Donald Trump, who served as the 45th president of the United States from 2017 to 2021, epitomizes the politics of our time, when larger-than-life, loud, fear-mongering political figures tailor-made for television and social networks gain public office. This is an age when TV news is more like reality TV and political constituencies display fierce tribalism. After serving a single term as president and losing re-election to the now 80-year-old Joe Biden, Trump is back in the news. At 76, Trump is once again challenging Biden for the presidency, as the favorite for the Republican ticket. However, this is not the only reason why Trump is in the news.
On May 9, a jury found that Trump had sexually abused and defamed writer E Jean Carroll. Trump is the first former US president to face criminal charges. He has also been charged with “falsifying business records” in connection with a “hush money payment” made to Stormy Daniels, a porn star, shortly before her 2016 presidential election victory. The indictment tells of a $1,30,000 payment that Trump’s former personal attorney made to Daniels for her silence about the affair with Trump. Prosecutors allege that Trump admits to reimbursing his lawyer for that payment amount, but that he had falsely characterized it as a retainer agreement for business advice.
The tribalism that Trump inspires is fiery and lawless. On January 6, 2021, crowds of Trump supporters attacked the Capitol building (the seat of the United States Congress, located on Capitol Hill in Washington DC) in an attempt to keep him in power after his loss in the elections The House Committee (made up of select members of the House of Representatives) appointed to investigate the attacks voted to recommend to the Justice Department that Trump be charged with “aiding, aiding or abetting” the insurgency. Will these charges haunt him as long as he remains the Republican front-runner, or will they?
As Trump once boasted, he could kill a person on a busy street and his supporters would still support him.
The political reality is that Trump is very popular. In the last election, both Biden and Trump collected a record number of votes. Biden received 81,283,501 votes (51.3 percent of the total) and Trump received 74,223,975 votes, with the former becoming president. However, both men had received more popular votes than ever before. Biden now holds the record for the most votes received in a presidential election. To give some context, in 2008, Barack Obama won 69,498,516 votes, up until then the most ever in a presidential election.
The “popular vote” is not the barometer for winning elections in the American electoral college system. Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump despite getting almost three million more votes than him. In the American system, the winner is the candidate who takes the electoral college. However, the popular vote is an indicator of how voters feel about a candidate, even if it is not the constitutional marker of winning the presidential election.
What the Biden-Trump matchup indicates is that despite losing the presidency to Biden, Trump was very popular. This is despite well-founded allegations of lawlessness on multiple counts, repeated false claims on most political issues, including the “stealing” of the 2020 election, running a deeply disorganized administration, and fearmongering that included banning Muslims from entering the US. So why is Trump so popular?
For mainstream members and supporters of the Republican party, Trump answered basic questions while in office. For example, Trump’s biggest legacy will be judicial appointments. Above all, his three appointments to the Supreme Court. Nominations to the US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) are notoriously political, while the testimony of the judicial nominee is shown on national television. In the United States, having lifetime appointments to the Supreme Court and other appeals courts means that many Trump appointees will remain in office for the next 30 years or more.
All three of Trump’s appointments – Judge Neil Gorsuch, Judge Brett Kavanaugh and Judge Amy Coney Barrett – are identified with a more conservative brand of politics. And many Republicans see Trump’s biggest legacy as overturning Roe v Wade, the abortion-rights decision, by the Dobbs and Jackson Women’s Health Organization decided in June of 2022.
In Dobbs, SCOTUS held that the US Constitution does not confer a right to abortion and overturned its earlier decisions in Roe v Wade and Planned Parenthood v Casey. All three Trump appointees voted to overturn Roe.
Numerous studies show that Trump and most Republicans tend to score higher with white voters, while Democrats mostly win black and Hispanic voters. Interestingly, college-educated Americans are increasingly voting for Democrats. While white Americans without a college education support Republicans, especially Donald Trump. Race and class play a big role in who voters support in elections.
For those looking for a deeper look at Donald Trump, a fascinating new biography has just been published. Titled Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America. The author is New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman. Haberman covered Trump as a candidate in the 2016 election and eventually as a one-term president. Trump was famously aware of Haberman’s unflattering coverage of him as president. It’s 600 pages of drama, political insight and scoop, a story of the intertwined worlds of wealthy law-breaking real estate tycoons, far-right politics and the massive cult of die-hard Trump supporters and the privileged, spoiled scion of a real estate tycoon father, who learned to bend all the rules and put himself ahead of anyone or anything else.
This is the explanation for Trump’s rise: he discovered his core electorate, which he shapes through fear, strategically deploying social media and speaking in a language that appeals to them. Along the way, he deployed his privilege to bend and break the law. What remains to be seen in the 2024 presidential election is whether voters will reward him again, for being Donald Trump.
The writer is a senior advocate in the Supreme Court of India
