Trump has poisoned US democracy

Published by The i paper (4th November, 2024)

Four years ago, I was talking to voters in West Virginia when I met a young black woman called Brittney. Since polls showed an 85 per cent lead for Joe Biden among black women, I assumed she would be backing the Democrats, especially after learning she came from the liberal bastion of California.

But Brittney told me she was voting for Donald Trump since she was “pro-life, pro-country and pro-flag”. She went on to detail how she had switched to his side after working on Hillary Clinton’s campaign in the previous election – and that this decision provoked such fury she had fallen out with her parents, siblings and friends, leading her to move to the other side of the country.

Her story underlined the scale of divisions plaguing the United States, intensified by Trump’s abrasive style of populism and then worsened by his damaging refusal to accept defeat. Speaking to voters again over the past couple of weeks, I find them invariably affable and open about their politics. Yet it often feels as if the red and blue tribes inhabit different worlds as they discuss key issues such as immigration, inflation, abortion and the perceived threat to their democracy. And these divisions feel even deeper, the outlook gloomier, the media bubbles stronger, the political discourse more corrosive, than when I reported on previous presidential elections.

Now it is not hard to find citizens with stories that echo Brittney’s. When I went out to watch Democrats canvassing in Doylestown, a prosperous suburb of Philadelphia in the pivotal state of Pennsylvania, a middle-class mother on the doorstep told me how frightened she was of events unless there was a Trump landslide. “As long as he wins, I think we avoid civil war,” she said.

Then this woman, a thoughtful senior official in a neighbouring state and supporter of Kamala Harris, went on to tell me that she had not spoken to her Trump-supporting sister for months. “We don’t even do Thanksgiving with them any more because we can’t spend time together since it inevitably comes up. She’s kinda cut herself off from everybody.”

Cherise Udell, a canvasser who had travelled with her teenage daughter from Utah to assist the Democrats, then told me she had not talked to her mother since the last election. “She says I am an enemy of the state because I did not support him – she told that to my daughter. We keep trying to call, send her gifts, but she refuses to talk. She’s cut us off.”

Her relationship with her brother and a cousin was also frozen for four years until they started speaking again at a wedding in the summer. Her daughter Ella added that it felt “horrible” to be blanked by her own grandmother, showing with stark clarity the anguish caused by this family rift.

It is alarming and sad to hear such stories exposing fissures so deep in the world’s most important democracy that a mother brands her own daughter an enemy of the state for holding differing political views. We had a taste of this in our own country over the foolish Brexit referendum, but the poison seeping through US society is far more toxic as people tumble down hate-filled rabbit holes on social media.

Others told me of friendships fractured, such as a young man flirting with supporting Trump who said this suggestion so enraged a friend they no longer spoke. This is a legacy of Trump’s demagoguery, election denialism and furious talk of revenge, so he deserves much blame for this state of affairs, along with the party that refused to disavow him. But such divisions are inflamed also when foes brand him a fascist.

The US also shows the gender divide opening in many Western democracies. Trump may claim “women love me” but polls indicate his rival to be far ahead with female voters, outweighing his own lead among men. This is unsurprising given all the claims of sexual abuse, his macho campaigning and the abortion issue. There are, however, millions more women registered to vote with female voters exceeding male voters in every presidential election since I was born six decades ago.

One stunning poll in Iowa even suggests female voters may be driving a late shift to Harris in Iowa, a state Trump won by eight points in 2020. So will women save America and the world from another four years of his destructive and self-absorbed populism?

This is another knife-edge election, reliant on a handful of swing states under their anachronistic electoral college system rather than a majority of votes (which would have seen the Democrats win all but one of the presidential elections since George Bush trounced Michael Dukakis in 1988)

In the absence of a landslide, which seems unlikely, things could get messy whichever side is victorious. Trump and his allies are already talking of cheating and fraud, seeding the ground for another attempt to overturn the verdict of voters if he loses again. But if he wins by a slender margin, there could be legal challenges that end up in the Supreme Court, already seen by many on the left as an institution corrupted by partisan Republican stooges.

There are profound fears on both sides of the tribal divide in this county awash with lawyers and guns, where there is already routine talk about potential for civil war, especially if it results in many angry men. Alarmist or not, one consequence of Trump’s stolen election myth has been the degradation of American democracy, with polls finding a majority of Republican voters believe his bogus claim that he was robbed of rightful victory.

This loss of trust, combined with declining faith in institutions such as the courts and media, is dangerous since democracy depends on consent – and the free world depends on the US, for all its faults and flaws, at a time when we witness sustained assault on liberty by an alliance of autocracies. We face a seismic week in history.

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