Donald Trump: the Banana Republican

Despite the poll numbers looking good for Joe Biden, despite the piles of postal ballots pouring in from energised Democrats and long queues at early voting sites, defeat for Donald Trump is by no means certain. We don’t know if there are a substantial number of “shy” Trump voters sufficiently ashamed of the president’s epic vulgarity to keep quiet about their support. We don’t know if the global pandemic will depress the Democratic turnout — Biden needs a big turnout — and given that Democrats are more likely than Republicans to trust the scientists warning that Covid-19 is highly contagious, some may not show up in person.

The threat of violence from armed white supremacist groups could also depress turnout: armed men from a security firm said to have been hired by the Trump campaign showed up at an early voting site in St. Petersburg, Florida, and guys with guns have been reported lurking around Wisconsin polling places. A number of registered voters in swing states have been receiving emails and tweets ostensibly from a hate group called the “Proud Boys” (though the US Department of Homeland Security blames Iranian hackers) warning that if they don’t vote for Trump, “we will come after you.”

Trump’s most straightforward, most “respectable” (if that word applies) path to re-election without months of litigation is pretty much the same as it was last time: win the “right” states, even if it’s by tiny numbers. In Florida, Trump managed to pip Hillary Clinton to the post by a slender 1.2 percentage points. Trump is president today courtesy of a scant 80,000 voters in three states, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, a margin not so much thin as positively anorexic. Nevertheless, last time round it was enough to hoist Trump over the finish line, with the 270 Electoral College votes required. Biden currently leads in those states but, as Trump’s campaign never fails to point out, the polls also predicted a Hillary Clinton win.

American presidential elections aren’t precisely national; we don’t work on the principle of one person, one vote. Hillary Clinton won three million more votes than Trump (a fact which still irritates the living hell out of him), but thanks to the bizarre mechanism of the Electoral College, one vote in the huge state of California counts less than one vote in the sparsely populated state of Montana. The Founding Fathers, most of them lawyers and slave-owning landed gentry, did not have much faith in the demos, so they engineered a system that would theoretically save the passionate masses from themselves in case they chose what Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist Papers 68, worried about: a president with a talent for “low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity.”

The Electoral College is no longer fit for purpose. For the time being, however, America is stuck with it, and Trump’s campaign knows that if they hold onto Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Florida, they can afford to lose a couple of others, say, North Carolina and Arizona, two states becoming increasingly diverse and Democratic-leaning. But if Trump loses Florida, it’s hard to see how he can cobble together an Electoral College win.

All of this presupposes an election run more or less in good faith, with all the ballots counted properly and the outcome honored. Good faith, however, is in short supply. If the election is close — and maybe even if it isn’t close — the Trump campaign has signalled that they’ll challenge the results state by state by state. He has described mailed-in ballots as fraudulent, likely to be manipulated by “foreign governments,” and “a scam,” even though Trump himself votes by mail in Florida. Trump’s campaign has hired armies of lawyers.

For that matter, so has the Biden campaign. Trump’s people are looking for mysterious forces, possibly paid by Hungarian-American billionaire and democracy campaigner George Soros (who apparently masterminds everything from climate change to Black Lives Matter to the pandemic loo roll shortage). Trump is also flirting with rumours of a liberal pedophile cabal, led by the Clintons, which is aiming to steal the election.

Trump cannot conceive of actually losing. Neither can his red hat-wearing followers. A woman in a Trump-voting family in Pensacola, a conservative Florida city, said simply, “He has to win.” Her husband added, “If the Republicans lose, they won’t accept that. I won’t accept it, but neither will he.”

In the marginally sane pockets of America, we’re wondering what happens if Biden appears to win and Trump simply refuses to concede? He has said over and over that the only acceptable result is a victory for him. At a rally in September, he assured his followers: “The Democrats are trying to rig this election because that’s the only way they’re going to win.” He has pretty much admitted he’s jamming through a replacement for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg because he thinks a disputed election will end up in the Supreme Court (as happened in 2000) and he needs another favorable vote on the Supreme Court: “It’s very important we have nine justices.”

Some of us are getting increasingly frightened that unless the election is an absolute Biden landslide, Trump will unleash chaos, triggering a constitutional crisis that will make the weeks of machinations in Bush v. Gore look tame. Republican party operatives are doing their damnedest to suppress the vote in heavily Democratic areas, threatening to send police to polling places, trying to limit early voting. The governor of Texas recently tried to mandate that each county could provide only one place where people could drop off their votes before election day, 3rd November. Harris County, where the city of Houston is located, has a population of 5 million. Lucky for those spending whole days in the queue, a judge recently lifted the governor’s order.

The count on election night may well favor Trump. He knows it and has been bellowing that the count should be cut off and all those absentee ballots discarded. This is illegal in most states, but, as the distinguished journalist Barton Gellman, writing in the current issue of The Atlantic, points out, it’s almost certain to be the Trump campaign strategy. The play here is to craft the perception of an unresolved election, a manipulated vote count, and all manner of cheating: “He could disrupt the vote count where it’s going badly, and if that does not work, try to bypass it altogether.” We may end up with two men claiming to be president-elect come January. If that’s so, God help the Republic.