https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2022/05/31/both-biden-and-trump-are-in-trouble-but-who-will-blink-first/

The Democrats face a likely drubbing in the midterms, yet their leader is better placed to win in 2024.

The two major US political parties – the Democrats and the Republicans – are perennially in upheaval. That’s by design in a system that funnels all major political inputs into two giant, uneasy coalitions.

But the two party leaders are looking unusually weak these days. In different ways, Donald Trump and Joe Biden aren’t inspiring much confidence.

Mr Biden’s is the more straightforward case. He and his fellow centrists are still in charge of the Democratic Party, even though they face persistent challenges from a left wing that wants to take control. Like many first-term presidents, Mr Biden is facing a second year of misery. His poll numbers range from bad to abysmal, and despite his deft handling of the Ukraine crisis, it’s still “the economy, stupid” that shapes the national mood.

First-term presidents’ parties typically lose ground in their first midterms. Mr Biden may face a particularly large setback, because his party already has little room to manoeuvre in Congress. The persistence of significant inflation and the growing threat of a potential recession explain the distinctly sour mood of the electorate.  It’s looking like a grim November for the Democrats.

However, his opposite number, Mr Trump, appears, if anything, to be in even bigger trouble. It’s remarkable that he has been able to maintain a tight grip over his party despite his 2020 presidential election defeat to Mr Biden, although that’s partly because he has convinced most Republicans that he didn’t actually lose but was cheated. But as the Republican primaries for the November election are demonstrating, that grip is loosening considerably.

His spectacular comeuppance in Georgia last week was stunning. David Perdue, his anointed candidate, was demolished by incumbent governor Brian Kemp by more than 50 percentage points. Even worse, Georgia Republicans also re-nominated Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. Both men rebuffed Mr Trump’s claims about massive fraud in Georgia’s 2020 election, and Mr Raffensperger did so with public derision and contempt. Mr Trump’s effort to take vengeance on these alleged turncoats was of no interest to Republicans in Georgia.

Mr Trump’s efforts to play the wrathful kingmaker have had, at best, mixed results. The Georgia humiliation was entirely self-inflicted. There was no rational reason for the former president to make state-level primaries de facto referendums on himself and his ridiculous fabrications about the 2020 vote. While most Republican candidates won’t criticise Mr Trump or challenge his “big lie” about that election, it’s clear that voters can distinguish between candidates who appeal to them and those he anoints. His cult of personality is in trouble.

It should be good news to him that his style of politics appears to be transferable and to have a life of its own. But it’s evidently, and unsurprisingly, not. While he is still easily the most popular Republican figure, it’s almost certain that Mr Trump would face some sort of opposition, and possibly a potent and credible one, if he seeks the 2024 presidential nomination.

Potential challengers include Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Indeed, Mr DeSantis appears to be slowly constructing an American analogue to Viktor Orban’s Hungarian “illiberal democracy” in Florida with elements of authoritarianism and hints of fascism. Mr DeSantis refuses to say whether he would challenge Mr Trump for the nomination or not. And the former president has not formally announced another campaign for the presidency.

But it is becoming increasingly clear that if he cannot move past re-litigating the 2020 election, he will not be a viable national candidate in 2024, even if he can win the party nomination. A group of prominent Republican leaders have banded together to oppose what they call Mr Trump’s “revenge tour” of primary elections, and are plainly looking for alternative leadership.

Time is not on Mr Trump’s side, particularly if he continues to obsess about 2020. But it may be on Mr Biden’s. There is a strong pattern of Americans electing a president, then defeating his party in the first midterms, especially in the House of Representatives, and then re-electing him for a second term. This pattern of divided government applied to Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, while George W Bush’s first midterms were held in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and its atmosphere of national unity.

So, Mr Biden’s chances of re-election may be better than many assume at present. Arguably the biggest challenge he will face is his age. He was 78 when he was elected as the oldest US president in history. Mr Trump, however, was the third oldest at age 70.

The American political system doesn’t only suffer from structural dysfunctions, particularly anti-democratic elements that have yielded many dangerous manifestations of minority rule. It’s also beset by an unhealthy level of gerontocracy, the rule of the elderly. It’s not just Mr Biden and Mr Trump. Most of the senior leadership in both parties in the House and Senate are remarkably advanced in age. That’s not necessarily a disaster, but it does demonstrate the undue advantage incumbents generally enjoy and, more strikingly, the noticeable lack of talent in the two, or in some cases even three, generations labouring to succeed them.

Mr Trump already defied expectations by winning the Republican nomination and then the presidency in 2016, and by remaining the dominant Republican despite his 2020 defeat. But the signs that his ascendancy may be ebbing are clear. Mr Biden’s real test, meanwhile, will come after the midterms, particularly if, as seems likely, his party suffers a major defeat. That would almost certainly initiate a concerted and bitter attack from the left on his centrist leadership and policies.

Both the Republican and the Democratic leaders are old enough that their health is an issue, and, although it’s obvious that both men are fully in control of their wits, both are frequently accused of being senile. Yet, Mr Biden has a huge advantage. He is in the White House. And that gives him leverage Mr Trump doesn’t have to fend off internal party critics, battle Republicans and persist in shaping a forward-looking agenda. He’s got enormous power.

Mr Trump not only lacks such authority, as ever he’s his own worst enemy. As long as he makes dozens of state-level elections de facto referendums on his leadership and, especially, remains fixated on re-litigating 2020, his influence on national, and even Republican, politics can only continue to decline.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2022/05/23/a-litmus-test-for-trumpian-republicans-in-pennsylvania/

Election denial now defines Republicans, internally as well as against Democratic opponents.

