By Michael Regenstreif
It’s been like watching a train wreck these last 16 months. Horrifying for too many reasons, but impossible to look away from.
I am referring to the Republican U.S. presidential candidacy of Donald Trump, the TV reality show star and real estate mogul. Despite a seemingly endless string of ongoing insults variously hurled at women, Hispanics, Muslims, the handicapped, prisoners of war, leaders of his own party, and so many others, his candidacy has endured.
Thankfully, it will soon be over. As I write – on October 21 – the election is just 18 days away and it appears that Trump has thrown away any chance of recovering and finding enough support to win the election. Although they were running neck-and-neck at one time in the national polls, his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, has widened her lead after each of the three head-to-head debates to the point where it now appears to be insurmountable.
Poll analyst Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com creates models based on the state-by-state polls to predict the eventual Electoral College results and constantly updates the predictions. As of now, Clinton holds an 86.2 per cent chance of winning the election while Trump has a 13.8 per cent chance. Minus some completely unpredictable and highly unlikely scenario, Clinton will surely be the first woman to be president of the United States.
While Trump’s campaign has been in freefall recently – thanks to Trump’s own behaviour – it is astounding that the least qualified candidate (at least in modern times) to ever win a major party’s nomination for the U.S. presidency, a man with no experience in public service (and, apparently, little experience in paying federal taxes), still maintains a base of support of about 40 per cent of the American electorate, despite all that he has said and done – and all that has been revealed about him.
And, as it has become obvious to all that he is losing the election, Trump has ramped up his attacks – on Clinton, of course, but also on Republican leaders like Paul Ryan, speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, and most appallingly, on democracy itself.
For weeks, Trump has been complaining that the American electoral system has been “rigged” against him and that the only way he can lose the election is if it is rigged. And he absurdly claims the American media has entered into a conspiracy against him. It is a tradition in Western democracies that, when the votes are counted and the winner of an election is determined, the defeated candidate(s) concedes the loss, and the government proceeds to an orderly transition of power.
But Trump is refusing to say he will concede a loss; only that he will accept the result if he wins. Many observers fear he will launch a post-election campaign to delegitimize Clinton’s presidency.
That is something that Trump has done before. He was cheerleader-in-chief of the so-called “birther” movement – a racist fringe movement – that for years tried to delegitimize the presidency of Barack Obama, the first African American president of the United States, by falsely claiming he was born in Africa. Trump continued to lead the movement for years, even after Obama released his birth certificate from the state of Hawaii.
Trump’s behaviour throughout the campaign has been appalling. He is the first presidential nominee candidate in more than 40 years not to release his tax returns and he has acted like nothing more than a schoolyard bully. Trump’s personal attacks on the women who have come forward to allege that he behaved toward them in ways that he himself described in the now infamous 2005 tape have been particularly disgraceful.
And, as a candidate for the most important office in the world, he has shown almost no real understanding of the myriad important issues he would face on both domestic and international fronts.
Hopefully, Trump will fade away – at least politically – after November 8.
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