From someplace that charges for journalism.
***
It seems bewildering that Donald Trump is even a candidate in America’s presidential election, never mind a near certainty to win the Republican nomination with a good chance of taking the White House back. Surely, only those who mistake this huckster’s braggadocio and lies for real leadership could overlook 97 criminal charges and brazen attempts to overturn the US Constitution and an election he lost.
Mr Trump’s diatribes will now set the narrative and agenda for the 2024 campaign. He is an outrage machine who channels middle Americans angry with the system, with modern woke culture and its elites who disdain them and whom they despise. Those voters have no interest in Ron DeSantis’ promises of Trumpian policies with more competent delivery because he doesn’t have the capricious anger that they want. Yet Mr Trump has resurrected himself partly because the Democrats have let him do it.
Under the Democrats’ noses, he has taken the party’s working-class supporters, even among ethnic minorities, and transformed them into right-wing populist support for what used to be the centre-right party of business.
President Joe Biden is a decent, centrist politician who did the world a service in ousting Trump in 2020, and helped steer the US to a soft landing while making it competitive again in green and digital technology, albeit at huge cost in borrowed money. But inflation has a corroding effect on politics. The erosion of kitchen table spending power means voters have had little sense of America’s economic wins. And the Democrats have either ignored, overlooked or inflamed too many other voter sensitivities.
Immigration got Mr Trump the loudest cheers in Iowa. Nothing makes a government look hapless more than losing control of its own borders. Borders are essential to the idea of a nation for many mainstream voters, who resent being tarred as racist.
The removal of Covid-era migration controls in 2023, and the Biden administration’s slow response to surging arrivals – tens of thousands each week – at the southern border has lifted Trump’s fortunes once more.
Uncontrolled illegal immigration makes it is almost impossible to talk about trade, so the Democrats let him get away with nonsense like a 10 per cent tariff on everything. Putting “a ring around America” will sound good to those who lost jobs or quit the workforce after globalisation, but it’s a $US300 billion tax on the economy with nearly a million job losses when Asia and Europe retaliate.
But Mr Biden kept $US80 billion in Trump tariffs, and has never made the case for free trade or reviving Barack Obama’s TransPacific Partnership. Mr Trump wants to extend his successful business tax cuts again, though electioneering personal tax cuts are more likely. But in office Mr Trump never took on government spending, and he added as much debt as Mr Biden has.
Instead, Mr Trump finds an easy target in the Democrats’ obsessions with identity politics. His explosions of vulgarity seem no worse than the tedious, preachy lecturing from sanctimonious progressives. No more so than for the small and medium businesses that have to do all the box ticking that comes with it.
Democrats, and every American citizen, would be rightly concerned with the assault on America’s institutional pillars that Mr Trump has launched. He’s more interested in revenge than reform in plans to appoint zealots to shrink and purge federal government, the justice system, and even the military that he thinks wronged him.
Mr Trump is running for the country’s highest office with criminal courts dogging him. Nobody is above the law, yet the problem is the US legal system is a low bar because it’s already so politicised and manipulated by both sides of politics. Mr Trump just draws more energy by portraying himself as a populist martyr to it.
It’s a failure of the Democrats themselves that once-rejected Donald Trump can still present himself as the new broom. Big investors in the US like Andrew Forrest, as we report today, hope for the best that Mr Trump will keep business drivers such as the Inflation Reduction Act, once he can claim credit for them. But maybe Mr Biden can see him off again – or some other unpredictable development upends the whole crazy process.
***
It seems bewildering that Donald Trump is even a candidate in America’s presidential election, never mind a near certainty to win the Republican nomination with a good chance of taking the White House back. Surely, only those who mistake this huckster’s braggadocio and lies for real leadership could overlook 97 criminal charges and brazen attempts to overturn the US Constitution and an election he lost.
Mr Trump’s diatribes will now set the narrative and agenda for the 2024 campaign. He is an outrage machine who channels middle Americans angry with the system, with modern woke culture and its elites who disdain them and whom they despise. Those voters have no interest in Ron DeSantis’ promises of Trumpian policies with more competent delivery because he doesn’t have the capricious anger that they want. Yet Mr Trump has resurrected himself partly because the Democrats have let him do it.
Under the Democrats’ noses, he has taken the party’s working-class supporters, even among ethnic minorities, and transformed them into right-wing populist support for what used to be the centre-right party of business.
President Joe Biden is a decent, centrist politician who did the world a service in ousting Trump in 2020, and helped steer the US to a soft landing while making it competitive again in green and digital technology, albeit at huge cost in borrowed money. But inflation has a corroding effect on politics. The erosion of kitchen table spending power means voters have had little sense of America’s economic wins. And the Democrats have either ignored, overlooked or inflamed too many other voter sensitivities.
Immigration got Mr Trump the loudest cheers in Iowa. Nothing makes a government look hapless more than losing control of its own borders. Borders are essential to the idea of a nation for many mainstream voters, who resent being tarred as racist.
The removal of Covid-era migration controls in 2023, and the Biden administration’s slow response to surging arrivals – tens of thousands each week – at the southern border has lifted Trump’s fortunes once more.
Uncontrolled illegal immigration makes it is almost impossible to talk about trade, so the Democrats let him get away with nonsense like a 10 per cent tariff on everything. Putting “a ring around America” will sound good to those who lost jobs or quit the workforce after globalisation, but it’s a $US300 billion tax on the economy with nearly a million job losses when Asia and Europe retaliate.
But Mr Biden kept $US80 billion in Trump tariffs, and has never made the case for free trade or reviving Barack Obama’s TransPacific Partnership. Mr Trump wants to extend his successful business tax cuts again, though electioneering personal tax cuts are more likely. But in office Mr Trump never took on government spending, and he added as much debt as Mr Biden has.
Instead, Mr Trump finds an easy target in the Democrats’ obsessions with identity politics. His explosions of vulgarity seem no worse than the tedious, preachy lecturing from sanctimonious progressives. No more so than for the small and medium businesses that have to do all the box ticking that comes with it.
Democrats, and every American citizen, would be rightly concerned with the assault on America’s institutional pillars that Mr Trump has launched. He’s more interested in revenge than reform in plans to appoint zealots to shrink and purge federal government, the justice system, and even the military that he thinks wronged him.
Mr Trump is running for the country’s highest office with criminal courts dogging him. Nobody is above the law, yet the problem is the US legal system is a low bar because it’s already so politicised and manipulated by both sides of politics. Mr Trump just draws more energy by portraying himself as a populist martyr to it.
It’s a failure of the Democrats themselves that once-rejected Donald Trump can still present himself as the new broom. Big investors in the US like Andrew Forrest, as we report today, hope for the best that Mr Trump will keep business drivers such as the Inflation Reduction Act, once he can claim credit for them. But maybe Mr Biden can see him off again – or some other unpredictable development upends the whole crazy process.
statistics: Posted by NewGolconda — 5:38 AM - Today — Replies 0 — Views 38