FRDH Podcast

With a little under 100 Days til the US Election no one is sure what the reality of the race is. It is a measure of just how norm-shattering, traumatic, and, frankly, bizarre Donald Trump’s years in office have been that virtually no one feels confident that the previous history of US Presidential election is a guide to what will happen on November 3rd. In this FRDH Podcast Michael Goldfarb tries to see through the twitter induced paranoia engulfing American society to the historical precedents that should be providing the key to understanding the situation.

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Transcript of this episode

All things being equal, by this point in high summer, the Democrats should have held their convention, their Presidential ticket Joe Biden and running mate would be on tour around the US. Political Journalists would be ransacking their bag of cliches to maintain voter interest. But nothing is equal to anything that has happened in American lifetimes in this Covid-19 summer.

The daily wash of the unbelievable makes it difficult to keep our bearings, to see the deep channel in the flow of events. In this podcast I am going to try and mark it out.

In a little less than 100 days the most consequential American election since 1932 will take place. By any measure the winner is a foregone conclusion: the Democratic Party’s candidate Joe Biden.

By the measure of polls President Donald Trump is in deep trouble. The big picture is this: polls conducted as recently as ten days ago show him 15 points behind Biden. In March, Biden’s advantage was just 2 points, a statistical tie.

At a more granular level, at this same point in the election campaign of 2016 Trump was leading in the suburbs, where Presidential elections are won or lost, by 10 percentage points. Today Biden leads by nine points, a swing of 19 points.

Polls are just snapshots, they can be inaccurate, they can change, but these polls echo historical precedent. Trump is running for re-election in the middle of a crisis: like Herbert Hoover in 1932 as the Great Depression gripped the US, or Jimmy Carter in 1980 as the Iranian hostage crisis and inflation swept the country. And the first president Bush in 1992 who saw a national mood swing from the sugar high of sweeping Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait while a deep recession and slow recovery ruined the economic prospects of millions of American voters.

All three men lost their re-election bids. Can anyone look at the uncontrolled surge of the coronavirus pandemic with its associated mass lay-offs and shrinking economy plus the civil unrest since the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis policeman and not see a national situation that is at least the equal of the crises that sank Hoover, Carter and Bush?

And yet, it is a measure of just how norm-shattering, traumatic, and, frankly, bizarre Trump’s years in office have been that virtually no one feels confident that the previous history is a guide to what will happen on November 3rd.

Trump has shattered every rule and norm of presidential behaviour in the last three and a half years. In a perverse form of political genius he has used the tools of modern communications – especially social media platform twitter – to get inside the collective American psyche. His tweets have shifted the entire national conversation onto twitter where facts are few and the character limit in tweets means snark and abuse and expressions of fear dominate.

The press, playing by the old rules and norms of giving a President’s statements credit for being factual, has been forced to repeat his lies and spend far too much time analyzing his tweets than reporting news.

Here’s an example of how deeply Trump has disrupted the status quo: recently reporters granted one to one interviews have been asking him, if he loses on November 3rd, will he respect the result and leave office. That the question even has to be asked is shocking. This happened most recently last Sunday in an interview with Fox News’ Chris Wallace, The President’s non-commital answer was he would, “have to see.” Then Trump added, “I’m not going to just say yes. I’m not going to say no.”

He then went on to criticize yet again voting by mail, something the Democrats want because of the pandemic. Trump said it would “rig the election.”

People who live in those parts of the Middle East where regime change is via the ballot box will be familiar with the tension of, “will the vote be fair, will the result be respected.” In America this tension is unprecedented.

This has led to a kind of panic among opinion formers and leading academics. Yale University history professor Timothy Snyder, an expert on how societies are taken over by dicatorships, put up a 20-tweet thread on twitter last weekend with advice on how to resist authoriarianism. It begins: “Do not obey in advance.” It ends, “Be as courageous as you can. If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die under tyranny.”

