Editorial | Happy to see the back of Donald Trump

Barring an implausible legal acquiescence to Donald Trump’s efforts at overturning the will of voters, Joe Biden will be the next president of the United States. That is good. After four years of Mr Trump’s chaotic, roller-coaster ride, the United States and the world will have an opportunity to regain their collective breath and begin a turn to some form of normality.

That’s an upside. It mustn’t be underestimated or taken for granted. For we might have had to contend with another term of Mr Trump’s narcissistic, racist, xenophobic, nationalistic, hubristic and mercurial leadership of the world’s major military and economic power. And that translates, in part, to disregard for people who look like the majority of Jamaicans and an inconsequence for rules-based international arrangements that offer a modicum of protection to small countries like this one.

Yet, despite the optimism of last week’s election, it would be wrong to believe that all is now well with the United States, or that with Mr Biden’s presidency, a switch has automatically been turned on for America’s reassertion of global leadership.

First, while Mr Biden received more electoral college votes than Mr Trump and beat him by over a million ballots in the popular vote, there was no unambiguous repudiation of Donald Trump, for which the rest of the world had hoped. Americans offered no atonement or expiation for his presidency.

Indeed, with the highest voter turnout in a century, Mr Trump received over 70.5 million votes, the third-highest in the history of presidential races. His vote count was up nearly 12 per cent on what he received in 2016 when he pipped Hillary Rodham Clinton to the White House. The United States remains, as it has been trending for over two decades, a deeply polarised country.

A large minority of the country remain attracted to Mr Trump’s brand of personality-centred, grievance-based and nationalistic populism. It has been embraced by racists, while enticing working class, rust-belt and rural white Americans, who found solace in Donald Trump’s ill-formed ‘America First’ dogma, with its call to protectionism on the economic, trade and immigration fronts. The outgoing president was also able to concoct a coalition with white evangelical Christians, who suspended their supposed distaste of immorality, indecency, racism and authoritarianism in exchange for support in their culture wars.

The upshot is that Mr Trump has maintained the unwavering support of around a third of American voters. He deployed them in an appropriation of the Republican party, which no longer adheres to an ideology of conservatism, of the fashion of its American founding fathers such William Buckley and Russell Kirk, or even a more recent party champion such as Ronald Reagan. That is bad for a Biden presidency if the Senate remains in the hands of the Republicans and Mitch McConnell remains the majority leader.

DIFFICULT PATH

In a toxic and divided America, with a Republican party bereft of a philosophical core, the would-be inheritors of a weaponised Trumpism, with its grievance-riven and sulking progenitor inciting from the wings, can, and possibly will, make it difficult for Mr Biden to win congressional support for his policy agenda. Programmes on energy, climate change and manufacturing reform based on green jobs will be slowed, if not stalled. He, nonetheless, could still take the United States back into the Paris Climate Accord as well as the Iran Nuclear deal, although without the imprimatur of the Senate. Reviving Obama era trade deals like the Trans-Pacific trade agreement would be far difficult, even if Mr Biden was inclined to do it.

All, however, is not lost. Donald Trump, beyond what would have been the imaginings of his predecessors, expanded the power of the presidency with the use of executive orders – mostly for ill. That genie won’t return to the bottle. It can be employed by Mr Biden to reverse those Obama policies that were undermined by Mr Trump and to pursue his own, where the president’s fiat can be used to end-run an obstructionist Congress.

On the global stage, there will hopefully be coherence and predictability to America’s foreign policy. Mr Biden, however, will find that during the four years of Donald Trump’s bullying and bluster, the world didn’t just stand still, waiting for adult behaviour to return to the White House. Many countries moved on. The new president and his secretary of state will have to work on re-engaging partners and rebuilding relationships, while fostering new ones. Hopefully, he will respect the sovereignty of countries like ours, rather than having hectoring envoys lecturing us about who should be our friends.

Joe Biden’s primary job, though, must be to bring balm to America, which is the first step to reasserting itself as a moral voice in the world.