What Trump’s tantrums portend

Opinion polls show that Trump would defeat Biden in the swing states in 2024.

Republican candidate and former US president Donald Trump has declared that there would be a bloodbath, if he loses in the November election to the nation’s presidency. He also called, while on an impromptu rant, as his teleprompters swung wildly in the wind at an outdoor campaign rally, ‘undocumented immigrants’ animals. He also promised to levy an import duty of 100 percent on imported cars.

In America’s peculiar system of electing the nation’s all-powerful president, winning a majority in individual states matters more than winning the popular vote at the national level. Each state has a certain number of delegates to the national electoral college, which then elects the president.

Perception And Reality

Most of America’s 50 states are either solidly Republican or solidly Democratic. But some states switch their loyalties from election to election. These are labelled the swing states, or the battleground states. In the 2020 elections, seven states switched their political loyalty, sending their electors to vote for a party other than the one the state had favoured in 2016. In 2024, the number of swing states could climb to 12, according to opinion polls.

Opinion polls show that Trump would defeat Biden in the swing states in 2024. This would be enough to hand Trump the presidency. Biden’s hitherto uncritical support for Israel’s protracted slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, carried out in the name of eradicating the possibility of another terror attack on the lines of the one Hamas carried out on October 7, has made him unpopular with sections of American voters, the young, in general, and Arab Americans, in particular.

This protest could lose Michigan for the Democrats. The recent, steep inflation has scarred voter psyche, across the board, notwithstanding the resilience of the economy and ultra-low levels of unemployment that have pushed up availability of jobs and incomes for all sections of American workers, including the traditionally disadvantaged.

Trump illustrates the danger of a dysfunctional political system, in which voters are disengaged from politics for the most part, and in thrall to media, particularly social media, which makes reality an inconsequential footnote to perception. Voters in the US are ready to elect a dangerous populist like Donald Trump.

The most charitable explanation for Trump’s reference to a bloodbath in case he loses the election is that he was speaking metaphorically, in terms of jobs or industries being damaged, rather than literal bloodshed, of the kind he whipped up on January 6, 2021, asking his supporters to march on the Capitol.

White Supremacist outfits like the Proud Boys complied with Trump’s exhortation, and a violent crowd stormed the building where Congressmen were assembled to ratify the 2020 election results, attacking anyone in their way.

Last Days Of American Manufacturing?

That charitable explanation refers to the auto industry in particular. Trump promises to levy an import duty of 100 percent on cars made outside the US, throwing to the winds Republicans’ traditional commitment to open markets and free trade, and revealing an insular, isolationist mindset.

The charitable explanation, however, also reveals Trump’s contempt for facts and refusal to engage with reality. America’s auto industry has not exactly entered any list of endangered species. Tesla is the world’s most valuable automobile company, and leading the charge on the electric vehicle front. Other American automakers are doing reasonably well in their home market.

If electric vehicle sales are slackening across the world, it is for good reason. There is confusion on how to go electric. Large storage batteries call for particular minerals, whose exploration, mining, refining and processing not just call for lots of energy but also create dependence on China, which dominates the battery value chain.

Hydrogen fuel cells are another option, in which hydrogen is filled in the tank, just like petrol, and mixes with oxygen, in the presence of catalysts, to produce electricity that goes to run the motor propelling the car forward, besides water. Toyota and BMW are betting big on hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, in preference to EVs that run on battery-stored power. Which technology will prove more successful remains to be seen.

The Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, the Chips Act and the Infrastructure Act, provide lots of subsidy to incentivise into being new, high-tech manufacturing industries in the US. This kind of a new investment boom in new manufacturing has not been witnessed in the US for generations.

Costs Of Trump’s Populism

This has not registered with the public at large, and Trump’s pretense that American manufacturing is in danger, if he is not allowed to don the mantle of a tariff-wielding messiah, seeks to capitalise on this lack of awareness. This is dishonest, to say the least.

When Biden calls undocumented immigrants animals, he is being racist himself and inciting racist violence by his supporters.

Such an ill-informed, dishonest, xenophobic, populist inciter of violence still stands a good chance of emerging as the leader of not just the world’s oldest democracy but also of the so-called free world. This would fray not just the Western alliance, but also the world order that America presides over.

Other nations around the world, including India, would do well to guard against Trumpian populism in their own polities, even if they cannot meddle in US domestic politics.

TK Arun is a senior journalist. Views are personal, and do not represent the stand of this publication.