10.11.2022

Trump’s bubble bursts

The Republicans’ red wave turned into a ripple. With results still coming in, Daniel Lazare gives his assessment of the US midterms and their likely effects

Amid the muddle of this week’s US midterm elections, the only thing that has come through loud and clear is that the Trump bubble has burst.

To be sure, a couple of Trump-backed Republican candidates have prevailed (sort of). JD Vance - a best-selling author who started out as a critic of the ex-president, only to morph into a fully-fledged member of the pro-Trump cult - has won a clear victory in the Senate race in Ohio, the country’s seventh-most populous state. While Republican senatorial candidate Herschel Walker, another Trump pick, is narrowly trailing Democrat Raphael Warnock in Georgia, he appears to be doing well enough at the time of writing to force Warnock into a run-off election early next month. So he may win after all.

That is the good news for Trump. The bad is worse. To wit:

In Pennsylvania, the country’s fifth most populous state, Mehmet Oz - a physician turned celebrity TV pitchman, whom Trump promised would “work and fight for Pennsylvanians” - lost to John Fetterman, a decidedly untelegenic ex-mayor of a burned-out steel town, whose wardrobe consists mostly of sweatshirts and shorts. “Fetterman may dress like a teenager getting high in his parents’ basement, but he’s a raging lunatic hell-bent on springing hardened criminals out of jail in the middle of the worst crime wave in Pennsylvania history,” Trump said in September. But it looks like voters prefer the rumpled Fetterman to a medical huckster notorious for pushing phony weight-loss schemes.
In the Pennsylvania gubernatorial contest, Josh Shapiro has prevailed against Doug Mastriano, a Trump-endorsed Christian fundamentalist, who attacked his Democratic opponent for living “in a privileged neighbourhood”, attending a “privileged, exclusive, elite” Jewish religious school, and therefore having “disdain for people like us”. Trump may not think there is anything wrong with covert anti-Semitism like this, but a strong majority of Pennsylvanians fortunately disagree.
In Georgia, Republican secretary of state Brad Raffensperger - the election official who resisted Trump’s plea to “find 11,780 votes”, so he could say he won the state in 2020 - won easily as well.
Most galling of all for the real-estate magnate, far-right governor Ron DeSantis handily defeated Democrat Charlie Crist in Florida. Trump has recently taken to mocking the ambitious DeSantis as “Ron DeSanctimonious”. But, fresh off his victory in the Sunshine State, it looks like DeSantis is now in a position to give Trump a run for his money in the race for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024.

Trump could well be going down the same road as Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro - another would-be strong man, who found his strength unexpectedly ebbing when he lost to ex-president Lula da Silva on October 30. Trump had been expected to formally announce his re-election bid as early as next week. But whether or not he follows through, there is no doubt that the midterms have taken the wind out of his sails.

“Look at Kari,” Trump said at one point about Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake. She is “winning with very little money. And if they say, ‘How is your family?,’ she says the election was rigged and stolen. You’ll lose if you go soft.” Unfortunately, Republican senatorial candidate Blake Masters took Trump’s advice all too seriously and, after going around the state insisting that Trump won in 2020, he is now losing by four points.¹ (Lake is also trailing Democrat Katie Hobbs, although she may still be able to close the gap and eke out a win.)

The lustre is plainly off the Trump brand. By the same token, Democrats appear to be in distinctly better shape. The party had everything against it going into the elections - inflation, rising crime rates, an unpopular war, and a semi-senile president whose approval ratings have hovered in the dismal low 40s for the last 12 months. Normally, factors like these would spell disaster. But the fact that Dems seem to have held their own means that the party that has won the popular vote in seven out of the last eight presidential elections still commands something like long-term majority support. No-one likes ‘Sleepy Joe’ - and who can blame them? He can barely read a sentence off a teleprompter, his political ‘ideas’ are a string of half-baked clichés, and after sparking one war with Russia, he seems intent of provoking another with China in the western Pacific.

This makes him a serious danger to the world at large. But, as bad as Biden is, voters appear to have decided that an increasingly unhinged, demagogic, and anti-democratic Republican Party is even worse.

Gridlock

Is it progress? Perhaps. But the fundamentals have not changed one iota. Despite their lacklustre performance, Republicans are still more likely than not to take control of both the House and Senate. Even if they dial down the vitriol for the moment, that means that gridlock is poised for yet another rebound - as are frustration, anger, brinksmanship, and all the other poisonous side effects that go with it.

