THE DAWN OF AN ERA
Keith Boag
The clock has run out on wishful thinking. Donald Trump’s rendezvous with history will not be a blip, a close shave or an accident. His political comeback will likely make him the defining figure of the first quarter of this century — or longer. For better or worse, there will be a Trump era forever in the story of America.
He’s already defined one minor cultural period: As you might expect with an upstart who markets his own name as a luxury brand, Trump played the role of an icon in the 1980s, when his tinselled Studio 54 persona was an avatar for the vulgarities of the decade: “The Donald” — first playboy mogul with a car phone.
Of course that was nothing compared to what’s coming — even the first Trump term was nothing compared to what’s coming.
Post-mortems following the first Trump administration made much of how the 45th president had been contained and constrained — by cooler heads, sharper minds and, to an insufficient degree, the law — so that he was never allowed the freedom to indulge the full range of his impulses.
Not so for the future 47th president who has spent the last four years marinating in self-pity and now returns to spend the next four years in the White House feeling vindicated and vindictive.
The US Constitution constrains The Executive by giving The Legislature the power to impeach, convict and remove the president. But Republican legislators have already proved they will act only in Trump’s best interests, regardless of the consequences for their country.
The Constitution gives the Judiciary the authority to hold The Executive accountable to the law, but the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has already ruled that it's absolutely nobody's business whether crimes are committed in the Oval Office so long as the president cloaks his deeds in the trappings of an official act.
The final and ultimate guardrail protecting democracy is the ballot box and Trump has just broken through the tape with his decisive victory. He will never again have anything to fear from voters.
After years and years of boorish slanders, offences to decency, lies, juvenile disinhibition, sexual assaults, criminal indictments and a plot to overturn an election, he’s been granted another four years to redefine the character of a nation. Why? How did it come to this?
Blame Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, for a start. He judged Trump “practically and morally responsible” for the violent January 6th insurrection at the Capitol and for a critical moment McConnell held the power and influence to put a stop to it, remove Trump from office, prevent him from ever running again and change the course of history including the history of his party. Instead he folded.
There are, as well, the time-tested, immutable theories of political physics: Running against a soaring cost of living is like running against gravity — inevitably it’s going to pull you down. But because Trump is so deeply reviled by so many, it seemed that defying political gravity might be doable for Democrats this time. Wrong.
It may be that winning wasn’t ever possible under the circumstances, but there will be hell to pay for losing anyway because there almost always is.
The pillorying of Joe Biden is in full swing — a half century political legacy forever dwarfed by his stubborn refusal to step aside sooner and allow time for a considered decision about who was the best choice to change the course of an election he’d said was bigger than him because it was existential.
Biden and his team persistently claimed they could beat Trump, but, now that we know what they knew, it’s clear that was never so. Podcaster John Favreau told his Pod Save America audience last week that in the hand-off to the Harris campaign the Biden team finally coughed up their secret; the data they’d guarded about what they were up against. Trump was on track to win 400 electoral college votes, a landslide.
That’s how it looked when they handed the ball to Kamala Harris and, to her credit, she led her team all the way back to mid-field.
Among the things that will be different, paradoxically, is that battling Trump won’t be the glue that holds the Democratic party together anymore. There’s no longer anything they can do about him, which leaves them to finally shift focus, throw open the windows of their party and air out their grievances and frustrations.
Independent Senator Bernie Sanders was among the first to stake a claim. He fired off a statement saying that it was no surprise working class people had abandoned Democrats because Democrats had abandoned them. That’s consistent with what’s happening elsewhere: Republicans are the party of Main Street now, they’re no longer the party of Wall Street, just as Canada’s Conservatives are no longer the party of Bay Street. Main street is their street now and they’ve figured out how to talk to the people who live there.
It’s possible that things might have gone differently had Biden left earlier, we’ll never know. But it does seem that, in the big picture, it's the elite consensus of the past half century that’s the problem. The doctrine of the market— that deregulation and the free flow of goods, people, capital and information around the globe would ultimately benefit everyone — that canard was due for a reckoning sometime around the 2008 financial meltdown. The whole project has not worked for working people and they’re tired of it. They’re hoping for something else in the Trump era.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Keith Boag - The US presidential ticket is set: Trump + Vance versus Harris + Waltz. And to cover that election, we're bringing our readers and listeners a brilliant journalistic mind and political correspondent legend, Keith Boag! Keith was with the CBC for more than 30 years, including as Chief Political Correspondent. His career included work for many years in Washington, D.C., and as Ottawa Bureau Chief. Keith covered seven federal elections in Canada, ten party leadership campaigns, as well as several US elections. Keith will regularly offer his written analysis via "QUOTES" at Air Quotes Media.
The views and opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Air Quotes Media. Read more opinion contributions via QUOTES from Air Quotes Media.