Trump’s Star Rises Again as the World Turns Worse

The US presidential race remains the closest on record since Al Gore versus George W. Bush in 2000. It could still go either way: but in the past two weeks, Donald Trump has regained crucial ground and appears still on a slight and hard-fought rise, with increasing signs of alarm coming from Democratic campaign insiders. It is easy to see why. Trump has focused on doing what he does best, which is hammering home his criticisms of the genuinely appalling and indeed terrifying record of the Biden-Harris administration over the past nearly four years.

But he has not been able to even pretend to modify his aggressive exterior conduct and nature that generate so much hate and fear among not just Democrats but old moderate Republicans and independents too. As a result, the sympathy and admiration Trump deserved to have for surviving two assassination attempts in short measure and still having the courage to go out publicly on the campaign trail has given him no inroads whatsoever among the centrist swing voters he needs to break through and win.

But Trump is gaining: the most recent ActiVote poll from October 3 to October 8, showed him in the lead nationally by 1.2 points. This was a huge reversal in only four weeks. ActiVote’s poll in September had Democratic candidate and incumbent Vice President Kamala Harris ahead of him by 5.4 points. Both polls surveyed 1,000 likely voters and had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points. The October one was the first national poll to give Trump a lead since September 22.

RealClearPolitics (RCP), the most comprehensive assessor of the bewildering number of national and state opinion polls across the United States, currently gives Trump a clear edge in state-by-state victories in the Electoral College that he needs to return to reclaim the presidency. As of October 11, RealClearPolitics was predicting Harris would win Nevada, Wisconsin and Nebraska’s 2nd District. But RCP awarded Trump massive industrial Pennsylvania and Michigan and crucial Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina, giving him a very clear margin of 296 Electoral College votes to Harris’s 242, with 270 needed to win.

Trump has been campaigning far harder and more effectively than Harris in the swing states, and as in 2016, his key areas for increasing support are among poor white workers, especially laid off industrial ones, and greatly boosting his support in the African American and Hispanic American communities.

There is an enormous irony in this, for these groups have been the most loyal members of the Democratic Party for nearly a century. Their movement into the Democratic ranks can even be seen to have preceded the time of Franklin Roosevelt starting in the presidential campaign of New York Governor Al Smith in 1928. For these groups now to be the largest source of defections from the Democratic camp to Trump, while the fading and shrinking tribe of RINO’s – or Republicans in Name Only – the old country club and socially acceptable upper middle class and professional elements in the party, who supported both the Eisenhower-Bush and Ronald Reagan dominant factions over the past 70 years, is an astonishing and even epochal Reversal of Fortune.

I predicted in my 2015 book “Cycles of Change (photo on the left),” the great political, social, economic and even existential crisis that emerged in the 2016 election. It was later that year set off by one man: Donald Trump. But it cannot and will not end with him.

The old American political elites are determined to keep their heads buried in the sands deeper than any self-respecting ostrich. Therefore, all the fading beneficiaries and loyalists of the old internationalist, open borders, minimum government intervention, free market consensus across the United States cannot see this. And that is why their hatred and fear from both right and left towards Trump is so intense. For all these beneficiaries and true believers in policies that have ruined the lives of hundreds of millions of Americans over the past three or four generations: it is All Trump’s Fault. Just get “The Big Orange” out of the way and off the political arena, and everything will magically go back to the perfect eternal harmony and Music of the Spheres that reigned in American life until he rode down that now-fabled escalator in Trump Tower in Manhattan on 26 June 2015 to declare his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination.

The US media and Deep State establishment continue to hate, fear and oppose Trump. The very mention of his name makes their skin crawl: it is like sprinkling holy water on a devil. Or holding up a cross to one of the Possessed, just as Dostoyevsky predicted.

Trump continues to shout and yell and gesticulate. He always will. Yet a cold, sober assessment of his years in office until disrupted by the COVID pandemic, compared to Joe Biden’s and Kamala Harris’s, is devastating. Trump created more jobs than any US president in well over a generation. His economic policies especially helped the poor, black and Hispanic communities, and his share of their votes soared in 2020 compared to 2016 and looks to be far higher again this time. For more than 60 years, the total support of those groups has been crucial to Democratic victories on the national stage to win and control federal power.

Trump was also the first US president in half a century since Gerald Ford not to start any new wars during his time in office.

Conduct your own experiment: point out these Inconvenient Facts to any liberal or old Republican establishment American of your acquaintance. Then watch their immediate descent into the most undignified of spoiled brat or howling maniac frustration and rages.

Sigmund Freud, a lifelong Habsburg political conservative and imperial patriot who hated US Democratic President Woodrow Wilson to the most intense degree, would have been most amused – and not at all surprised.

It was not Trump who urged the clique enslaving the Ukrainian people into an insane war with Russia. It was not Trump who deliberately torpedoed and sank every realistic initiative for peace out of Russia over the past two and a half years. All that was done – consistently and repeatedly – by Joe Biden and the reliably passive, useless and idiotically, mindlessly smiling Kamala Harris with her fixed, lobotomized grin.

I predicted at the start of this campaign that Harris could win and might well do so: but even back then, I cautioned that the greatest fear her handlers dreaded was, as late British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan liked to say, “Events, Dear Boy, Events.” And sure enough, the frightening slide of the world towards global war from Ukraine to across the Middle East with a total vacuum of power and lack even of any consciousness in the White House has made that fear tangible and real. That is the real reason now why, in the face of the ever more frenzied and absurd personal attacks mounted against him throughout the US mainstream media, Trump’s support even in the conventional and usually easily influenced polls, continues to slowly but remorselessly rise.

We are clearly in 1932 crisis territory already in terms of US history. I have no doubt that we are also already deep into 1860 territory, when widespread state secessions, the collapse of the federal system and the unimaginable bloodbaths of the Civil War were only months away. And in the nuclear age, outcomes infinitely worse than those are all too possible – and imminent.

So, Trump could win. He could be prevented from winning. His supporters could refuse to accept the reality of any defeat. And so could Harris’s.

The terrible curse of a famous Chinese blessing has already descended upon the American people. They are doomed to live in interesting times.