What if Trump wins the 2024 US elections?

Oped Template Jaime J. Yambao

AT this writing, polls in the United States are showing President Joe Biden overtaking former president Donald Trump in voters’ preferences on who should win the elections come November 2024. There are pundits who consider this as the start of a historical trend. The odds are usually in favor of the incumbent provided the national economy is doing well.

The performance of the US economy under Biden has been, in fact, the best among advanced countries and has been infinitely better than during Trump’s term of office. This fact has only to be brought to the appreciation of voters, which the well-funded Biden campaign team is set on doing. It’s inconceivable that the 7 million voters that brought Biden’s victory and Trump’s defeat in 2020 will have disappeared in November.

Besides, strange as it may seem, Trump seems preoccupied with losing voters. His statement that it was at his behest that the justices of the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade is costing him the women’s vote (and the Supreme Court its credibility and reputation for impartiality). Despite the high IQ he claims to have, Trump does not realize that the fear of a pregnancy going wrong and needing a safe abortion procedure is common and normal among women.

While politics is the science of addition is a common adage, Trump is virtually expelling from the party all those Republicans who challenged his wresting complete control of his party and pushing them into the welcoming embrace of the Democrats.

The race remains very close though. It has been projected that the electors of two of the small swing states can spell the difference between victory and defeat in the electoral college, which rather than the public vote, chooses the president and vice president-elect. There is also time remaining for Trump to realize his mistakes and correct them.

Social psychologists like Dr. Bendy Lee warn the public about underestimating the toxic influence of Trump over the masses. His tactics of bullying and lying are a virus more contagious than the physical virus Covid. He has incredibly transformed the party of Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan into his personal army.

Dr. Lee accurately predicted that Trump’s political tactics would lead to an event like the January 6 attack on the US Capitol and predicted that a second Trump presidency will mean more of such violent and divisive events happening. The only treatment for this social disease, says Dr. Lee, is to isolate the virus from the victims through the overwhelming public rejection of the Trump candidacy.

In recent global history, the growth of authoritarianism is outstripping that of democracy. With a Trump victory in November, the last global champion of democracy and human rights, the United States, may well disappear. Dr. Justin Frank showed in his book “Trump on the Couch” that Trump’s parents reared their son Donald on the ways of bullies and despots. He was taught that the world belonged to the strong rather than the weak and that to admit defeat was a weakness.

Trump may well have been taught from childhood also that he belonged to the superior race. The father has lately been alleged to have been an active member of the Ku Klux Klan, and Trump himself has been said to keep Hitler’s Mein Kampf at his bedside.

Dr. Frank thus explains why Trump has been more comfortable in the company of autocratic leaders rather than democratic ones; he sees in them something of his father whom he idolized. He has developed in adulthood into a narcissistic psychopath, putting his ego above everything else, including the rule of the truth and the law.

Viewed from this perspective, Russia’s and China’s wanting to intervene in the US presidential election campaign is understandable. The intervention of Russia in the social media discrediting Hillary Clinton, who until the last moment was expected by the polls to win, was widely considered a factor in her losing to Trump.

Russia’s intervention in that election brought substantial dividends. Trump apparently considered himself forever indebted to Putin. He was openly deferential, even reverential, to Putin in their meetings. In front of the world media, he notably gave more credence to Putin’s verbal claims rather than the reports of his intelligence agencies.

Also, he reportedly suggested the reinstatement of Russia as a member of the G8 (Group of Eight) because of his belief that Crimea, which Russia illegally annexed in 2014, really belonged to Russia. That intervention continues to extend dividends to Russia; Trump has coaxed the Republicans who hold a slim majority in the US House of Representatives to block the passage of military aid to Ukraine, causing the tide of battle in Ukraine to shift in favor of Russia.

The perception of those dividends that Russia enjoyed at least for the duration of Trump’s presidency may have inspired China to follow Russia’s example in the 2020 elections in the US. After all, just in the last few days, Trump reaffirmed his admiration for President Xi Jinping.

After all, the tariff war Trump waged against China he also waged against his country’s other trading partners, including notably the United Kingdom and the European Union. Investing in the victory of Trump in the November elections may have been considered by the Chinese to be worthwhile after hearing of Trump’ former associates’ — and now critics’ — revelations about Trump’s long-term geopolitical.strategy.

According to Ambassador Michael Bolton, former national security adviser, then-president Trump had none. Trump incorporated business concepts rather than a strategic approach to his foreign policy and international relations. The Trump approach was very transactional, based on a monetary relationship rather than a political or values-oriented relationship. Not a democrat by heart, Trump should not be expected in his foreign policies to promote and defend democratic values.

Trump now advocates transferring arms and ammunition to Ukraine on loan, rather than grant basis. He created a stir when he said that he would ask Russia to do whatever it wanted on any NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) ally not contributing 2 percent of its gross domestic product to defense. Because Trump believes US allies to be drawing much more advantages than the US draws from its alliances, Ambassador Bolton does not rule out the US’ pulling out of NATO and bilateral alliances in a new Trump presidency’s first 100 days.

China should find betting on Trump’s victory in November a sound proposition. Trump is an isolationist. It will not matter to him if China aggressively pursues its claims of sovereignty on many countries in its neighborhood.

Will Trump attach so much importance to the first, second and third island chains that the US has surrounded China with? Provided Russia does not reclaim Alaska, it will not matter to Trump, too, if Russia reclaims and invades all countries that were once part of the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire.

It appears that gaining Trump’s eternal debt of gratitude may be a simple matter of making a substantial contribution to Trump’s campaign kitty. Contrary to his claim that he is fabulously rich, Trump is, in fact, in dire financial straits. He desperately needs external help to be able to pay the fees of his army of lawyers defending him in over 90 criminal and civil cases, and at the same time, run a winning grassroots campaign for the presidency.

In most areas of foreign policy, a Trump presidency will not entail much change because Biden substantially pursued the same policies that Trump did. The disastrous US departure from Afghanistan was in pursuant of Trump’s ill-advised deal with the Taliban. Biden’s promised reversal of some of Trump’s policies did not take place, such as the return to the Iran nuclear deal and the reestablishment of a US consular presence in Palestine.

The only changes concerned the abovementioned transactional approach to multilateral and bilateral alliances, and climate change. Trump may once again withdraw the US from the Paris Framework Agreement on Climate Change. A sign of this happening is Trump’s mocking of the electric car. He says publicly that it does not go far and depends on a battery that only China manufactures. Trump is wrong on the last score. The battery is built of materials coming from a number of countries, including the Philippines and Indonesia.

Is it any wonder that when Elon Musk was asked if he was contributing to the 10 half-billion dollar bond required of Trump to appeal his conviction for defrauding the state of New York, the electric car mogul gave a flat “no?”

During the last year of Trump’s presidency, an international polling company solicited the attitude of many people around the globe toward the US president. All of them expressed negative views except Filipinos and a few others. That should put Filipinos in the good graces of Trump if he wins in November.

Unfortunately, Trump is getting quite forgetful these days, even more so than Biden. With mental health professionals suspecting Trump of developing dementia, possibly Alzheimer’s. He misreads his teleprompter, replacing words with nonwords. For instance, he once made three attempts to read the word “unanimous.” All of them are wrong and incomprehensible. If only Trump did not lie so much and praise himself less, Trump can be quite charming.