Republished with Permission
Peter Williams
Writer and broadcaster for half a century. Now watching from the sidelines although verbalising thoughts on www.reality check.radio three days a week.
This Substack predicted it eight days out.
But to be honest you did not need to be Nostradamus to call it. That so many seemed surprised by the margin of Donald Trump’s victory shows (a) that the Western population is split into parallel universes and (b) identity politics is dead and buried. (NB Green Party.)
Kamala Harris is comfortably the worst American presidential candidate I can remember. At least Walter Mondale in 1984 offered some policy like an Equal Rights Amendment, an increase in taxes – that never goes well – and a reduction of federal debt. Mondale was whipped by Ronald Reagan in the Electoral College by 525 to 13.
Harris’s defeat will not be by such a resounding margin but as a campaigner she was just useless. She had the extraordinary ability, similar to many sports stars, of talking plenty but saying nothing.
What the heck is “an opportunity economy”? She claimed often to “know the American people” but actually she had no idea about them. Even in her concession speech the metaphorical outweighed the straight talking.
“The light of America’s promise will always burn bright as long as we never give up.” Say what?
Which is not to say that Donald Trump is the Second Coming. It might be his second go at being POTUS but he’ll do well to regain the levels he achieved first time round on the economic and world security fronts.
Harris completely missed the mark in her campaign by constantly attacking Trump’s personality and by thinking that abortion was an issue that many people cared about.
Trump kept asking those at his rallies “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” In other words, he invoked the famous phrase first used by Bill Clinton’s strategic adviser James Carville in 1991: “it’s the economy stupid”.
But now comes the real work. Trump needs to do better with some of his key appointments this time around than he did in his first term. He needs a chief of staff that lasts longer than Reince Priebus (six months in 2017) and a communications director who doesn’t spout ‘alternative facts’ about the crowd size at the inauguration as Sean Spicer infamously did seven years ago.
What I’m looking forward to is the role that Robert F Kennedy Jnr gets to play in the health portfolio. The US population in the third decade of the 21st century is arguably the least healthy it has ever been. Life expectancy has only just started to rise again after dipping to a woeful 76.4 years in 2021, more than two years below 2019. Just under 40 per cent of Americans are obese and nearly 30 per cent more are overweight.
One in 37 American kids have autism. Ninety years ago the number was one in a thousand.
Kennedy and his adviser, Stanford educated surgeon Casey Means, want to have Americans eat better and be less medicated. The fight will be tough and dirty with the deep pockets of the food and pharmaceutical industries undoubtedly prepared to use every legal means possible to fight back.
But the evidence is right there in front of the American population. People are fatter and sicker than ever before. How Kennedy and Means progress their MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) programme will be worth watching – and hopefully it’s an opportunity for New Zealand to learn from.
In 2016–20 Trump famously kept America out of war. This time he comes in with Ukraine and the Middle East both raging. Is he capable of having a quiet word in Putin’s ear to strike a deal? Like maybe, “Vlad, you keep a bit of the eastern part of the country and I’ll make sure the hawks of Nato pull back to the West.”
The Middle East is more complicated but the key is Trump being prepared to play hard-ball with Iran. He ripped up the nuclear deal with Iran in 2018 and will put more pressure on the country to stop the attacks on Israel through Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis.
We should more confident of a peaceful global situation with Trump in the Oval Office than under a Democratic administration. He’s already said he won’t be taking advice from “the bad generals” (i.e., the war hawks) like he did last time.
He may have barked the hyperbole in his victory speech (the greatest political victory of all time etc, etc) but he has a chance through his weird personality and different way of doing things to actually achieve significant milestones in the next four years.
I’m optimistic about the world, even for the distressed lefties – if they can stand it!
This article was originally published on the author’s Substack.
