Donald Trump and the cognitive decline of the American empire

Republican candidate for President Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley addresses a crowd of supporters during a Get Out The Vote campaign stop at the Tuscan Village in Salem, New Hampshire, USA, 22 January 2024. Haley is battling against opponent former US President Donald Trump in the New Hampshire Republican Primary to be held on 23 January 2024. EPA-EFE/CJ GUNTHER

By Phillip van Niekerk

24 Jan 2024

We’ll never know whether Donald Trump’s brain lapses helped Nikki Haley exceed expectations in the Republican Party primary in New Hampshire on Tuesday, but they gave her a stick to beat him with and it hurt.

The Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary are stamping grounds for “retail” politics. It’s where candidates get up close and personal with real voters.

When Ron DeSantis started campaigning a year ago he was leading Trump in the polls, but he bombed when voters discovered what his hometown newspaper The Miami Herald could have told them – that he had “all the charisma of burnt toast”.

DeSantis dropped out on Sunday night, after blowing $150-million on a few thousand votes in Iowa.

Trump dodged the debates and skipped most of the flesh pumping so he could grandstand as the victim at court venues in New York where his sordid legal difficulties are playing out.

When he hit the New Hampshire campaign trail last weekend, he sometimes looked confused as he ad-libbed and babbled his way around the state. He bragged that he had recently “aced” a cognitive test in which he was able to tell the difference between a giraffe, a tiger and a whale.

Trump and Fox News have mercilessly attacked President Joe Biden for his age (81) and his alleged mental decline, but anyone paying attention could see which of the two candidates shows signs of dementia.

Haley went there. She questioned Trump’s mental fitness after he repeatedly confused her with former Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, insisting that Haley was head of security during the attack on the Capitol on 6 January.

“I wasn’t even in DC on January 6th, I wasn’t even in office then,” she said, shaking her head.

Vice-president or thorn in the side?

Even though Haley does not have a serious shot at the Republican nomination, the former UN ambassador has shown political skill and rekindled the possibility of life after the Maga cult for the GOP.

New Hampshire was her best shot – a state where independents can vote in the Republican primary and where some vestige of the old GOP is still standing. She was enthusiastically shepherded around by the popular governor, Chris Sununu, and still fell short by 10 points.

The next primary in a month’s time is in South Carolina, Haley’s home state where she was governor, but is trailing Trump by 35 points.

She claims that she has momentum, but it’s bang in the middle of the Bible belt where she will be up against Trump’s most zealous and angriest followers, the older white evangelicals.

Even if Trump morphs into an actual cabbage, he will be the Republican candidate in the November election.

Read more in Daily Maverick: Trump Wins New Hampshire Republican Primary Over Haley

The question now is whether Haley will remain a thorn in Trump’s side or join the queue wanting to be considered for the vice-presidency or a cabinet post.

She didn’t sound like she was in the mood on Tuesday night when she lambasted Trump and said: “The worst-kept secret in politics is how badly the Democrats want to run against Donald Trump.”

Trump’s vindictive victory, saying that Haley would be investigated “for stuff she doesn’t want to talk about”, was not an invitation to be nice.

Trump has a much better well-oiled electoral machine this time and his early conquest of the Republican Party gives him the rest of the year to bombard Biden and the White House.

South Carolina Senator Tim Scott dropped out last week and went as far as staging a wedding proposal on the beach – “we weren’t expecting that”, quipped Trump with a nudge and a wink. Clearly, in the modern GOP you can’t be black and gay.

(Haley’s problem might be that she is a woman and a person of colour).

The smart money for Trump’s VP is on New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, a Maga hero since she demolished the careers of the presidents of Harvard, MIT and Penn State at a congressional hearing into anti-Semitism last month.

Read more in Daily Maverick: Harvard chief’s shock exit exposes decade-spanning fractures

But Trump is likely to draw it out a la The Apprentice to inject some adrenaline into the campaign, though the bigger mystery is why anyone would want the job.

Trump’s last vice-president, Mike Pence, sheltered with his family in a loading dock under the Capitol on 6 January 2021 while a Maga lynch mob roamed the halls chanting “Hang Mike Pence”. Atlantic Magazine columnist David Frum is reminded of an audition to be Henry VIII’s sixth wife.

Repeat of the nightmare

Carl Bildt, the former prime minister of Sweden, told CNN that “2024 is the year of 50 or so elections around the world. But there is only one election we are all talking about: the one in America.”

So, what are the chances that the Trump nightmare will be revisited upon the US and the world, except many times worse than before?

Trump has a much better well-oiled electoral machine this time and his early conquest of the Republican Party gives him the rest of the year to bombard Biden – who is old – and the White House. It promises to be ugly.

His base is rock-solid and believes everything he says: For instance, 81% of Republicans agree with Trump’s statement – identical to Adolf Hitler’s blood libel against the Jews – that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of America”.

