The official narrative about Tuesday’s election in the US is that nobody knows which way it’s going to go, perhaps because nobody wants to think about it going to the courts, and then Fox News, and then the streets.
Certainly, as Donald Trump and Kamala Harris continue to remind voters what they have to offer — respectively, meandering gibberish and not being Donald Trump — the reporting coming out of the US has been so carefully hedged you could use it as topiary.
Still, it seems safe to make one prediction: win or lose, Trump will be with us for years to come, both in how far he has emboldened the far right and how entirely he has exploded the liberal consensus about who and what relatively educated, relatively wealthy people consider electable.
Since the advent of television US elections have been more like beauty pageants than contemplations of policy, with charisma often prized more highly than a grasp of government, and cracks in the façade of celebrity punished far more harshly than any intellectual weakness.
For example, Richard Nixon’s loss to John Kennedy in 1960 is widely attributed to the fact that Nixon sweated on TV and was less handsome and articulate than JFK.
Likewise, in 1984 after Ronald Reagan had struggled in the first debate against Walter Mondale and the press had started worrying about his extreme old age (73!), Reagan returned for the second debate with his famous quip about how he was refusing to make age an issue in his campaign and would not be exploiting his rival’s youth and inexperience. It was the gentlest of jokes, delivered without a hint of spite, but it effectively ended Mondale’s campaign.
Four years later, all it took to inflict the same kind of damage was a single photograph, as Michael Dukakis discovered when he awkwardly rode a tank straight into political oblivion. And spare a thought for poor Howard Dean, whose 2004 campaign imploded as an enthusiastic whoop to his supporters came out as a slightly manic scream, and the Dean Scream became a media meme.
Convictions
It seems odd to have to point this out, but none of these politicians had been convicted of sexual abuse (later confirmed to be rape by the presiding judge). None had been convicted of fraud. Certainly, none had called a famous Vietnam veteran a “loser” while also telling a talk-show host that avoiding sexually transmitted infections had been “my personal Vietnam” and that he should be “getting the Congressional Medal of Honour” for his conquests.
It goes without saying that none of them ever spoke admiringly of Russian or North Korean tyrants, or tried to overturn the results of a US election and then lied about its legitimacy for years afterwards.
All they’d done was sweat, or smile ruefully as a better politician made them the butt of a clever joke, or look awkward, or shout shrilly, once.
In 2024, we know now, not even being a rapist and a fraud is enough to budge the needle. And this is the crisis that now faces the US, no matter which candidate wins this week or whenever the litigation finally ends.
Of course, if Trump wins legitimately we may be too hypnotised by the unfolding — or unravelling — of the present moment to pay much attention to longer-term processes, as Rupert Murdoch and Elon Musk flood an already toxic information ecosystem with fresh spillages of invented threats and grievances (white people being replaced! Suburbs under attack in liberal states!) and an emboldened evangelical movement starts pulling the US back to the deep sexual and cultural conformity of the 1950s.
(For a sneak peek of coming attractions, let me refer you to Tucker Carlson, beloved by Maga as a deeply honest and rational journalist, who has recently claimed that he was once physically attacked in bed by a literal demon.)
Part of the problem for Harris and people who aren’t into nuclear-armed theocracies though, is that none of this goes away if she wins. On the contrary, for tens of millions of Americans a Harris win would be a rocket fired into the sky, signalling that tyranny is under way.
Trump might have been a terrible businessman and a mediocre president, but his big 2020 election lie has proved to be the most potent kind of political dark magic: every day I see Maga supporters online explaining, without hyperbole or agitation, that Trump losing an election is ironclad proof that the election was rigged.
But Harris has an even bigger problem than Trumpism, and that is the increasingly clear fact that she represents a knackered, unloved party, propping up a political system that at its best is corrupt, warmongering, eye-wateringly hypocritical and simply unsustainable.
You can feel it already: even if Trump concedes a close defeat and tells his followers not to engage in insurrection, a win for Harris won’t feel like a fresh start.
Instead, it will merely be a temporary reprieve; four brief years in which she will somehow have to convince a divided, floundering, God-fearing nation that unsatisfying compromise and dull secularism are a better choice than the easy, seductive myths being pedalled by hustlers in shiny suits; that American democracy can be for everyone and not just those inside the beltway; that American capitalism isn’t just a Ponzi scheme.
And I’m not sure anyone can do that.
• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.
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