Napoleon was history on horseback. Donald Trump is nemesis with an orange glow. The shambling, increasingly erratic 77-year-old, reeling from a collective US$600 million in legal penalties from recent verdicts, triumphed in the “Super Tuesday” set of primaries this week, winning all states save for Vermont. As he was always going to. Sole remaining serious challenger Nikki Haley was handed the Vermont wooden spoon and then dropped out of the race. As she was always going to. Taylor Swift endorsed… nobody, simply urged, as she was always going to, people to get out and vote in either Republican or Democratic primaries.
These are the two paired, single-most pointless voting exercises in recent American history. The whole exercise was a macabre dumbshow of Western democratic failure, ever-accelerating, with a supine mainstream media reporting these major party manoeuvres as breathlessly as if half a dozen contenders were neck and neck in a three-day count.
But the fault, in that respect, does not lie with Trump. He is, after all, what people — those still registered as “Republicans”, down to about a quarter of the voting population — really want. Really, really want. They have absolutely rejected any sham populist candidates such as Ron “de Sanctimonious” Santis, put up by the party establishment and backed by the Murdochs and other grandees.
There has been no repeat of 2012 when, faced with the Obamaslaught, the Republican conservative vote slid between numerous absurd candidates, from Rick Santorum to Rick Perry, a week at a time. True, Trump’s operatives, over the past four years, have refashioned the Republican Party. Well, they’re not Trump’s operatives per se — he has no idea what they’re doing, or that they are doing it. They’re hard-right political professionals worming their way into state delegations, rules committees and the like, practising the ancient art of the stack.
Nevertheless, I mean, the virtue of the primary system is that it serves as an absolute corrective to that, by allowing candidates to just stick their hand up to run. And Nikki Haley did, along with numerous others (and there are still dozens of jokers and lunatics on each of the 30 or so contests still to come.) The early departure of other contenders even gave the mainstream party what it had lacked in 2016, a single anti-Trump contender.
Buuuuuuuut, they didn’t want her. The trouble with Haley was that she wasn’t really a Never-Trumper. She was a Never-Trumper Now (shades of Veep), who had served as his ambassador to the UN, and thus spruiked his utterly incoherent foreign policy to the world. Haley could quite reasonably say that she was serving the county, and it had to have a UN ambassador. But her eagerness to run defence for Trump meant she could never run as the true outsider, as Ohio governor John Kasich did in 2012, staying in till near the end with his proud message of *checks notes* being to the right of Trump on numerous social issues. Ach.
“Super Tuesday” — the simultaneous primaries of about 15, mainly southern, states and territories — has thus been traduced as a kingmaker event. But “Super Tuesday” itself is partly to blame for that. Put together in the 1980s as a way of giving the South a unitary sway against the big states and the early primaries, it represented a further departure from the idea that primaries were local events, held face to face, electing delegates to state conventions that may or may not be pledged to a candidate.
This had already started to change in the 1970s, as pledging became the standard practice. Super Tuesday made all that impossible. The second wave of the primary contest became a media pseudo-event, in which the real activity of campaigning in state X became a symbolic event in all the other 14 states. The symbolic then undermined the real event, and the primaries became hollowed of content.
Super Tuesday set that up to happen in a classic American fashion. It’s like US football, the rules of which have been successively altered over the decades to fit the demands of TV broadcasts, thus creating a sort of speed-dating armed rugby, cued to the ad breaks. These are all symptoms of the pervasive feel of unreality that hangs around American life, the persistent sense that you are in the Netflix series written around whatever you happen to be doing at that given moment.
Trump is what one section of the population goes to as an answer (for the other side, it’s therapy and Ambien). He is so obviously the disease for which he purports to be the cure that a voice-over should probably mention this every time he speaks, like a US pharmaceutical advertisement (“side-effects may include a further destroyed industrial base through export industry damage, and a yet worse hollowing out of the life you thought you might once get”).
Does the US presidential campaign thus begin now? Pretty much. It is months too early, it will benefit Trump — no Republican opponents saying things that can’t be unsaid but can be rebroadcast later — and it will surely exhaust every possible meme, obsession, and pseudo-event. No major media group will take advantage of this to open wider questions as to whether these structures of process and capital choke off the possibility of actual democracy — which was what the progressive and populist movements intended when they got the primary system established in the early 1900s.
But if anything is likely, it’s that events are looming that we just have not a single idea about at the moment. Who could have imagined the “Access Hollywood” tape, at this stage in 2016 — or its media-reshaping reaction? Hillary’s emails? Russian interference? Faked Russian interference? The Bush-Clinton rematch that 2008 was supposed to be the black swan that Nikki Haley is hoping will descend is that, between the Republican Convention at the end of July, and as close to the printing of ballots as possible, Donald Trump will die, and a panicked party will anoint his just-conceding antagonist.
We’re all resigned to androgerontocracy looming. Don’t be surprised if the 2024 contest turns out to be two women of colour, a Harris vs Haley stoush, re-energising everyone. Destiny comes in many guises, sometimes as an accident — and sometimes as a rambling orange man-badger, emerging from the bunker at the fourth, staring out from behind his fake tan. History repeats, first as tragedy, then as farce, then as Caddyshack.
