Tipping back towards chaos, with Trump Premium

The 2024 United States presidential election is beginning to look increasingly like a referendum on Donald Trump

The 2024 United States presidential election is beginning to look increasingly like a referendum on Donald Trump. The 45th President leads not only all other Republican Party candidates by a considerable margin in voter surveys but also appears to be dominating the incumbent, Democrat Joe Biden, including in certain swing states. Yet, there could not be a more polarising figure at the forefront of electoral politics in the country.

On the one hand, Mr. Trump is reaping the hurricane for a variety of alleged improprieties including, most notoriously, his role in egging on a mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol buildings on January 6, 2021. This egregious act, which shook the country’s democratic credentials, marked the culmination of months of election result denial by Mr. Trump’s campaign, including active efforts to overturn the count in states such as Georgia.

Now, in addition to indictments for election interference in Georgia, and at the federal level for his role in encouraging the attack on the Capitol, the former President faces criminal cases regarding allegations that he unlawfully held classified documents at his residence in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, after demitting office, and that he paid hush money to an adult film star to cover up an affair. Additionally, the Supreme Court of the state of Colorado recently barred his name from the election ballot citing a violation of the Section 3 of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. constitution, known as the “insurrection clause”, which disqualifies individuals engaging in insurrection and rebellion from holding public office.

One view of these indictments and the personal appearances in court that they will necessitate is that they are likely to hobble Mr. Trump’s election campaign plans for 2024. Yet, if the media circus and general public outcry accompanying each episode of Mr. Trump surrendering to the authorities for processing are measures of the impact that these allegations have on his popularity, it is obvious that Mr. Trump has only emerged stronger and is seen more as a victim of political vindictiveness than ever before.

His soaring popularity in the polls of late perhaps reflects, then, the belief among voters that Mr. Trump’s agenda is not complete and indeed that Trumpism as a political force is yet in a nascent stage. It is worth parsing Mr. Trump’s unique matrix of pronouncements on domestic and foreign policy issues to better understand why voters might throng to his campaign next year.

Domestically, the rise of Trumpism reflects the vociferous reassertion of the white, straight male in American culture — who, under its banner, has taken up a position in opposition to the liberal value of constitutional equality for minorities of all hues — immigrants, African Americans, the LGBTQ community, women, and Muslims, to name a few. What began as a silent cry for help against the ravages of economic globalisation and the migration of manufacturing jobs overseas — the so-called Rust Belt effect that propelled Mr. Trump to victory in 2016 — rapidly and conveniently degenerated into overtly racist dog-whistles by Make America Great Again (MAGA) Republicans across the country and bisecting all class barriers within this cohort.

If nativist populism was the wave that the Trump campaign rode into the Oval Office, they wasted little time in cementing their political gains by insidious institutional reforms including, most notably, setting the stage for further dismantling the liberal governance consensus by tipping the U.S. Supreme Court 9-3 in favour of unapologetic conservatism.