The top line of the 2020 campaign so far came from Michael Bennet, the Democratic senator from Colorado: “If you elect me president, I promise you won’t have to think about me for two weeks at a time,” he tweeted in August. That was about the last time we heard from him. Predictions of fatigue with Donald Trump have proved to be premature.
America’s hoped-for pivot to seriousness — dullness even — still feels hypothetical. Having just enjoyed the best week in his presidency, Mr Trump’s luck shows signs of enduring.
Could this week have been his springboard to re-election? It might look that way in retrospect. The least expected data point was Mr Trump’s Gallup approval rating, which hit a peak of 49 per cent. It is not clear what Mr Trump has done in the past month to earn a four-point jump. The number may turn out to be a blip. But it was bolstered by the finding that 63 per cent of voters approve of how Mr Trump is handling the economy — the largest such rating since George W Bush in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks.
As US growth slows this year, that glow may well fade. In the meantime, America’s blue-collar workers are enjoying their first year or two of real wage growth in the 21st century. The fact that Mr Trump has little to do with it — he inherited a seven-year recovery and has overseen similar growth rates as Barack Obama — is immaterial. Incumbent presidents are almost always rewarded by more dollars in people’s pockets. Forecasts of an impending US recession, which were rife in 2019, are less frequent.
Mr Trump’s second great windfall this week was his acquittal by the US Senate. Any neutral body would probably have found Mr Trump guilty under the thinnest reading of the US constitution. As it turned out, only Mitt Romney, the senator from Utah, plucked up the courage to declare that the emperor had no clothes.
Mr Romney’s 52 Republican colleagues switched variously from protesting Mr Trump’s innocence to conceding he was guilty but only for something trivial, to arguing that he was indeed guilty but it was too close to the next election to remove him. One or two even argued that Mr Trump had learnt from being impeached and would not dare to repeat his offences.
Their pretexts did not matter. You only had to listen to Republican cheering for Mr Trump’s State of the Union address on Tuesday — a cross between a PT Barnum show and a Nuremberg rally — to see how completely he owns his party. Mr Trump will face no serious challenger for the Republican nomination. Washington’s political junkies need not spend long on the Democratic campaign trail to notice that the word “impeachment” rarely surfaces. The candidates are too savvy to dwell on an issue even their own voters do not raise. The same Gallup poll this week showed that 53 per cent of Americans opposed the Senate’s removal of Mr Trump.
His third windfall, and the one most likely to last, was the outcome of the Iowa Democratic caucuses. Forget the technical glitches, which were bad enough for a party that is trying to emphasise its competence. The worst aspect for Democrats was the low voter turnout, which belied expectations. This year almost a third fewer of Iowans, or 16 per cent, went to the caucuses as in 2008 when Mr Obama’s campaign took off.
This hints at a serious enthusiasm gap between Democratic voters, who are miles from coalescing around a champion, and Mr Trump’s supporters, some of whom would go to worrying lengths in his defence.
Of course, a week is a long time in politics. Things would look different if the Democrats united behind a good nominee and voters felt the slowdown in US growth. Against that, however, are the stubborn facts. Three years after taking office, Mr Trump is the least unpopular he has ever been. Moreover, he can do almost what he wants before November without fear of restraint. Impeachment was hardly a blip. Inviting foreign interference cost him nothing. The vote-counting fiasco in Iowa shows how easy it would be to contaminate public trust in the election process.
US democracy is sleepwalking into great danger. Yet somehow it feels as though everything is normal.
