‘Really, America? Trump Again?’

A week is a long time in politics. One week ago, the President of the United States was insisting that he was staying in the race for re-election despite a chorus of calls for him to step aside based on his age.

Now, with the Republican Party having invested great energy and not an insignificant amount of money on a baseline message that an old guy with possible cognitive decline is probably not up to the job, that is about to backfire – with Donald Trump running against an opponent 20 years his junior.

Without resorting to naked hypocrisy, Trump and his supporters are now going to have to fend off the very same line of attack that they crafted – a delicious irony, of course, but the bigger question is: why is Trump still in the race at all?

What we have witnessed in recent weeks from the two main political parties in the US could not be in starker contrast.

For the Democrats, following the disastrous presidential debate performance of Joe Biden, an open discussion began, in public, over whether this was the right way forward for them. The Republicans, however, failed to engage in any such inner reflection after their nominee was convicted of 34 felonies. They are not the same.

The felonies are only a part of the fuller picture of Trump’s legal woes, all of which are self-inflicted and result from his actions rather than nefarious politically-driven ‘witch- hunts’, as he claims.

Before those convictions, which should have been the final straw for the Republican Party, Trump had been found liable for sexual assault and defamation, which also should have been disqualifying.

Prior to that court case, Trump’s business organisation was judged to have engaged in systemic fraud over years by using false property valuations to avoid taxes or to secure preferential financing terms. That, too, should have been a disqualifying moment. The fine deemed appropriate for this series of financial crimes was close to a half a billion dollars.

Yet, despite it all, Trump remains in the race.

It is not only a problem that the Republican Party will not concede that it should not have a serial criminal at the helm, but that many US voters are seemingly still ready to endorse this one-man crime wave.

Of course, the assassination attempt on Trump was serious. But the notion that he somehow may have been changed by the incident, or that he was going to adopt a more conciliatory tone, was debunked when Trump appointed Senator JD Vance of Ohio as his running mate.

With Vice President Kamala Harris now the official nominee of the Democratic Party, the next 100 or so days are going to be very interesting. With neither the GOP nor the voters willing to disqualify Trump, the clashes between these two are likely to be fierce.

For Trump, the strategy will be the same, to lie over and over again. But Harris will not be flustered by this. As a former prosecutor, she will be armed with facts and with a confidence and confrontational style that will likely not only throw Trump off his stride, but also get under his skin.

Despite having cultivated an image as some kind of ‘strongman’, Trump is nothing of the kind. His vanity will not react well to a younger woman calling out his lies to his face. It is also relevant that the woman going head-to-head with Trump is a person of colour.

A Trump/Vance win would put a serial criminal back in office, ably abetted by a man of great ambition but zero moral conviction in Vance. In 2017, the Ohio Senator called Trump “reprehensible”, a “total fraud”, a “moral disaster”, and “America’s Hitler”.

In his first term, Trump went through 44 Cabinet officials. How many of those have endorsed him this time around? None. All but four of them have said that they will not be voting for him.

Really, America? How can you even contemplate returning this man to power?