives non-Trumpians mad – their enemy may be no politician, but he (or the people around him) are some of the most savvy political operators there have ever been.
But he can’t win with only the Maga-hatted devotees on his side – though he can come closer than you might hope. It is the disillusioned and the disfranchised and their anger at what they see as Biden’s and the Democrats’ failings since 2020 that could result in bolstered support for his rival. Chicago is a flashpoint. A “sanctuary city”, its detractors say its resources are being stretched to breaking point by migrants – whose tent cities spread over increasingly large parts of the place. Among poorer Chicagoans especially, already dealing with a national cost of living crisis, there is a growing feeling of deprivation and anger, especially as the city’s requests for help from the White House go unanswered.
Repeat that enough times in a country and, as one talking head puts it, you are sitting on a powder keg. No matter that Trump himself is a man who, according to Miles Taylor (the chief of staff when Donald J arrived) wanted to create his own Putin-esque mercenary force, and who appears to be making other preparations to run the country as much as a dictatorship as possible. People can get desperate enough to want to blow things up and see where the pieces land.
“Trump’s enduring domination over the Republican party despite the insurrection is the greatest riddle I have ever encountered,” says Moore early on. But there are moments when his tone suggests at least a possible partial solution to that riddle. He refers to the “Trump circus”, he reels in disbelief at a young, Black Trump voter, instead of fully engaging with her, and seems baffled as to how people can be taken in by him, rather than asking what they are responding to and why.
It all makes me want to ask – don’t you yourself, in some deep, buried part of your brain, understand the appeal? The longing to see what could happen? Isn’t it the same primeval urge that makes us want to stand on cliff edges? What if that fascination with extremes and flirtation with destruction was not tempered by being a citizen with much to lose? What if it was coupled with a far from irrational feeling that whatever does happen couldn’t be much worse for you and that there is a chance it may make things a bit better, at least in the short term? Do none of the Trumpers, none of the angry Chicagoans, have a point? If liberal orthodoxy and arrogance have played a part in making people feel unheard and disempowered, should programmes like Moore’s not try extra hard to avoid that themselves? No one wants to shorten the fuse on the powder keg.
Trump – The Return? is on ITV1 and ITVX now
