Donald Trump has done nothing wrong. Not in one way. The firming consensus that he was a rabid dog that somehow snuck into the conservative camp and killed a basket of puppies who would have made the cutest little floppy-eared presidents, ignores the uncomfortable truth that they were mostly all mad dogs. It also whistles nervously past the millions of voters for whom he was and remains the choice they really, truly, deeply wanted to make.
Trump was saying what they wanted to hear. Trump promised to make everything great again. And he did it without the snivelling weasel words of his rivals.
When they dog whistled at racism and bigotry, he just stood up and called brown people rapists. Where they hinted at punitive measures to contain 'the inner cities', Trump just blamed black people for everything. It's a wonder he hasn't broken that most sacred of modern American taboos and dropped a few N-bombs into his campaign speeches yet – but of course there's still a few weeks to go.
His crazed incoherence, his baffling victimhood, his anger and resentment, they're just 'what everyone's feeling'. Everyone who voted for him anyway.
And everyone who voted for Brexit. And everyone who sent Hanson back to the Senate. Because although Trump looks like an American catastrophe, he's not. His success – yep, success – has been to gather a vast multitude to his flag, even though that flag is a pair of skid-marked Y-fronts printed with a skull and crossbones made up out of millions of little white grievances. It doesn't matter that Hillary is gonna beat him with an axe handle come election day. Trump has already won.
He's shown the way forward for the next demagogue, the one with more discipline and intelligence and fewer allegations of sexual assault in his past. Trump has shown that bigotry works. That ugliness pays off. That in an atomised polity, the warlord who can gather the largest, most committed war band, can rise to challenge for the ultimate prize. The fact that tens of millions of people will vote for this bumbling arseclown in November, despite the clear and present danger he represents to their own civilisation, does not auger well for the next US presidential campaign.
Or for the politics of any liberal democracy.
Most of the coverage of the US election from overseas is predictably concerned with the implications of a decreasingly likely Trump victory for international relations, alliances and trade pacts. But the thing that should worry us more, given Trump's almost inevitable defeat, is the blueprint he has provided for subverting the political process and convincing a huge, fractured electorate to vote against its own best interests.
When cold-eyed political operators come to do the autopsy on Trump, they won't be solely looking for the flaws that killed him. They'll want to know how to repeat his success without falling victim to those flaws.
The answer is not likely to involve a promise of less bigotry and fascism, but more. Simply with better organisation and less pussy-grabbing next time.
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