What next for Donald Trump and America?

Watching the American Presidential Election was a lot like taking in the latest Marvel blockbuster: there were plenty of flashing lights and impressive graphics, the actor playing the hero turned in a stiff and stilted performance as he overcame the forces of evil, and it carried on for much too long.

The campy, maniacal villain kept a largely weary audience interested. Donald Trump, his insides presumably a fearsome cocktail of antivirals, steroids and amphetamines, roused himself from his sickbed to dance around to the YMCA as largely maskless masses of supporters cheered him on. Speeding from swing state to swing state amid the senseless carnage of Covid, the President seemed to have gotten his groove back. The polls were tightening, with voters perhaps left cold by Joe Biden’s low-key campaign. He couldn’t do it again, could he?  

He couldn’t. Biden landed a body blow in claiming Florida, and across the dull CNN-MSNBC interregnum of the next 48 hours it became clear that the Democrats would take the key battleground states of Pennsylvania and Arizona. Cautious optimism overflowed into scenes of jubilation in the streets of New York and Philadelphia. He was gone, after four years of bile and farce, he was gone.

Jubilation: Trump’s defeat provoked celebrations in the streets

Trump, denied a Hollywood crescendo of demise by the grindingly slow gears of American democracy, reacted by firing out some allegations of electoral fraud via Twitter, packing his clubs, donning a white MAGA cap and heading to the Trump National course in Sterling, Virginia. For the 45th President of the United States, there’d be no Gotterdammerung, only golf.   

The civil disorder that many commentators had gleefully predicted failed to materialise, with Trump content to eschew militia shoot-outs in favour of another great American failsafe: the barrage of lawsuits. These last-gasp legal actions appear doomed to fail, with judges having already chucked out a number of claims in swing states. There’ll be more mud slinging in the weeks to come, but with even Fox News now looking on in embarrassment, Donald Trump will vacate the White House. What now for the man who promised to Make America Great Again?

It is tempting to imagine the 74-year-old attempting to reintegrate to the New York City party scene, perhaps reuniting with his simpering wingman Rudy Giuliani in the VIP lounge of a Manhattan nightclub, sloppy drunk on Tattinger and whispering war stories from Washington into the uninterested ear of an Eastern European call girl. Alternatively, a return to the screen could beckon for the former Apprentice host, who is surely the only man to have featured in Zoolander and two instalments of Playboy’s Centrefolds series.

Trump, disliked by many of the Republicans’ traditional power brokers and openly scorned by almost all of the media, is unlikely to benefit from the sort of chummy, old boys’ club act enjoyed by recent Presidents from both parties. This rehabilitative retirement has seen the likes of George W. Bush and Bill Clinton wheeled out as charming relics of a bygone age of dignified politics, a high-profile charade that is as nauseating as it is ahistorical.  

Instead, the departing President seems set for a bitter and brooding exile. Whether at the sprawling Mar-a-Lago complex in Florida or in the penthouse of the Manhattan tower that bears his name, Trump and his cronies will have time to reflect and regroup. There’ll be fewer immediate opportunities for grift, patronage and outright nepotism. The Trump clan and the travelling circus of PR courtesans, gas-and-oil oligarchs and crypto-fascists that accompanies them will need to devise new hustles. 

Already in his mid-seventies, Trump may be too old for any return to the political frontline after the dust settles. James Goldsmith, another icon of 1980s greed and excess who dipped in and out of politics, was a comparative youngster at 64 years old when his Referendum Party contributed to the Tories’ collapse at the 1997 general election. He died of pancreatic cancer at his Spanish ranch just two months later.

The hopes of America’s alt-right cartel may rest with Donald Trump Jr., who has come to the fore in his father’s re-election campaign, and has recently authored the books Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us and Liberal Privilege: Joe Biden and the Democrats' Defense of the Indefensible. Junior’s sudden passion for politics, having previously failed as a mortgage broker and a public relations expert, suggests he is an opportunist – albeit one with all the zeal of the newly-converted. He recently acknowledged the rumours of a future presidential run on Instagram, and his father remains proof that money, rather than experience or ideology, remains American democracy’s most important barrier to entry. He, and other right-wingers, will be ready to pounce in 2024.

Over 70 million Americans voted for Trump in 2020

In the meantime, Joe Biden will attempt to heal a nation that was already riven with division and poverty, even before the ravages of the planet’s worst Covid outbreak. He will need to act swiftly and decisively. The Democrats will have noted that over 70 million Americans felt compelled to vote for a second Trump term, suggesting a lingering appetite for racialized, oligarchic populism.

Worryingly, Biden did little in his time as Vice-President in the Obama administration to suggest he will be able tackle the problems that scar America: the chasm between rich and poor, a full-blown opioid epidemic, rampant gun violence and a looming environmental catastrophe. In response to the previous economic crisis, Obama delivered a Wall Street bailout that had laughably few strings attached, then sat on his hands as around 9 million Americans had their homes repossessed. As Joseph Stiglitz put it “the polluters got paid”, while the working- and middle-classes were shafted.

Within a few years, the coastal elites were toasting a return to prosperous normality, ignoring the despair and resentment building across the American interior. They even managed to convince themselves that Hillary Clinton was going to win the Presidency by bellowing “America is already great”.

Biden, Obama and the Democratic Party seemed almost wilfully ignorant of the rot that continued across both terms of their administration. Their response to the Fentanyl epidemic that claimed tens of thousands of lives was particularly telling, as federal agencies misunderstood and downplayed the crisis, and failed to properly fund a co-ordinated response.

Paramedics attend a suspected Fentanyl overdose

In the meantime, Obama was able to brag at party fundraisers how he’d made America “suddenly the biggest oil producer and the biggest gas producer”. This made his later laments of “climate change… changing our communities” seem somewhat insincere.

There are some encouraging signs among Biden’s election promises, such as recommitting to the Paris Climate Accords and investing $1.7 trillion in clean energy, as well assuring Americans that Covid vaccines and treatments will be administered cost-free. However, it is hard to escape the feeling that the Democrats have discounted the likes of Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Beto O’Rourke in favour of a supposed safe option, based on little more than nostalgia for an administration that was ineffective and increasingly unpopular.

While Biden has secured an important victory in 2020, if the Democrats want to repel the GOP’s next nativist bigot in 2024 they’ll have to made real progress in tackling America’s deep-seated issues. The popularity of the party’s relative radicals such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and the newly-elected Jamaal Bowman points a way forward, based on environmental responsibility, economic fairness and a pluralistic society.

Joe Biden, the unconvincing hero, has overcome the great American villain and that is worth celebrating. However, the gaggle of “good guys” had better make sure that they’re in much better shape by the time the sequel rolls around in 2024.