Gathering Storm

One of many problems: Trump’s vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance is proving to be a disastrous liability for the Republicans’ campaign

With just over a month to go before the scheduled US presidential election on November 5, what is the state of play in this “Great Race”? Opinion polls fluctuate from day to day and are a mass of confusion.

However, their general picture is that Democratic Party candidate Vice President Kamala Harris has narrow and possibly increasing leads over her Republican foe, former President Donald Trump, in key Heartland battleground states.

As of September 21, Nate Silver’s Project FiveThirtyEight, widely regarded as one of the most comprehensive and fair-minded assessments of overall US polling results, gave Harris a narrow but potentially decisive 48.3% lead over Trump’s 45.6% support.

Also significantly, the Project FiveThirtyEight results showed Harris incrementally but consistently widening her lead over Trump since the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August.

Trump has appeared to hold on to his base in the 2016 and 2020 elections, but estimates of the crowd sizes he is attracting vary wildly. One study puts the average numbers attending Harris’s rallies at 10,000 to 15,000 and Trump’s numbers at lower than 5,000 but judging just from video and photographic coverage, this appears far too low.

Also, while Trump’s vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance is proving a disastrous burden to him, Harris running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, is a total nonentity: he has been more invisible than an obscure eunuch at a medieval Ottoman Imperial court in Constantinople. And he is of no help to the ticket whatsoever.

There is quite simply no passionate grassroots support for Harris anywhere. However, an enormous amount of synthetic enthusiasm continues to be desperately generated for her in the mainstream news media.

Yet Harris can still win – legitimately – and even by landslide margins. Such rock solid historic Republican strongholds as Alaska – which does not matter in terms of population and therefore Electoral College votes – and Texas – which matters a great deal – are now in play according to many polls.

How could this be? It is all about the crucial importance of image over substance in US electoral politics, especially at the presidential level.

I have noted before in these columns that Trump frowns and shouts a lot in public. He simply does not conform to the imagined dignity that a president or aspiring president is expected to convey. The fact that he has substantive and often realistic proposals especially on key issues, such as controlling immigration, fighting crime and reviving the industrial economy, mean nothing. This is 21st century America: only the image on the video screen counts.

In the 2016 and even 2020 presidential elections, Trump had a good natured, always smiling, poised and dignified running mate – former Indiana governor and then vice-president Mike Pence. Pence gave Trump a balance, a credibility and a dignity which he sorely needed.

Vance has shown he can deliver none of that. And he is a neophyte at the game of national politics too. He has proven to be a political disaster for Trump.

This also means that despite Harris’ total lack of credibility, substantive coherence and charisma, she is seen from a distance – thanks to the Big Brother News Media manipulating her image – as “presidential,” dignified and credible in her bearing. Consequently, she still carries enough credibility with the five to ten percent of indecisive American swing voters who almost always decide presidential election outcomes.

Elections are only a month away, but there are many factors that could overturn the current set-up

There is now only one month to go to the election, and there are, still, to use the useful term of witless late secretary of defense and White House chief of staff Donald Rumsfeld, many Known Unknowns (KUs) that can derail this cozy picture for Harris and the Democrats in the next few weeks.

The first KU quite simply and awfully is the threat of thermonuclear war.

For the ghostly senile presence of nonentity Joe Biden still haunts the White House and, at least theoretically, Biden is still in charge of the nuclear codes. This is the case even though on September 20 Biden had his wife First Lady Jill Biden who holds no government position whatsoever co-chair a Cabinet meeting with him.

This makes a mockery of the tattered remnants of the supposedly sacred Constitution of the United States. Even the most demented and self-indulgent of Roman emperors never sank so low. Yet none of the assembled might or rank and file of Democratic senators, Congress members and party supporters raised as much as a peep about it.

The now “defunct” Biden administration has done little or nothing to defuse the crisis in the Middle East

On the week of September 23, the annual General Assembly meeting of the United Nations will convene in New York City. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is expected to attend and to use his visit, backed by the United Kingdom government of Keir Starmer, to urge the Biden administration to release to Kiev long range missiles that can target strategic sites deep within Russia.

Yet Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly and clearly warned that this is Moscow’s Last Red Line and that he will not tolerate it. Also, there is no doubt that the foreign policy and national security establishment in Moscow fully support their leader on this.

Therefore, if Biden and his team approve the missiles’ transfer, unrestrained thermonuclear war could make even the pathetic joke that US presidential elections have become completely irrelevant.

Even if that does not happen, a second KU could erupt across the Middle East.

Hostilities between Israel, unreservedly backed by the United States, on one side, and Iran allied with Hezbollah, the Houthis and Hamas in Gaza, on the other, continue to escalate. Once again, the nonexistent Biden administration, including Harris, has not raised a finger to try and defuse this crisis, despite pleas from all of America’s traditional allies and friends across the Middle East to do so.

In a third KU, the extraordinarily fragile state of the US economy could result in a market crisis as happened on Black Tuesday, October 29, 1929, and on Black Monday, October 19, 1987.

Wall Street collapses and the puncturing of enormous speculative bubbles in the West almost always happen in the month of October. This is again a clearly recognizable threat and danger – another KU.

Any of these three KUs might destroy any real lead by Harris or expose her theoretical lead over Trump as fake.

If any or all of them erupt, then Biden, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Harris and their “advisers” who run around frantically trying to come up with ideas to tell them what to think, may well be tempted to use any such crisis to suspend, cancel or delay the presidential election.

But if that happens, the threat of a full-scale political breakdown of the US federal political system, such as has not happened since the secession of the 11 states of the Confederacy in 1861, would be very real.

None of the US Mainstream Media, the MSM, dares to discuss or warn of this threat. Their silence makes a mockery of the idea that any kind of responsible free speech or free debate is still permitted in the national media of the United States.

Yet what would happen if the election is suspended is a fourth enormous KU, a Known Unknown that could cascade into a continental-scale national crisis and breakdown of coherent organized society with unanticipated and unimaginable speed.

For probably 95% to 98% of Americans, the scenarios of possibly imminent national economic crisis, constitutional political breakdown or full-scale global war are simply inconceivable. But this lack of imagination and fear does not negate these dangers: it only makes them far more likely.

No one in 1860 America, including Abraham Lincoln himself, remotely imagined the unprecedented bloodbath that was about to deluge the nation. And the United States avoided catastrophic economic collapse and political breakdown when President Franklin Roosevelt took office in April 1933 by the narrowest margin.

More than 90 years have passed since that last enormous, terrifying existential national crisis. Now, as I warned in my 2015 book “Cycles of Change” (Amazon/Kindle), once again, It Is Time.

Martin Sieff is a senior fellow at the American University in Moscow and a regular op-ed contributor to the China Daily.