Trumpism will outlast Trump and the Democrats should remember that

As you are reading this, President Donald Trump might well be at his golf resort in Doonbeg, Co. Clare, where is a guaranteed warm welcome from some of the locals, even if the same can’t be said for the rest of the country. The visit will make for a very uncomfortable couple of days for the Government which will be fervently hoping there are no rows and that Trump won’t be going home in a bad mood, with possibly terrible consequences for Ireland.

In some way, it’s amazing he is coming here at all. You would imagine that a man who hasn’t been able to wrap up the war with Iran anything like as quickly as he hoped would have better things to be doing than attending a golf tournament in Ireland, but then again, Trump has been nothing if not unconventional. He always does things in his own idiosyncratic way. It is one of the only consistent things about him.

A couple of weeks ago, I took part in a panel discussion at the Kennedy Summer School in New Ross. The event is named after John F Kennedy, Ireland’s favourite Irish-American son, whose family came from the New Ross area.

Among other things, the panel was looking ahead to the mid-terms in November, when Trump’s Republican party is expected to do very badly, just as Presidents Clinton and Obama did poorly in mid-terms in their time. Unusually, President Biden bucked the trend in the mid-terms of 2022.

Analysis

No-one at the summer school defended Trump because as a person he is basically indefensible. In a previous column for this newspaper, I described him as possibly the least Christian president America has ever had because what other president has said he hates his enemies, and wishes the worst for them? Lots of other presidents have probably thought that, but to say it gives permission for everyone else to believe the same.

Instead of defending Trump as a person, you have to look at his policies on a case-by-case basis. For example, the heavy-handed approach taken by immigration officers to illegal migrants was appalling and rightly condemned. That heavy-handed approach has since been moderated.

But could you really say he is wrong to insist that European countries should pay more for their own defence? Why should the rich countries of Europe be so reliant on American power and the American taxpayer to defend them in case of attack by Russia?

And is he wrong to stand up to China which has been inflicting unfair trade practices on the world for years and has essentially undercut jobs in both Europe and America by dumping cheap (but increasingly sophisticated) goods on us?

Seven months on from the start of the war with Iran, he must now know deep down what a huge mistake he has made”

The EU’s response has been to impose 30% tariffs on Chinese electric cars, which shows that Trump’s own tariffs on imported goods into the US might not be so mad after all. If tariffs are always bad, then why does the EU use them?

His war on Iran, has, of course, been a disaster, a needless own-goal. Trying to stop Iran developing nuclear weapons was defensible, but after capturing President Nicolas Maduro, the dictator of Venezuela in an overnight raid early this year, he seemed to believe he would quickly decapitate the leadership in Iran just as easily, replacing it with something more amenable. Seven months on from the start of the war with Iran, he must now know deep down what a huge mistake he has made.

The economic result of his war so far is high oil and gas prices and the continued closure by both sides of the Strait of Hormuz. All of us are being affected by this as we will see when our heating and electricity bills fall due this winter.

Trump was elected partly on a promise of no more ‘forever-wars’. He has spectacularly broken that promise. He was also elected to bring down the cost of living, and he is failing on that score too, thanks largely to the war on Iran driving up prices.

In fact, at the aforementioned Kennedy Summer School, one of the speakers, Maria Cardona, a Democratic Party operative, said that the Democrat strategy in the November mid-term elections for the Senate and the House of Representatives is to remind voters of Trump’s broken promises, with no more wars, and lower prices at the top of the list.

But listening to Cardona it struck me that she was conceding Trump’s basic policy platform, if not Trump himself, are popular. The Democrats will be telling voters not that Trump kept his promises (which they liked) but that he broke them. This concedes that Trump was on to something.

Promises

But one big promise Trump has kept is to reduce the level of immigration, both legal and illegal, into the United States, especially across the Mexican border. Even Hillary Clinton has conceded immigration levels became too high under Joe Biden (although she didn’t name him), while Barack Obama said Americans want an “orderly immigration system”, which implies it had become too chaotic.

At the Kennedy Summer School my big point was that in countries like France, Britain, the US and Germany the mainstream parties had paved the way for the likes of Le Pen, Farage, Trump and the AFD respectively by refusing to take voters concerns about high immigration seriously. On the contrary, they treated these voters – who are a clear majority of the electorate – with contempt, denouncing them as ‘bigots’, ‘racists’ or (in the case of Hillary Clinton) as a ‘basket of deplorables’.

Those voters got the message and began to transfer their votes to candidates they would normally never back because they felt they had no choice. If Biden had kept the Mexican border under better control, Kamala Harris might even have won the presidential election two years ago.

The Democrats are almost certainly going to win back the House of Representatives in November, and there is a decent chance they will also win back the Senate. If they don’t mess things up, you would have to think they will win the White House in the November 2028 presidential election.

While Trump himself might be unpopular, Trumpism will remain a potent force in American life”

But if they then revert back to a lax immigration policy, or the ‘woke’ social policies that ran rampant under Joe Biden, they will open the door wide to another version of Trump because no matter what voters think of him personally, his basic policy platform of lower immigration, lower prices, less ‘woke’ and no more ‘forever-wars’ remains popular, even if he has broken some of those promises.

In other words, while Trump himself might be unpopular, Trumpism will remain a potent force in American life and the Democrats would be very foolish to forget that.