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In the autumn of 2016, I told my politics class at the University of Iceland that in the coming presidential election I would for the first time in my life vote for the Democrats. Donald Trump was unacceptable as president because of his rejection of free trade and his unpresidential behaviour, whereas Hillary Clinton was a safe choice. One of the girls in the class raised her hand and asked innocently: ‘Why do you have the right to vote in the American presidential election?’ I chuckled and said that of course I did not have the right to vote but that the whole world followed the election and was entitled to hold an opinion on it. After all, the United States commands the world’s mightiest military by far, and the president of this superpower is the leader of the West. Since World War Two, we Europeans have enjoyed Pax Americana, peace through American strength. It was not the European Union which ensured peace in Europe. It was 300,000 American soldiers based in Europe and behind them the American nuclear capability. Remember that the dictators had almost conquered the whole of Europe after Hitler and Stalin signed their Non-Aggression Pact on 23 August 1939. In the spring of 1940, there were only six democracies left in Europe, Great Britain, Ireland, Iceland, Sweden, Finland, and Switzerland.
Trump a Good President
To my surprise, Trump turned out to be a much better president than I had envisaged. He appointed competent, moderate judges to the Supreme Court (by moderate I mean careful to stay within the prescribed role of the Court), he lowered taxes which in turn stimulated the economy, and he maintained peace. What some had seen as his worst trait, his sheer unpredictability, worked in his favour against the dictators ruling the four new Axis powers, Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. They had no idea how he would react to their possible aggression and therefore lay low. Putin did not invade Ukraine in 2022—when Biden had become president—because of any broken promises that Ukraine would not join the West. He invaded because he perceived a weakness in the leaders both of the United States and the European Union. He had invaded Georgia in 2008, and nothing happened. He had invaded Ukraine in 2014, and nothing happened (the Germans even continued to tap Russia’s energy resources and they laughed openly at Trump in the General Assembly of the United Nations when he warned them against becoming too dependent on Russia). Putin also observed the debacle when the Americans under Biden withdrew from Afghanistan.
Trump a Bad Loser
I however found Trump’s unwillingness to concede defeat in 2020 and his whole behaviour during the transition to the Biden Presidency improper and indeed repugnant. But in this election campaign, he has had some memorable moments. One is his heroic defiance when he had been shot in Butler, Pennsylvania. Another is his standing behind the counter of a MacDonalds serving customers. The third was, when President Biden called his voters ‘garbage’ (with the White House staff then trying to redact the transcription of his comment), whereupon Trump put on the outfit of a garbage collector and drove to a meeting in a garbage truck. In the two later incidents he used to his advantage the widespread feeling of many Americans—whom his 2016 opponent Hillary Clinton notoriously called ‘the deplorables’—that they are being controlled by an arrogant elite of the universities and media which is only interested in raising taxes, regulating the economy, weakening or even defunding the police, opening the gates for illegal immigrants, intervening in the affairs of other countries and allowing men in sports to identify as women, thus gaining an unfair advantage over real women.
Kamala the Most Left-Wing Candidate Ever
The truth of the matter is that Kamala Harris is the most left-wing candidate ever to stand for president (perhaps with the exception of the pro-Soviet Henry A. Wallace in 1948). She is to the left of Senator George McGovern in the presidential election of 1972 and of Senator Bernie Sanders in his two failed attempts to get the Democratic nomination. She represents the wokeism and cancel culture which is slowly ruining her home state of California. She is, like many other intellectuals, not really proud of being an American. Go to the senior common room of any American university (except the Hoover Institution where I was hanging around in the 1980s and 1990s) and you will hear disgruntled left-wing professors rant about all the faults of America. Kamala Harris is their candidate. ‘Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable,’ the eloquent American (in fact Canadian) socialist John Kenneth Galbraith once said. In this case, the disastrous is Harris, the unpalatable is Trump. I do not like his ideas about tariffs (he should have read some Bastiat, as Ronald Reagan did), but he is forcing Europe to face up to her responsibility of defending herself, hopefully in a continuing Atlantic partnership. In 1976, the famous Italian journalist Indro Montanelli responded to the real danger that the communists would be voted into power, by exclaiming: ‘Hold your nose and vote for the Christian Democrats’.