He owns the Republican Party and has powerful backers with lots of money and millions of small donors who don’t mind paying his legal fees.

Last week the billionaires and CEOs who gathered at Davos agreed, according to the New York Times, that Trump will win re-election.

They look at Trump and see tax cuts, crushed unions and trains running on time.

“In private, many business and political leaders at the World Economic Forum say they expect Donald Trump to return to the White House,” the Times noted, adding that “the Davos crowd often gets things wrong”.

That’s not an endorsement per se. But Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, praised Trump’s policies on Nato, China, taxes and immigration.

Dimon was less concerned about the Biden campaign’s main theme – that the future of democracy is at stake – than the Democrats hurting the feelings of the Maga crowd.

But then, as Will Bunch wrote in the Philadelphia Enquirer, much of corporate America has long been cool with dictators. “They look at Trump and see tax cuts, crushed unions and trains running on time.”

Robert Reich, a former Labour Secretary and a left-wing critic of Democratic and Republican administrations, described Biden’s policies on trade and industrial policy, against monopoly corporate power and support for unions, as the biggest sea change in American politics in 50 years. That is a perspective that you won’t often see in the mainstream media but explains why the billionaire and millionaires generally don’t like Biden.

The middle-of-the-roaders

Nikki Haley’s most important contribution has arguably been to expose a vulnerability that could doom Trump in the general election in November: Independent and moderate voters really don’t like him.

In Iowa, 43% of Haley’s supporters said they would vote for Biden over Trump. That’s only a tiny fraction of the Republican electorate but could be decisive in a close election.

The two impeachments and 91 indictments have only intensified support for Trump among the fan base. Either he is the most persecuted president in American history or the most criminal – and for the Maga crowd to accept the latter would be like abandoning their faith.

Trump does not have policies. It is just nihilism and narcissism. He wants to be at the head of the most powerful country in the world so he can stay out of jail.

By contrast, the middle-of-the-roaders are bothered by the criminal charges, by the fact that Trump attempted to overthrow a democratic election, that he has vowed retribution against his enemies if he wins, and that his rants on Truth Social are growing ever more deranged.

They have no love for Russian President Vladimir Putin who must be congratulating himself on the investment he made in Trump. Even as Ukraine is running out of ammunition, the Maga caucus in the House of Representatives are blocking aid for the fighters on the front lines at the behest of Trump.

At the same time Trump loyalists are killing a bipartisan immigration deal so that he can continue to blame Biden for the chaos at the border.

Trump does not have policies. It is just nihilism and narcissism. He wants to be at the head of the most powerful country in the world so he can stay out of jail.

If he loses no one doubts that he will deny the outcome and once again try every trick in the book to overturn the result.

In his bonkers speeches he is demanding total immunity for crimes he commits, including, as his lawyers conceded in court, the right to send Seal Team 6 to assassinate political rivals. Even the supreme court is unlikely to go along with that.

The right-wing ideologue and Trump acolyte Stephen Miller is excitedly drawing up plans for the largest crackdown on “illegal” immigrants in history, with mass deportations and concentration camps on the border.

It’s the economy, stupid

Biden supporters point out that in every election since the supreme court, strengthened by three Trump picks, threw out Roe v Wade, the Democrats have outperformed the polls, including stopping an expected red wave in 2022.

Removing a constitutional right from women is not an issue for only one electoral cycle, not when Republicans continue to threaten a national ban on abortions.

Trump’s problem is that he is not even entertaining any more. He is just a gross old guy with make-up and bad hair who can’t remember his lines.

Despite Trump’s depiction of America as a hellscape that he needs to rescue, the US has its lowest unemployment rate in 60 years, inflation is almost back to historic norms, real wages are rising, violent crime is down, and the stock market is in record territory. Consumer sentiment is starting to catch up.

Of course, Trump, even in his dotage, is a shrewd operator who knows how to push people’s buttons and generate chaos.

The two old men who are sizing each other up for their final slugfest have one thing in common: People tend to underestimate them.

Biden might not be everybody’s first choice but as he constantly points out: “Don’t compare me to the almighty – compare me to the alternative.”

Trump’s problem is that he is not even entertaining any more. He is just a gross old guy with make-up and bad hair who can’t remember his lines.

Trump is starting to resemble another Haley – Bill Haley (no relation to Nikki), whose 1955 hit with the Comets, Rock Around the Clock, made him the first rock star of the modern era.

That is, until his fans saw him in person on stage – a middle-aged chubby man with a goofy kiss curl on his forehead – and dumped him for sexier alternatives.

Of course, Donald Trump does not see Elvis Presley in his rear-view mirror, just Joe Biden in his aviators. DM

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Politics

Vice-president or thorn in the side?

Repeat of the nightmare

The middle-of-the-roaders

It’s the economy, stupid