The Chinese virus is alive and kicking, and even more vicious than before. Bowing to electoral expediency, Trump assured America that a vaccine would come within weeks. Medical specialists predict no relief before 2022. A vaccine is not imminent.
Hoopla is an Americanism and means the excitement surrounding an event or situation especially when considered to be an unnecessary fuss. It is also a British game in which rings are thrown from a fixed line to encircle one of several prizes.
Both are accurate descriptions of the 2020 US Presidential election. Except that the line, red (Republican) or blue (Democrat), was crossed several times by both contenders.
Based on my understanding of American values and preferences, I had predicted a Donald Trump victory in 2020.
I was wrong.
In a race down to the wire, America voted primarily with its mind, instead of with both its heart and its mind.
The US Presidential election is the most watched in the world.
This campaign was always a referendum on Trump, his capability and integrity, rather than an affirmative endorsement of Biden and his agenda. You were either for Trump or against him.
With the madness of the past few days, with clashes and violence, the day of the elections (3 November 2020) was the lull after the storm.
With almost 100 million Americans having voted early (either in-person early voting or via postal ballots), the halfway mark of those eligible and likely to vote had been crossed, for the first time in a century.
Another 60 million voted on 3 November 2020.
The Trump team feels that the unprecedented postal ballots can be manipulated. Trump complained that this would “allow rampant and unchecked cheating” that would undermine “our entire system of laws”.
He criticised a Supreme Court decision that Pennsylvania (a crucial swing state) mail-in ballots could be counted up to three days after Election Day as long as they were postmarked by Election Day.
A federal judge has also rejected Republican Party efforts to invalidate over 125,000 Texas early votes.
This is a battle for the soul of America. In many ways, the clash of ideas goaded me to re-read political scientist and historian Samuel Huntingdon’s 2004 classic: “Who are we? The challenges to America’s national identity”.
So what is the real America?
America was founded by British settlers who brought with them a distinct culture, according to Huntington, including the English language, Protestant values, individualism, religious commitment, equality of opportunity and respect for law.
The waves of immigrants that later came to the United States gradually accepted these values and assimilated into America’s Anglo-Protestant culture and accepted its creed.
More recently, however, America’s national identity has been eroded by the challenge of assimilating massive numbers of Hispanic and other immigrants (some people call it rampant tribalism) and by issues such as multilingualism, multiculturalism, multi-religionism, the devaluation of citizenship, and the “denationalization” of American elites.
September 11 nine years ago brought a revival of American patriotism and a renewal of American identity. It also marked the end of political correctness regarding Islamic terrorism.
2020 is a quest to bring back American exceptionalism and leadership, that was on stark display following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
As Huntingdon predicted, the battle for ideologies had been won. Now it was the struggle of civilizations.
One placard that I saw on the day of the balloting was held by a girl not much older than 10 years. It read: “I want my America”.
It is clear who she would vote for if she could.
When Donald Trump fought the elections in 2016, it was as an outsider, who promised to drain the Washington swamp. He was relatively unknown.
He upended everything that his predecessor stood for, beginning with America’s foreign policy. The Obama Administration asked him to punish North Korea for its nuclear obduracy. He embraced the North Korean leader and held two summits.
While the Iran-Iraq War, which began in September 1980, was going on, in 1984, United States sanctions prohibited weapon sales and all US assistance to Iran followed a decade later by a ban on all trade with and investment in Iran.
Obama’s team prided itself on reaching an agreement with Iran to withdraw Western and UN sanctions against a verifiable promise to halt its nuclear programme. These sanctions have been in place for over 35 years.
Trump, totally distrusting Tehran, trashed the deal.
Liberal thinkers in the US argued that Islamists could be redeemed by incorporating them into the global system. If they could taste the goodies of the free world, they would reform their attitudes.
Trump, believing with reason that radical Islamists hated America (more out of envy than anything else), promptly banned immigration from several Muslim countries and took the legal challenge head on.
And when the Dictator (sorry Director) General of the World Health Organization sought instructions from Beijing on what to say to the world about the virus, Trump was furious. While the Director General was composing hosannas to Xi Jinping of China, Americans were dying. Donald Trump, as only Donald Trump can, pulled out of the WHO.
The Presidential election in the US is not a national election. It is a series of state-by-state elections that determine the winner of the Electoral College.
While most states are known to be Democratic or Republican, there are several battleground or likely “tipping point” states—the ones that could prove to be decisive in a close race.
At the time of filing this report, the President’s team has filed appeals against the voting patterns in several “swing states” that seemed to be veering to his challenger.
Donald Trump does not like to lose.
Issues were relegated to the background (except China and its virus). Personal attacks got nastier and nastier.
Trump’s core constituency, non-college degree white Americans, responded enthusiastically to his call to Make America Great Again.
For tens of millions of people to double down and vote for Trump again in 2020 is an assertion by those voters that Donald Trump (owing to his platform) was and remains their preference for the most powerful job in the world.
These are people who believe that their grandparents and parents built America. They do not wish to see America ruined by “those goddamned immigrants and Muslims”.
