Ever since I studied American history and politics at the University of Glasgow in the late 1960s, I have taken a keen interest in U.S. current affairs.
I’ve been a White House correspondent, a Wall Street correspondent, lived there off and on, visited regularly for almost 50 years, written and broadcast about it and interviewed various presidents, including Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. I write these words from my apartment in New York.
So when I say I cannot recall a time when Republicans and Democrats have been in worse shape, I know of what I speak. Things are so bad that America could be on the brink of a political crisis — perhaps even a constitutional crisis — of historic proportions.
And it’s all largely down to one man: Donald Trump.
This week, he gave the clearest indication yet that he intends to run for the U.S. presidency in 2024. He told New York magazine that he’s already made up his mind to go for it — he just has to decide whether to formally announce before or after the mid-term congressional elections (for the House and Senate) in early November.
No presidential hopeful, to my recollection, has ever announced their candidacy before the mid-terms. But my guess is that Trump will. Publicity is as necessary to Trump for survival as oxygen is for the rest of us.
He hates the way other politicians — including several Republican hopefuls for their party’s presidential nomination, such as Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida — currently command the headlines.
If he announces renewed presidential ambitions in September or October then he will be centre stage once more come the November vote, and all eyes will be on who he has — and hasn’t — endorsed. That’s where he always craves to be and where he is happiest.
The fact he’s currently under ten different investigations by federal, state and district authorities, some of them criminal, I’m sure played no part in his decision — except that being president again would provide a certain immunity from most of them.
Whatever his reasons, it’s not good news for Republicans.
Trump hangs over the party like a poisonous cloud incapable of dispersion. The Trump cult still dominates the Republican base to such an extent that, as things stand, he is the clear favourite to win the Republican nomination. Thus does he stop Republicans from moving on from the tumultuous, toxic Trump years and fashioning a new centre-right agenda for the 2020s and beyond.
This would not matter so much if the Democrats, who hold the White House, House and Senate, knew what they were doing. But they don’t. In many ways they’re in even worse shape than the Republicans.