Having vowed to bring the Biden administration to a standstill, it is hard to imagine Republicans pausing their offensive for very long. As inflation mounts and the Federal Reserve’s credit-tightening policies push the country into recession - assuming it is not there already - they will therefore do everything they can to block White House efforts to deal with the crisis. For American workers, that means facing increasingly harsh conditions, precisely as the deterioration intensifies.

The midterm results will have little effect on foreign policy, since arms shipments to Ukraine, stepped-up sanctions against Russia and the like enjoy high levels of bipartisan support. The same goes for Beijing, since China-bashing is an even more popular sport on Capitol Hill. Back when the Biden administration looked like it was heading for an electoral rout, imperial policy seemed to be hanging in the balance. Centrists like Germany’s hapless Olaf Scholz perhaps thought they would gain a bit more wiggle room if Biden’s foreign policy met with a rebuff at the polls. ‘Atlanticists’ like Giorgia Meloni in Italy and Rishi Sunak in the UK might similarly have feared winding up isolated and exposed. But, now that the administration has avoided the worst, the opposite is the case - Meloni and Sunak have ended up strengthened for the time being, while Scholz’s position is increasingly precarious.

But what is good for Meloni and Sunak is bad news for global society in general, since resurgent US imperialism is clearly on a collision course with reality. Having dodged one bullet, the Biden administration is placing itself directly in the path of another, as its foreign policy turns more and more reckless.

Indeed, the dark side of the midterms is that neoconservatives may have wound up stronger, now that Democratic bellicosity seems to be paying off. Fetterman, for example, has drawn sympathy for a stroke that left him cognitively impaired in May. But he still managed to engage in a remarkable display of Democratic chest-thumping by attacking Oz for relying on Chinese manufacturers for some of the items he hawks on TV. “China is not our friend,” Fetterman reminded him in a debate last month, adding that “the best way for America to establish its dominance” and “punch Putin” would be to “unleash the energy here in Pennsylvania and across the country”.

Bashing presidents is what passes for foreign policy out in the hinterlands. In Arizona, Democratic senatorial candidate Mark Kelly has garnered sympathy not only because he is an ex-astronaut married to Gabby Giffords - a former congresswoman left severely incapacitated by a 2011 assassination attempt - but also because he is running against the loony-right Blake Masters, who not only opposes Roe v Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalising abortion, but Griswold v Connecticut, the 1965 ruling legalising contraceptives.²

But, just because Masters is a horror does not mean that Kelly is much better. He is still a standard-issue Democratic Russia-baiter, who wants to impose more economic sanctions, investigate Vladimir Putin for war crimes, and block Chinese exports of rare-earth metals as well.³ The same goes for Democratic Senator Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada, who appears to be losing to Republican Adam Laxalt. Having joined with rightwing Republicans to block Chinese technology and rein in Chinese political activities, she is another Democrat who thinks that beating up on China is good, clean fun.⁴ Ditto Senator Michael Bennet - a Democrat who has just won re-election in Colorado and who has not only hopped on the anti-China bandwagon by accusing Beijing of using “financial ties to suppress negative information about the CCP [Chinese Communist Party]”, but has also called for government measures against companies that abide by the boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaign against Israel.⁵

The midterms did see an unqualified progressive victory in one regard, however. This is in the area of abortion rights. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s shocking June 24 decision overturning Roe v Wade, voters in Michigan, California and Vermont have strongly approved measures locking in reproductive freedom. As a result, the Vermont state constitution now includes a plank declaring:

… an individual’s right to personal reproductive autonomy is central to the liberty and dignity to determine one’s own life course and shall not be denied or infringed, unless justified by a compelling state interest achieved by the least restrictive means,⁶

This is more than good news - it is downright thrilling. But Vermont, the home of Bernie Sanders, has long been an abortion-rights stronghold, so the referendum does not change the balance of power overall. Thanks to the Supreme Court, abortion is still banned or severely limited in 14 states, representing 26% of the US population, and under serious threat in at least eight more. If banning abortion amounts to a form of neo-slavery, in which government asserts control over female reproductive organs, then the United States is once again half-slave and half-free. The situation is no more tenable now than it was in the 1850s.

Trump is losing steam, as the crisis pauses for a moment. But rest assured - it will soon be back in full.