Even though Donald Trump is out of office, the malignancy that the former US president brought into American politics has now thoroughly spread into his Republican Party. Yet Republican leaders can’t claim they weren’t fully warned.

A highlight of Mr Trump’s rallies over the years has been his recitation of a poem about a woman who saves a poisonous snake only to be bitten. The snake says: “Now you knew darn well I was a snake before you brought me in.”

While most of his followers and others assumed Mr Trump was warning against immigration, it could hardly be a more apt description of how his politics of victory at the expense of democracy is being turned against his own nominal party.

This was on full display in last week’s Republican primaries in the key swing state of Pennsylvania. In the Senate primary, Mr Trump endorsed the surgeon-turned-television celebrity Dr Mehmet Oz. Yet this coveted anointing did not save Dr Oz from ending up in a statistical dead-heat with former hedge fund manager David McCormick.

While the initial tallies of in-person voting gave Dr Oz a slight lead, Mr McCormick’s apparent advantage with postal voting, on which his campaign had concentrated resources, suggests that not only will there be a mandatory recount that could take weeks, it might well begin with Mr McCormick in the lead and poised to win.

So, Mr Trump publicly urged Dr Oz to simply declare victory before all the votes had been counted, just as he had done in the 2020 presidential election.

The only effective way to stop the anti-democratic trend within the Republican Party would be a series of devastating electoral defeats.

Mr Trump has always been crystal-clear that he only recognises the validity of elections that he wins. In 2016, he was unequivocal that he would only accept an outcome that left him victorious over his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton. Since he won an electoral college majority, despite Mrs Clinton’s almost 3 millionpopular vote advantage, Mr Trump happily accepted a result that put him in the White House.

In 2020, however, Mr Trump lost both the popular and electoral college votes to current US President Joe Biden. True to his word, Mr Trump never accepted the outcome and continues to be fixated on re-litigating the 2020 result and propagating the lie that he was only defeated by massive fraud.

In 2016 and 2020, Mr Trump was deploying his disregard of democratic processes against Democratic opponents, which was just fine with many Republican officials as well as rank-and-file Republican voters, a strong majority of whom believe his fabrications, according to all surveys.

But it is now clear that support for the “big lie” about a stolen election in 2020 is an article of faith as well as a litmus test among Republicans. Some Republican leaders have accused him of launching a “vendetta tour” of the country to unseat incumbent candidates who did not support his attempt to overturn the election, although that seems set for a major comeuppance in Georgia this week.

The election-denial cancer has fully metastasised inside the party itself, even though neither Dr Oz nor Mr McCormick attempted to pre-empt the counting of postal ballots.

Nonetheless, Mr Trump has clearly made election denial a valid and even desirable intra-party as well as inter-party tactic. He has taken aim at not only national constitutional processes but also the ones that Republicans have established for themselves to determine their nominees and leaders.

Even more alarmingly, the threat at the national level of election denial, subversion and sabotage coming from Mr Trump’s followers is greater than ever, as another Pennsylvania primary demonstrated.

Pennsylvania Republicans overwhelmingly voted to nominate for governor Doug Mastriano, who participated in and helped organise bus trips to the January 6 protests that turned into an assault on Congress, designed to prevent the formal confirmation of Mr Biden’s victory. As a state senator, he attempted to replace Pennsylvania’s electors designated to vote for Mr Biden with pro-Trump ones. And he has been among the loudest voices denying the 2020 election’s validity and promoting preposterous conspiracy theories about the alleged fraud.

There seems little doubt that if he becomes governor of Pennsylvania, Mr Mastriano will bring Mr Trump’s ethic about only accepting positive election outcomes. As governor of one of the most important swing states in the country, he would be in position to severely undermine the outcome of the 2024 election if he wished, especially with the support of a large Republican bloc in the state legislature.

Mr Mastriano is hardly alone, although he could soon become the highest-ranking election denier and avowed saboteur, among national Republicans. A whole cadre of similar-minded Republican candidates have been nominated for key positions around the country. If elected, it would allow them to create havoc in the wake of future elections, by trying to block the will of voters and substitute some other, more favourable, metric for determining key election outcomes, especially for the US presidency.

It was always obvious that Mr Trump’s conviction that elections need only be respected in the event of a victory would spread rapidly throughout the Republican Party as long as he remained the dominant figure, and that it would inevitably turn inward as a tool his Republican allies use against fellow Republicans.

Election denial is a deadly and novel cancer in the American body politic. Even the election of Abraham Lincoln – which was the proximate cause for the secession of South Carolina and other slave-holding southern states from the US, and triggering the brutal and traumatic Civil War – was not denied by the losing side.

Mr Trump’s continued unrivalled influence in the Republican Party threatens to make that anti-democratic strategy standard fare not only against Democrats, but also against other Republicans.

The only effective way to stop the anti-democratic trend within the Republican Party would be a series of devastating electoral defeats. Those don’t appear to be on the horizon. And even if the defeats did begin, the party of Mr Trump is increasingly unlikely to calmly accept negative outcomes. That would be weakness.

As the remaining and dwindling group of traditionally conservative Republican leaders watch the poison reach their governors’ mansions or Senate offices, they would do well to remember Mr Trump’s own warning: they knew exactly what he was before they took him in, and now the venom is spreading throughout their body politic.