Four years ago, a victorious Joe Biden wrote off Donald Trump as an “aberrant moment”. Given that Trump has a fair chance of winning the popular vote, in addition to the US’s electoral college , history will surely now award that designation to Biden. Trump, after all, is among the most-known and highly investigated nominees in US history.
To elect him once may have been an accident; to do so twice came with eyes wide open. Trump is legitimately the next president of the United States . The question is why? A large part of the story is that a sufficient number of Americans want what Trump is selling: mass deportation of illegal immigrants, an end to globalisation and a middle finger to the liberal elite’s often self-parodying approach to identity, better known as wokeness.
All of this outweighed whatever doubts voters had about Trump’s character. That the US seems likely to elect a convicted felon, who is also indicted for attempting to overthrow the last election and is an overt admirer of autocrats, can be interpreted in one of two ways. Either voters do not take the risk that Trump poses seriously, or they know exactly what they are letting the country in for but still prefer it to business as usual.
Either way, Trump’s re-election is an existential disaster for Democrats. It is also a historic game-changer for the US’s allies. Democratic recriminations will come thick and fast.
Any postmortem will surely highlight the fact that a visibly ailing Biden waited .
