Trump may be a convicted criminal – but it doesn’t mean Biden will be a better president
Some of our most effective leaders were not averse to roguish ways, writes Patrick O'Flynn.
It is tempting to assume that the more morally upright somebody is, the better a political leader they will make.
But there is little evidence that this is the case. Some of our most effective leaders, from Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George to Boris Johnson in his “Get Brexit Done” phase, were not averse to roguish ways. By contrast, it could be argued that it was Tony Blair’s addiction to the idea of his own virtue that led us into the hell of the Iraq War.
So it does not necessarily follow that just because Donald Trump is now a convicted felon, Joe Biden will make a better leader of the free world for the four upcoming years. After all, during Trump’s first presidential term, the world largely avoided major destabilising wars – probably in part because despots everywhere worried about just what the bad man in the White House would do in retaliation should they step out of line.
It was under the presidencies of Barack Obama and then Biden that Vladimir Putin felt sufficiently emboldened to invade first Crimea and then wider Ukraine.
This does not make the prospect of a second Trump presidency, under the shadow of his felony convictions and indeed his stoking up of the Capitol Hill rioters of January 2021, any less extraordinary.
Beyond his fanatical core voters in the “MAGA” movement, most Americans see Trump as a deeply flawed individual, prepared to rip-up once cherished constitutional norms.
That a big chunk are still preparing to vote for him in November’s presidential election should give the US political establishment pause for thought. Too often, it does not.
The jubilation that greeted Trump’s convictions for what were, in truth, not terribly serious violations of business laws played straight into his narrative of a stitch-up by a liberal-left deep state.
“How will he be able to campaign from a prison cell?” crowed pro-Biden commentators. The answer is probably with brilliant effect, if it comes to that. Because the idea of a people’s champion taking on a rotten establishment and being persecuted for his willingness to do so holds a powerful appeal.
There is plenty of truth in Trump’s charges against the US establishment: that it has – for deliberate ideological reasons – presided over the collapse of border control and of policing in big cities; that it has no pride in the heritage and history of the nation; that it is becoming ever harder for ordinary people to earn a decent living free of state interference.
When prevailing orthodoxies have laid a country low, the appeal of a natural-born rule breaker is bound to grow. This backlash against over-reach by a tone-deaf elite political class, that is almost uniformly supportive of experimental “progressive” ideas and against time-honoured ways of doing things, is being replicated across the western world.
For Trump in the US, read Le Pen in France, Wilders in the Netherlands, Meloni in Italy and to an extent Nigel Farage in a British context where the electoral system makes it harder for outsider mavericks to break through.
The biggest winners from this era of ultra-polarisation in the West are despotic regimes such as Russia, China and Iran. How their leaders must laugh and lick their lips at the thought of our ruling classes having disconnected from vast swathes of society and, as a result, commanding very little intuitive loyalty from the masses. The regions of the world over which they seek to hold sway are opening up for them as a result.
A wiser West would see that its own excesses have been the catalyst for the Trump and Trump imitator phenomenons. Its nations would rein in the wokery and beef up border controls. It would stop transferring political decision-making power to undemocratic global bodies and revive the greatest device ever invented for boosting social cohesion and communal pride: the democratic nation state. That was what the Brexit rebellion was all about.
Remember how the elite crowed when the Supreme Court ruled Boris’s attempt to prorogue a Brexit-blocking Parliament unlawful? Within three months, the British people had given that rule-breaker a stonking majority to get the job done.
Trump may yet win again, or his antics may have alienated sufficient swing voters to keep Biden in power by a narrow margin. Nobody knows.
The left-leaning US political establishment considers him a monster. It should ask itself why, then, it is in danger of losing to a monster. What does that tell it about itself?
