Dyer: Trump will be bad, but likely survivable

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The Roman empire survived for four centuries despite having many rulers worse than Donald Trump (e.g. Caligula, Nero and Commodus), so we should not write off the United States just yet.

We should not even give up hope on the current cohort of American voters. Economic illiteracy, which led them to blame the Democrats for the great wave of inflation just past, is universal among electorates. They all live in national silos, most not even noticing that COVID caused the same wave of inflation in every other country.

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The other big factor in Trump’s spectacular comeback, the virulent dog-whistle racism to which so many older white males responded, is deeply shameful. However, it is due to a period of demographic transition which will pass.

For many white women, panic at the end of absolute majority status for American whites was counterbalanced by outrage at Trump’s complicity in the assault on abortion rights. Older white men had no such counter-balance, and voted massively against the perceived threat to their status, jobs and privileges.

That generation will be politically irrelevant in fifteen years and physically gone in thirty. The younger voters who will replace them do not fear those changes to the same degree, so we need not yet despair for the future of the American republic.

Let’s just focus on the nearer term, particularly for all the rest of the world? How much of Donald Trump’s radical agenda will become reality in the next four years?

Trump will pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement once again, but that will have a limited effect on other countries. (The aspirational limit of never more than 1.5 Celsius degrees higher average global temperature was adopted despite him in 2018.)

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He has promised to “drill, baby, drill”, but you can’t sell more oil than people are willing to buy and the world demand for oil is going into decline and the U.S. has not built a new coal-fired power plant in more than a decade because it is simply not competitive with solar and wind energy.

Trump has won the White House and both Houses of Congress and effectively controls the Supreme Court as well, so he is effectively a dictator. He will repeal the massive Inflation Reduction Act, Joe Biden’s big anti-global warming initiative, and there probably will be ugly federal legislation on social and religious issues as well.

In foreign affairs, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza will both end badly for the victims.

Trump will force Ukraine to surrender to Russian demands by cutting U.S. military and financial support. He will let Israel devastate and maybe even annex the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, but he will stay out of the war with Iran into which Prime Minister Netanyahu also wants to drag him. He might even let China have Taiwan.

Trump’s promised 20 per cent tariff on all foreign imports (and 60 per cent to 100 per cent on Chinese-made goods) will slow world trade and drive inflation in the U.S., but this will all unfold slowly. Nor will there be a big wave of Americans seeking sanity or safety elsewhere. (Where would they go? Everywhere else is foreign.)

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Liberals lament the encouragement Trump’s victory gives to autocrats such as Russian President Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping and illiberal democrats like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and India’s Prime Minister Narenda Modi, but Trump is too ignorant and nasty to be much of an example for anybody. It would be different and very dangerous if Trump’s cognitive decline becomes so severe that vice-president-elect J.D. Vance takes over.

Bad things happen to good people. The rich have been getting richer and the broad middle class poorer in America for more than 50 years  under Republicans and Democrats alike, but that’s a problem only Americans can fix. Meanwhile, the damage elsewhere can probably be contained.

Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist based in London, England

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