America faces a woeful choice between criminality and senility

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As the clock ticks down to the presidential election next November, American voters face a woeful choice between criminality and senility: between one candidate who is morally unfit for office, and the other who increasingly appears mentally unfit.

The presidential race of 2024 will be the most discouraging of our lifetimes. What a difference from only 15 years ago, when the choice was between John McCain and Barack Obama: one, a genuine war hero and elder statesman of the Senate; the other, an eloquent, self-made first-term senator who came from nowhere to win the presidency through brilliance and charm. (Of course, Obama was a disappointment in office, but given the sky-high expectations that carried him to the White House, that was always going to be the case.)

A battle for the ages, of the aged.Credit:

Not that there haven’t been dreadful alternatives before: think of the Gerald Ford-Jimmy Carter race in 1976, or the Donald Trump-Hilary Clinton contest of 2016. Yet, next year’s choice – assuming Biden stays in the race – looks uniquely dire.

Until now, the conventional wisdom has been that while Trump would have no difficulty locking up the Republican nomination, Biden would win because of independent voters. The election would be all about Trump, and if you’re not with him, you’re against him. In such a polarised contest, independents would reluctantly default to Biden.

That assumption is now looking shaky.

The several criminal prosecutions have not, so far, significantly dented Trump’s approval ratings. While they were always going to galvanise his base – for whom every new indictment reinforces their belief that Trump is the victim of an establishment mega-conspiracy – what has surprised pundits is how independents have reacted. While they still break in Biden’s favour, they have not fled from Trump in droves.

In a bitterly divided America, cynical and weary voters have become so used to Trump’s outrageous behaviour that it has lost its capacity to shock. It has become the new normal. Even for independents who don’t like him, Trump has so stretched the boundaries of what counts as impermissible political conduct that they barely exist any more.

There is a second reason why, whatever the justice system throws at him, Trump remains competitive. That is Biden himself.

In 2020, Trump was the only issue: he was, effectively, running against himself. Biden – never a strong candidate – was just the default choice for those determined to see Trump out of the Oval Office.

Today – while paradoxically Trump still commands more attention than the President himself – Biden is as much the issue as Trump. Which means that, as 2024 approaches, the question of Biden’s fitness for office – mental and physical – looms increasingly large. For all Trump’s faults, this is one problem he does not have. And while years of appalling behaviour have worn even middle Americans down to a weary familiarity with Trump’s character, the attention to Biden’s physical frailty has escalated. It was certainly there in 2020, but the COVID lockdown enabled him to mitigate the issue. This time, he has nowhere to hide.

President Joe Biden met with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy last week.Credit: Evan Vucci

As the President’s stamina and alertness are tested daily on the campaign trail, the comparisons between a visibly feeble, sometimes disoriented Biden and a belligerent, energetic Trump will become sharper. It will not only be Trump about whom the question is asked (although for different reasons): is he fit for office? Meanwhile, the President’s physical and mental capacity sets up an alternative narrative to the challenger’s character issues and legal hurdles. The weaker Biden gets physically, the stronger Trump gets politically.

And so, commentators on both sides of the Atlantic are now starting to think the unthinkable and asking what a second Trump term would look like. Last week, the former UK Foreign Secretary William Hague declared in his column in The Times: “The time has come to prepare for Trump.” This month’s issue of Foreign Affairs – the voice of the US foreign policy establishment – was devoted to the theme (in the words of its leading article) “Bracing for Trump 2.0″.

Leaving aside the even deeper fragmentation which a “revenge Presidency” might mean for America domestically, it is in foreign policy that Australia has most to be concerned. Trump’s first term was characterised by a nativist isolationism which manifested itself in impatience with allies and belligerent economic nationalism. While Biden has continued his predecessor’s economic protectionism, his foreign policy has sought to redeem America’s reputation as a reliable ally and defender of the rules-based global order.

Biden’s firm support for Ukraine in the face of Republican hostility in Congress – on display again last week during President Zelensky’s visit to Washington – is the emblem of that liberal internationalism. Meanwhile, Trump Republicans look set to make opposition to continuing military support for Ukraine a signature election issue. Significantly, in the first Republican debate (in Trump’s absence), the only candidate to make a strong defence of the commitment to Ukraine was former UN ambassador Nikki Haley. Republicans have come a long way since the glory days of Ronald Reagan.

As the campaign progresses, the “not our war” mantra will become more insistent. There is every reason to fear abandonment of Ukraine by a new Trump administration – perhaps as part of a “grand bargain” with Putin – with all the messages that would send to authoritarian rulers elsewhere.
For Australia, whose strategic policy is premised not just on the security of the ANZUS alliance but the willingness of the US administration to project power to defend the liberal international order, there is nothing to be welcomed in a return of Donald Trump to the Oval Office.

George Brandis is a former high commissioner to the UK, and a former Liberal senator and federal attorney-general. He is now a professor in the practice of national security at the ANU’s National Security College.

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