Pollsters, scarred by their dismal failure four years ago, took to analysing previous elections to camouflage their inability to predict the 2020 White House occupant.
Russia dominated the 2016 elections.
But in 2020 Biden has not dwelt on the well-worn topics of Trump’s soft spot for Putin or Kremlin meddling in the American elections through social media disinformation campaigns—in part because coronavirus has cast such a long shadow over the election and the Biden team felt that voters were tired of hearing about Russia.
The most resonant issues for American voters were:
1) Chinese virus
2) Economy
3) Islamic terrorism
4) Immigration
Whatever the election results, the Chinese virus is alive and kicking, and even more vicious than before. Bowing to electoral expediency, Trump assured America that a vaccine would come within weeks. Well respected medical specialists predict no relief before 2022. A vaccine is not imminent.
Realising American anger over the Chinese virus, Joe Biden swore to be even tougher on China than Trump had been.
Figures released a few days before election day showed the economy rebounding healthily. The stock market is roaring. Employment is back up.
In a recent poll, 41% of voters said they were doing better than when Trump took office, compared with only 20% who described themselves as worse off.
Adopting the President’s priorities, over half of American voters cited the virus and the economy as their most pressing concerns. 49% said the economy was good or excellent, and 48% approved of his government’s handling of the virus.
On the economy, Trump seemed to be doing well. In the choice between lives and livelihoods, Donald Trump tried to choose both.
Demand is back strongly, as are jobs. Demand exceeds supply (thanks to enforced savings during the first lockdown and stimulus cheques) and waiting periods for cars and white goods (even for paint cans) are increasing!
Through wanton violence in several cities, most recently Philadelphia (where the Governor deployed the National Guard), the Black Lives Matter movement lost its credibility.
The random shooting of two police officers in New Orleans four days before the elections reinforced this perception of wanton motiveless violence.
On 1 June, New York police arrested some anti-Trump demonstrators. The law enforcement agencies were on edge.
I drove around Manhattan on the evening of 2 November 2020. Several “high attraction” stores were boarding up, remembering the organised but horrible looting in upmarket areas of New York City in the first week of June, following the death of an African American in what appeared to be excessive use of force.
According to media reports, this happened across America. Since the results have not been formally announced, the shops have not reopened.
Looters prefer branded and easy to sell items—mobiles, clothes, electronics, cosmetics.
In June, some cars, with out-of-state licence plates, dropped off looters equipped with power tools, and then came back just in time to pick them up with their merchandise. After the initial violence, police stopped Uber and Lyft and rental electric bikes that were being used by the looters to zip across town and return with plundered merchandise.
And, as we saw on television then, all the looters were black.
In America, riots accompanied by looting, reflect socio-economic frustration and used to be spontaneous. In recent months, perceived police brutality or excessive use of force against members of the black community, has created a class of experienced looters who show up wherever there are civil disturbances.
Kamala Harris, who parades her black ancestry, maintained a thundering silence. It did her reputation no good.
In vibrant democracies like India, gratuitous violence is often generated by political parties to destabilise and discredit the government of the day. For them, Indian lives, of any colour, do not matter. With a half Sikh family, I remember 1984.
Given that more than a dozen investigations and civil suits involving Trump are currently under way, he could be looking at an endgame even more perilous than the one confronted by Richard Nixon.
Presidential historian Michael Beschloss said of Trump, “If he loses, you have a situation that’s not dissimilar to that of Nixon when he resigned. Nixon spoke of the cell door clanging shut.”
On 2 June 2020, amid the saturation coverage of the election, news came about the six simultaneous Islamic “terror” attacks in Vienna (just before the Chinese virus lockdown) that killed several people. It was reported in detail by news anchors, while the ISIS attack on Kabul University earlier the same day that killed tens of students was relegated to the ticker.
White America does not like Muslims. Trump understands that, and does not care about political correctness.
Ultimately, Trump’s hardcore constituency, middle America, stood by him. This American middle class resents immigrants and are angry that almost 15% of Americans are born outside the country. Their unshakeable faith is that their ancestors built America. And they want their country back.
Donald Trump promised them that he would give it back. He alleged that Joe Biden and his Jamaican-Indian immigrant running mate (Kamala Harris) would open the floodgates to desperate refugees from violence-wracked Latin America.
Questions over the business dealings of Joe Biden’s son in Ukraine did not resonate much beyond Trump’s core base (although it undeniably cost the Democratic challenger many votes), with attempts to reopen allegations of Biden’s alleged wrongdoing in Ukraine not being covered by the anti-Trump mass media.
The final result has not yet been officially declared at the time of going to press. Joe Biden seems to be the likely winner.
Hopefully, the Proud Boys, a far-right men’s organisation with a history of instigating violence, whom the President asked to “stand back and stand by,” after being asked to condemn white supremacists and self-described militia groups during the first presidential debate, will gracefully accept the verdict.
Or America is in for more uncertainty, the world will be poorer for it and China will gloat that its system is far superior, where “election” results are decided 30 years in advance.
Deepak Vohra is former Indian Ambassador to Armenia, Georgia, Sudan, South Sudan, Poland and Lithuania.