Will Trump Survive November U.S. Election?

By Henry Srebrnik, [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner

 

Is it possible that Donald Trump is riding a wave of anti-globalist feeling that will keep him in the White House for another term?

Despite the criticisms levelled against him daily by his opponents, can the COVID-19 crisis benefit him in the November election?

The coronavirus pandemic is largely a class-based crisis. In its wake, Americans may confront increased inequality and resentment. 

The disaster has become so dire, in part, due to the legacy of the 2008 financial crisis. Minimum wage, in real terms, is more than thirty per cent lower than it was fifty years ago. Meanwhile, housing costs have more than doubled since 2000.

While well-educated white-collar professionals work remotely from home, their incomes secure, poorly paid workers in sectors of the economy requiring their physical presence face the hazards of infection, as they ride crowded buses and subways to their jobs. They risk exposure to the virus out of economic necessity.

A genetic analysis of the coronavirus by researchers at the Yale University School of Public Health revealed that 60 to 65 per cent of the nation’s infections and deaths can be traced to New York – the American epicentre of global finance and travel.

Yet the groups that have profited the most from the globalization and deregulation that made the rapid spread of the pandemic possible have had the easiest time protecting themselves from its effects.

Outrage has grown towards the privileged living in large houses removed from neighbours by leafy yards, while the working classes remain confined in small apartments located in densely populated inner-city streets. 

Trump’s opposition to immigration is in tune with this new world. As globalisation has advanced, so has the risk of infectious diseases spreading. Prior to the pandemic, centrist Democrats proposed decriminalizing illegal immigration while some further left even suggested such people should have free health care. 

It will not be as easy now to dismiss as racism or nativism demands that the legal status of all workers be verified by employers. Even Trump’s plan to build a wall along the southern border may find a new lease on life.

 A Washington Post-University of Maryland Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement poll found that 65 per cent of respondents want a temporary freeze on all legal immigration during the coronavirus outbreak -- a position more populist than anything Trump has implemented. 

(The survey was conducted April 21-26 among a random national sample of 1,008 adults with 70 per cent reached on cell phones and 30 per cent on landlines, with a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.)

As Michael Lind, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, contended in an April 16 article in Tablet magazine, “It is safe to assume that abolishing border controls and immigration enforcement in an age of global contagion will not be a winning message in the foreseeable future.”

Trump’s calls for bringing manufacturing back to America have been under constant attack by the left. He was labelled a xenophobe for saying that China was taking advantage of the trade relationship with the U.S.

 

However, Nadia Schadlow, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, in an April 5 article in the Atlantic magazine, observed that “the current emergency has proved Trump right in fundamental ways -- about China specifically and foreign policy more generally.”

Trump’s quasi-isolationist impulses will also resonate. Will Americans really care whether Iranian-backed Shiites dominate Iraq or Saudi-backed Sunnis prevail in Yemen?

When the economy restarts, it will be in a world where governments act to curb the global market. They will rebuild a national economy instead of a global one, and their priority will be domestic industry. A situation in which so many of the world’s essential supplies originate in China – or any other single country – will not be tolerated.

Trump’s emphasis on protecting U.S. sovereignty is no longer so easily dismissed as being “on the wrong side of history.”

As Americans re-evaluate their positions on globalization, immigration, and the economy during this crisis, a populist like Trump, rather than a machine politician like Joe Biden, is more likely to benefit in November.