In an earlier article in this newspaper (“Understanding the Trump phenomenon,” August 5, 2016), I suggested that it was necessary to take Donald Trump’s candidacy and its implications more seriously than many were doing then. Six months into the Trump presidency, the American media remains fascinated with the new “reality show” that has entered the White House.
As every small skirmish, move and tweet is given inordinate scrutiny and attention, it is easy however to lose sight of the big picture. What have we, in fact, learnt about the United States in the months since November 2016? How is this new information going to be useful in understanding the future path of the U.S., as well as its ongoing relationship with the rest of the world? Here are some suggestions and speculations.
The one-third advantage
The first point to be taken note of is that, despite the widespread disapproval of Mr. Trump in the media and the political and intellectual classes, he still has an approval rating in excess of 35% with the American public. Given Mr. Trump’s rather erratic conduct so far, there seems no reason to believe that this rating will fall much further, no matter what he does. A small part of this can be accounted for by “legitimism”, that is, the need to support an authority figure. But far more important is the suggestion that over a third of the American public is currently made up of inflexible, hardcore right-wing and populist elements. Racism surely plays a role here too. The presidency can be won for the Republicans by adding roughly 15% of votes to this core constituency. In contrast, the Democratic Party does not have a solid base that measures up to this demographically. For them, to drum up numbers in the high-40% or more is thus a more difficult task. As American demography evolves, this could change, but only by the 2030s.
Second, the American electoral system as such is irrevocably broken, and yet there is no collective desire to fix it. In 2000, George W. Bush lost the popular vote to Al Gore by about 5,40,000 and yet won the election (this was the first time that it had happened since 1888). In 2016, Donald Trump then lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by a far larger margin of over three million votes. Still, currently there is no broad move afoot to reform the system, on the part of either major party, or to ensure that this does not happen again. This is in part because of American cultural hubris, which does not allow them to admit that their electoral system is far inferior to, say, that in use in France.
A third point concerns Mr. Trump’s domestic agenda. Too much attention has been focused so far on the trench warfare regarding health care. So far, it has proven impossible to replace ‘Obamacare’, an ironical fact given that many of those who would have been adversely affected probably voted for Mr. Trump. At the same time, Mr. Trump has already placed one conservative Supreme Court judge, Neil Gorsuch, and may have a chance to effect still more changes. He has significantly turned back the clock on environmental legislation. By 2020, he will have effected many other major domestic policy changes in one or the other fashion. Again, this is an indictment of the American political system, which gives far too much power to the executive, and even to a President who has lost the popular vote.
American power abroad
The fourth point is more crucial still, and concerns the projection of American power abroad. Since the end of the Cold War, and the emergence of the unipolar American-dominated system around 1990, speculation has gone on regarding the nature of potential challenges to it. These could come from other state-systems, such as China, or the European Union, or from unclassifiable systems and forms, such as al-Qaeda or the Islamic State. But few could have predicted that the real challenge would come from within the U.S. itself. Yet, this is what has happened. The Trump administration appears singularly unconcerned with, and inept in dealing with, foreign policy, and after all its core internal constituency is firmly ‘isolationist’ in its inclinations. The State Department is today in utter disarray. The Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, is from the petroleum industry and seems out of his depth; so that rumours even surface regularly of his imminent resignation.
Based on the past six months, it seems likely that by 2020, the systematic projection of American power on a global scale would have shrunk considerably.
Whatever the direct reality of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections, there can be no doubt that this outcome suits the Putin regime well. The Russian view appears to be that any political system that is naïve enough to be manipulated from the outside deserves what it gets anyway. It could even be argued perhaps that the fresh emergence of a multipolar world is no bad thing. A system largely managed by an inept U.S. diplomatic apparatus is hardly attractive, even to the U.S.’s erstwhile allies across the Atlantic.
To sum up, the Trump presidency is the product of a flawed political system that will obstinately not admit its flaws. In spite of this, it will surely have a significant impact over the medium term, both domestically and internationally. On the domestic front, it may be possible to turn some things back, depending of course on the outcome of the 2020 U.S. election. Where the impact is likely to be lasting, and not really reversible, is on the international front.
Sanjay Subrahmanyam is Professor of History at UCLA
