In the days after Barack Obama’s election as US president in 2012, my wife and I found ourselves in the lounge of an elite New York club, after an awards dinner. The philanthropists who invited us were generous and hospitable, but as we settled on the sofa, a very rich woman turned and hissed, “Can you explain the liar that is Barack Hussein Obama?”
We cannot understand Donald Trump without appreciating the racial tension that divides the United States: that woman was as mystified about a black American president with a Muslim name as others are about Trump becoming president.
Trump’s personality has been widely analysed. We know that he is a convicted felon who confessed to molesting women, has no moral compass and is a ruthless narcissist. He lies repeatedly and in any other context would probably be one of many inmates with this personality profile who fill jails across the world.
This, however, is no longer the point, because Trump is more symptom than cause and his presidency serves the interests of at least four different groups.
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1. JD Vance’s Hillbillies
JD Vance, author of the bestseller Hillbilly Elegy, and who may well be the next vice-president of the USA, describes himself as “Scots-Irish” and his book documents the abjection of the poor whites of Appalachia, including his own violent alcoholic father, who moved his family to Middletown, Ohio for a well-paid job in a steel mill, only to see it close and send him into the chaos of poverty.
He documents his miserable “white trash” early life, with feckless, addicted parents and only a solid grandmother to bring him up and ultimately save him. He distinguishes his flawed tribe from the “drug-addict neighbour [who] would buy T-bone steaks, which I was too poor to buy for myself but was forced by Uncle Sam to buy for someone else”. This is probably a dog-whistle reference to black welfare.
He blames the rich elites who drove down wages for his tribe by allowing immigrants to flood into the country to be hired on cheap wages to boost the profits of the rich. This is why he supports policies of mass deportation of illegal immigrants, tariffs on imports and increases in the minimum wage to incentivise the indigenous – read, poor whites – to work in their place. The policy of further cutting taxes for the rich he justifies by saying taxing them more would not bring in much and, anyway, the tariffs on imported goods could pay for that.
Unprecedented power will magnify the extremes of Trump’s words and actions to a grotesque level
Vance’s “hillbilly” constituency spreads far beyond the Appalachians across the USA and Trump’s personality and behaviour are widely denied, discounted or approved of. They believe their status and wealth have collapsed because immigrants and other races have been advantaged by welfare and low wages, in spite of the actual wealth of non-college-educated whites being much higher than the groups they resent. Trump fuels that grievance, empowering them to regain the status they believe they lost.
[ Hillbilly Elegy author JD Vance on Barack Obama: ‘We dislike the things we envy’Opens in new window ]
2. The Christian Right
The religious right is the second constituency that will vote Trump in as president. He has delivered for fundamentalist Evangelical Protestants and Catholics by reshaping the Supreme Court and abolishing Roe v Wade. The fact that he is personally irreligious and amoral does not concern them because he is an instrument of God who often works in mysterious ways.
3. The Celebrity Outlaw Cheerleaders
How many American movies have you watched where the beleaguered cop, surrounded by corrupt or cowardly colleagues, breaks the rules to enforce his own justice? Or Charles Bronson in Death Wish, taking the law into his own hands and killing street criminals to avenge the murder of his wife?
This is the John Wayne myth that lurks deep in the American psyche. Trump taps into this outlaw hero image for many voters – even, remarkably, a minority of black Americans and even more Hispanics. His macho misogyny and barroom racist talk strikes chords in some cultures in the USA, even among groups who will suffer if, for example, he abolishes Obamacare.
Trump became a celebrity with the Apprentice television show. Celebrities are not bound by ordinary rules. Trump a felon, a racist and a molester? Hey, he’s just being Trump.
4. The Rich
Trump cuts taxes for the super-rich, frees their corporations from costly regulations and ensures that America does not, as they see it, succumb to the demographic tide of non-whiteness that could otherwise threaten an economic regime that has benefitted them handsomely ever since Reaganomics was invented. For them, Trump is a useful vehicle and they hold their nose at his crudities and excesses.
If he is elected, Trump will take revenge on everyone he feels has persecuted him, beginning with a special prosecutor for the defeated Joe Biden, and going on to target people such as Gen Mark Milley, former chairman of the chiefs of staff, who thwarted Trump. He will devote an enormous amount of his presidential time to these personal feuds.
But Project 2025 – the radical blueprint by the conservative Heritage Foundation that outlines a massive expansion of presidential power – is a much more worrying blueprint for what he will do. Unlike after his first and unexpected election victory, Trump’s team is now super-prepared for four years of radical reshaping of American administration and democracy. This includes proposals to sack civil servants and create a partisan, loyalist cadre. Federal agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency will become a servant to industry rather than external regulators.
As climate change is viewed as a hoax, all policies directed at it will be reversed. The checks and balances that have kept USA as a largely predictable power will be swept away and presidential power will lose most of its fetters. Combined with the Supreme Court’s award of presidential immunity, Trump will feel almost entirely unconstrained in what he can do, and this unprecedented power will magnify the extremes of his words and actions to a grotesque level.
The Trumpian view of the European Union is of a militarily weak, economically failing and socialist cabal, and so he will fatally undermine Nato, slap punitive tariffs on EU goods and turn away with a warlike gaze towards China.
Meanwhile, Vladmir Putin is smiling and planning.
[ Edward Luce: Europe should brace itself for TrumpOpens in new window ]
Prof Ian Robertson is founding director of the Global Brain Health Institute at Trinity College Dublin and author of How Confidence Works: The new science of self-belief (Penguin, 2022)
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