Donald Trump has already won

Donald Trump’s path to victory is clear – Matt Rourke /AP

The Trump juggernaut is unstoppable. He won Iowa with over half the vote and a helpful second place to Ron DeSantis, who poses little long-term threat. New Hampshire on Tuesday will be less a battle of the campaigns than the pollsters: American Research Group shows Trump and Nikki Haley neck-and-neck, whereas Suffolk University gives The Donald a 16 point lead. My money is on the latter. FiveThirtyEight.com awards Suffolk an A- for reliability, ARC a meagre C+.

Assuming Trump does win, the race won’t just be over, it never really happened. The French post-structuralist Jean Baudrillard famously argued that “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place”. The West’s overwhelming firepower rendered Iraqi defeat inevitable; all that made a one-sided massacre look like a war was savvy media coverage.

Likewise, if we put aside the podcasts, town halls and endless footage of Trump walking into and out of courthouses, the reality is that Trump hasn’t debated his opponents once; Haley has pulled out of the New Hampshire debate; and DeSantis has unofficially withdrawn from the state altogether (he’s campaigning in South Carolina: Haley’s home town, where Trump is comfortably ahead). Meanwhile, the Democrats aren’t holding a real primary. The White House decided to punish New Hampshire for scheduling its contest early, so no delegates will be allotted and Joe Biden will not appear on the ballot – yet is still predicted to win a landslide via write-ins.

Primary seasons have peaked early before (Al Gore ended the 2000 Democrat race when he edged Bill Bradley in New Hampshire), and most of them are over by Super Tuesday in February/March. But the sheer meaninglessness of this year’s contests is unusual – a throwback to the 1960s, when primaries were for show and nominations decided elsewhere.

Twenty-twenty-four hinges on events largely external to the democratic process. Will Trump be taken off the ballot or sent to prison? Will Biden be swapped for Gavin Newsom over the summer? This could be the first Democrat convention that has truly mattered since 1968, which you can either see as a coup by shadowy power brokers or a return to an earlier, saner regime by which statesmen, not grassroots ideologues, picked the president.

Speaking of ideology, that has taken a backseat as well. Biden’s most prominent challenger is Dean Phillips – a Minnesota congressman who could take as much as a quarter of the vote in New Hampshire, though his campaign has rarely caught fire. At one event, literally no one showed up. Quoting Field of Dreams, Phillips quipped: “Sometimes if you build it, they don’t come.”

It doesn’t help that Phillips hasn’t honed in on a substantive liberal issue to whip up a protest vote; his only complaint is Biden’s age. Haley and DeSantis have also steered clear of directly opposing Trumpism – for the widespread assumption is that Haley wants to be The Donald’s VP; DeSantis, his heir in 2024.

Haley has challenged the Trumpites on Ukraine, granted – but having faced no public debate, the frontrunner escapes scrutiny of his positions and the race focuses on personality. It’s almost Medieval. Is the King too old? Is the pretender crooked? Will either last out the year? Once-upon-a-time, people didn’t cast ballots, they cast horoscopes – and on the basis that Gemini is in the Ninth House, I predict that come November we’ll look back on this as the most obvious presidential race in a while, one destined to take this shape since November 2020 – for it is, and always was going to be, a rematch.

Why was it all so inevitable? Because Trump refused to accept the result of the last contest. Because the Republican Party machine hasn’t the will to break with him; nor will his constituency abandon him. Also, because Biden is as much a narcissist as his opposite number – and won’t step aside even though his mental decline is palpable. Finally, one suspects that the people most comfortable with Trump and Biden’s victories are Biden and Trump themselves, for each regards the re-nomination of the other as their best shot at winning.

Are they correct? Would Haley or Newsom be a tougher opponent?

Well, a recent YouGov poll found Haley beating Biden by eight points – wider than Trump’s two percent lead. By contrast, Newsom demonstrates no advantage over Biden in hypothetical heats against Trump. With Americans feeling so glum about the direction of their country, any Republican candidate is probably stronger than any Democrat. When voters feel depressed in a two-party system, the incumbent slumps and the opposition rises – thus a Trump victory in November is entirely logical.

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