Insights Into The World

American Politics Could Be Unstable For Some Time

By Francis Fukuyama / Special to The Yomiuri Shimbun

11:00 JST, August 30, 2024

U.S. politics has resembled a roller-coaster over the past two months, as Americans prepare to go to the polls this coming November. For much of the past year, the contest looked like a dispiriting rematch between former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden. The latter was trailing his opponent not just nationally, but in most of the key swing states where American elections are ultimately decided. The over-riding consideration for many Americans was Biden’s age: at 81, he would be the oldest president ever seeking office, and many voters indicated they didn’t like either choice.

While Republicans had always said Biden was too old, Democrats began to realize they might be right following his disastrous debate performance on June 27. Biden’s voice was weak, he looked confused, and he failed to score many easy rhetorical points against an opponent who had tried to hold on to office after losing the 2020 election. Evidence began leaking out that Biden’s cognitive decline had become much more severe over the past year, a fact that his close associates had kept hidden. But Biden nonetheless insisted that he was the only Democrat who could defeat Trump, despite polling data that suggested that not only would he lose the presidency, but that he would cause the Democrats to lose their majority in the Senate and fail to flip the House of Representatives. The Democratic Party was split between a small core of Biden supporters, and a larger group that believed they would go down to defeat if Biden remained their candidate.

Then came the assassination attempt against Trump on July 13 by a 20 year-old man, Thomas Crooks, whose motives are unclear to this day. A bullet grazed Trump’s ear, and he was photographed holding up his fist defiantly and urging his supporters to fight. This was followed a few days later by the Republican National Convention, where he was confirmed as the Republican Party’s presidential nominee. His choice for vice president was first term Senator JD Vance from Ohio, a man who had turned himself from a Trump critic into a hard-core supporter over the past eight years. Vice presidents are usually chosen for their ability to broaden the appeal of the presidential candidate, but Vance’s selection reflected Republican confidence that this was unnecessary, and that Vance would drive up turnout among hard core supporters. In the days following the convention, it looked virtually inevitable that Trump would be the next president.

Then, suddenly, the momentum reversed on July 21 when Biden announced that he was dropping out of the race and endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris, to replace him. The Democrats’ luck was amazing. Some in the party had been advocating an open selection process, given the large number of appealing younger candidates like Governors Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Gavin Newsom of California, or Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania. But the prolonged effort to convince Biden to step down exhausted the party, and led them unexpectedly to coalesce within 48 hours around Kamala Harris’ candidacy.

Despite earlier doubts about her, Harris actually was ideally suited to oppose Trump. She was a prosecutor in San Francisco and the attorney general of the country’s biggest state, California, before becoming senator and then vice president. She immediately framed her campaign as one of a tough-on-crime prosecutor who was running against Trump, a swindler, rapist, and convicted felon. As the 59-year-old daughter of a Jamaican father and a South Asian mother, she appealed to women, African Americans, and young voters, key constituencies of the Democratic Party who had been increasingly disaffected by Biden.

The outcome of the November election remains very uncertain: Despite the newfound enthusiasm of many voters for Kamala Harris, she faces strong obstacles to becoming president. The country remains more polarized than ever. The Republican Party has been transformed beyond recognition from what it was under Ronald Reagan and the two George Bushes, and the possibility of Trump returning to the White House has become a major source of instability in world politics. The old party was in favor of free trade, supportive of immigration, and internationalist in its commitments to democratic allies around the world. Trump has single-handedly transformed the Republican Party into one that is isolationist, skeptical of alliances like NATO, protectionist, and hostile to immigration. While Biden retained many of Trump’s tariffs, the latter has promised a 10% levy on all goods made outside the United States, and a virtual end of trade with China. He has proposed cutting the individual income tax, replacing those revenues with money from tariffs. While he has talked tough on China, he openly professes to admiring the way that Xi Jinping controls his population with an iron fist. Trump clearly prefers Vladimir Putin’s Russia to a democratic Ukraine; he claims he would end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours, presumably by cutting military assistance to that country and forcing it to give up territory to Russia.

A re-elected Trump would pose a severe threat to other American institutions. The conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 has outlined a plan for resurrecting an executive order, issued at the end of the first Trump administration, to strip civil service protections from the federal bureaucracy, and to replace as many as 50,000 bureaucrats with Trump loyalists. This undermines the idea of a merit-based civil service, and will open the government to patronage and corruption on a scale not seen since the 19th century. Trump himself seems focused not on public policies so much as taking revenge on those political actors — the FBI, the intelligence agencies, and the Biden family — that he believes have been targeting him.

Many Republicans believe that the Democrats represent an existential threat to America as they understand it: The Democrats would encourage urban crime, promote mass immigration to replace America’s native-born population, and would seek to close down Christian churches around the country. These are of course fantasies, but the right wing in the U.S. has increasingly been defined by its belief in a series of conspiracy theories, fed by an internet in which truth is determined not by the credibility of the source, but the number of “likes” a post gets.

The progressive left has also been radicalized over the past few years, though not to the same extent as the right. Following the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, pro-Palestinian protests broke out on university campuses across the country. Many young people turned sharply against a man they label “Genocide Joe” Biden for his support for Israel, even as many on the right blamed him for being insufficiently supportive of the Jewish state.

Despite the fervid and unified support for Harris throughout the Democratic Party, she has some big challenges before she can win the White House. In the past she has taken left-wing positions unpopular with the general public, like cutting support for the police or ending the practice of fracking in the U.S. Her most important liability is the flood of asylum-seekers crossing America’s southern border, which was her special responsibility as vice president.

Harris’ choice of Tim Walz, governor of Minnesota, is a safe choice. He is not an elite product of a top university, but a former high school teacher and coach who might better appeal to middle-class voters. In picking him over Josh Shapiro, governor of the critical swing state of Pennsylvania, she avoided alienating younger Democrats who felt Shapiro was too pro-Israel.

Kamala Harris has a big opportunity to redefine herself and move clearly from being a progressive Democrat to a tough former prosecutor in the center of U.S. politics. Donald Trump and his campaign have been floundering as he becomes the oldest candidate in history to seek the presidency, and looks increasingly desperate as he tries out one attack after another against a young and energetic opponent. The polls have now shown Harris erasing the edge that Trump once held over Biden. Given the U.S. electoral college, the Democrats have to pull ahead by several percentage points to actually win the presidency, but this now seems entirely possible.

A Trump victory in November will have destabilizing consequences. He has promised extreme policies, like rounding up the more than 10 million undocumented immigrants and putting them in gigantic camps before forcibly expelling them. He often seems eager to use force, including the U.S. military, against protesters who will surely be out in large numbers should he win. But it is not clear that U.S. politics will become “normal” should Harris be victorious. As in 2016, Donald Trump has not agreed that he will abide by an election result in which he loses. He did not accept defeat in 2020, and was willing to use force on Jan. 6, 2021, to avoid stepping down. A majority of Republicans believe that the 2020 election was stolen by the Democrats; many of them are angry and have an apocalyptic sense that their country is being destroyed. While Trump is an old candidate, he has bred a generation of younger right-wing politicians like JD Vance who like him believe the Democrats are a mortal threat to America. It is possible that the latter will win an overwhelming victory, taking the presidency and both houses of Congress in November. But short of that, it is likely that Americans will continue to contest the outcome of elections well into the future. Such is the legacy of Donald Trump.