Washington Post columnist Brian Klaas, who has studied many contentious elections around the world, wrote last year, “For many countries, elections don’t involve just counting ballots but also counting bodies.” He then outlined his fears for the Presidential election:

“The bulwarks that protect a country from political violence can be breached if the leader of that country dehumanizes certain groups of people, targets political opponents with venomous rhetoric, explicitly encourages violence and then rejects the results of an election. Trump raises all four of those red flags.”

Neither Snyder nor Klaas is anyone’s idea of a radical. Their sense of alarm is a reflection of how deep the despair is in America as Election Day approaches.

In recent weeks it seems Trump and his advisers have been working hard to prevent the election taking place. His administration’s approach to the pandemic is to let it surge. Last week set records for new cases. More than 143,000 have died. It also looks like he’s trying to provoke some major act of violence that might allow him to try to cancel the election.

The images of men from federal agencies in full combat gear but wearing no identification snatching protestors from the streets of Portland Oregon and throwing them into unmarked vehicles recall similar scenes in Chile and Argentina when democracy was suspended in those countries during the dirty wars of the 1970s. The scenes will certainly excite the 35-38% of Trump’s unswayable support. The question is whether these actions will incite real violence in return. Every day it seems like a neck and neck race for America to make it to November 3rd as a functioning democracy.

A few weeks ago, I was invited to a zoom talk with former Democratic Senator Gary Hart. The talk focused on the many discretionary powers the Presidency acquired during Cold war and, more recently the war on terror. At least 100 that can be used at a presidnet’s discretion during times of national emergency, according to research by the BRennan Center at NYU’s Stern School of Law (their website is open by the way and you can find more details there) Hart is one of two surviving members of the Church committee, the Congressional committee that investigated abuses by America’s intelligence services including the CIA and the FBI, of their powers. Hart knows the secret state as well as anyone.

He minced no words. Trump can invoke some of these powers to forestall the election. This past week, the Senator wrote an op-ed in The New York Times that summarized what he told us. He cited one example going back to the Communications Act of1934:

The president can suspend broadcast stations and other means of communication following a “proclamation by the President” of “national emergency.”

He also reminded people of something Donald Trump said in March, “I have the right to do a lot of things that people don’t even know about.”

When looking at the scenes in Portland and reading of Trump’s plan to send the same combat ready federal militias to Chicago and other Democratically controlled cities it is hard not to think that those “things that people don’t know about” are things he is considering using to forestall the election.

And yet.

There is a reality that is too easily overlooked in the twitter-stoked paranoia gripping American political life. It’s a reality I have covered as a journalist the last four years.

First, Trump is really bad at the authoritarian thing. His wall isn’t built, no one’s free speech has been curtailed … I mean, I’m talking to you, right?

Then, the Democrats polling momentum isn’t because of Trump’s inept handling of the pandemic.

I was in Washington DC for Trump’s inauguration in 2017. The day after I was part of a crowd at least double the size that turned out on the Mall to watch Trump take the oath of office for the Million Women March.

In the midterm elections of 2018, in suburban Atlanta I recorded a group of women as they prepared to canvass their neighborhood on behalf of the Democratic candidate. They were upper middle class (it was a very nice suburb), for the most part in their forties and fifties, many had professional qualifications: law degrees and MBAs. Some had been on the Million Women March. Political activism was new to them. The work of those women in suburban Atlanta and similar groups across the country was instrumental in the Democrats taking control of the House of Representatives.

In 2019’s off-year elections, that same female-driven energy propelled the Democrats to victory in governor’s contests in three Southern states. Democrats won both houses of the Virginia legislature, an absolutely astonishing result.

There is no reason to think that momentum has dissipated.

Finally, there is this easily forgotten fact: in 2016 Hillary Clinton won the election by nearly 3 million votes. Trump was put into office by the archaic mechanism of the Electoral College. Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin provided Trump’s winning margin in the Electoral college. Today’s polls show Biden leading Trump in all three.

To go back to the beginning: by any historical measure, if the vote is free and fair and all the ballots counted, the Democratic candidate Joe Biden is on course to become the next President of the United States.

The next 100 days will be a measure of how much Donald Trump’s norm shattering first term has upended historical precedent and set America down a path towards authoritarian rule.