American presidential election campaigns are extravaganzas in which rhetoric reigns over reality while candidates survey their kitty before deciding whether they should throw in the towel. But, periodically, there comes along a maverick who upends conventional wisdom and upsets the army of forecasters. By now Donald Trump should have said his goodbyes after all the gaffes he has made, yet he remains in the field as the Republican frontrunner for presidential nomination topping the popularity charts.
While the Republican establishment is wringing its hands, Mr Trump seemingly grows from strength to strength. Being a billionaire, he is not beholden to anyone and is using his own money. After the San Bernardino mass killings in California by a couple of Pakistan origin, his remedy is to bar all Muslims entering the United States until the administration can figure out what to do. And he has extolled Russian President Vladimir Putin, a compliment that has now been returned.
Republicans are worried that before he leaves the field, if he does, he would have antagonised enough voters to ensure the success of the leading Democratic aspirant, Hillary Clinton. Before insulting Muslims at home and around the world, he was after Mexican immigrants vowing to build a boundary wall to shut out Mexico and make it pay for the wall.
More than Mr Trump’s own personality, the adulation Republican voters seem to have for him is an expression of the American state of mind and feelings. The Paris massacre of a month ago by home-grown jihadists was bad enough, but the shock of the California killing spree by an American of Pakistan origin and his Pakistani girlfriend has provoked a sharp sense of insecurity.
President Barack Obama’s assurances to his countrymen and women that American agencies were first rate and he was ensuring their safety were less reassuring than Mr Trump’s simple and dramatic remedies. The very extravagant nature of his rhetoric was snapped up by many who view him as a man who disdains political correctness for telling things as they are. In Americanese, they slotted him as a plain honest guy.
Apart from the psychological state of the American mind, there are other striking aspects of the presidential campaign. Thanks to modern technology, the army of analysts sifting the winds of change take their exercises to absurd levels. To a foreign observer seeking a broad picture, such election coverage is plainly boring.
Fund-raising prowess is crucial because elections are becoming more expensive even as the four-year deadline approaches. Candidates themselves are plied with fat briefing notes for answering questions, particularly as periodic beauty contests of aspirants before television cameras are staged. Score for Republicans thus far: Mr Trump on top and Jeb Bush of the Bush dynasty hovering near the bottom.
Giving some comfort to his nervous fellow Republicans, Mr Trump has finally declared that he would not contest the presidency as an independent candidate even as many of them pray that he would decide not to persevere. Meanwhile, Republican agony continues.
People throughout the ages have organised periodic fiestas to make merry and let their hair down. Americans have the right to have their own fiesta in the form of four-yearly presidential election campaigns. But the exercise is now so weighed down by charts, statistics and ostensibly learned theses that they have ceased to be fun, despite the manufactured bonhomie of nomination sessions. It is only after one candidate has won the election that merry-making has an authentic ring to it.
These days Americans are hardly in a mood to celebrate. The sense of insecurity they felt after 9/11, the horrendous taking down of New York’s iconic towers by jihadis flying passenger planes into them, has come to revisit them. To the foreign eye, the two tragedies are hardly similar. But what Europeans experienced through the killing of 130 people by radicalised men and women of European nationality in Paris came to pass in the US. The San Bernardino killings were by a home-grown Muslim of foreign origin.
As President Obama reminded his nervous people, America is a country founded by migrants and their progeny. But, unlike in Europe which is used to multi-culturalism, thanks largely to former subjects of their colonial empires, America’s boast is to make migrants American in as short a time as a generation. The US believes in a homogenised society, although the racial black-white issue remains a factor in social mixing. The shock of a foreign-origin couple living in a suburb employing firearms to decimate their helpless fellow citizens remains raw.
Here comes Mr Trump dispensing his brand of rhetoric to serve as a balm to his afflicted fellow Americans. It is, in a sense, a slash and burn tactic. If Muslims are the culprits, ban them. If President Putin is following the kind of policies the US should be following, praise him. His analogy stems from his ability to make millions in business deals and from branding his name.
The recognised enemy is the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) or Daesh in Arabic. It is after all the reason that brought Mr Obama back to the Middle East, initially though using air power. It is an open question whether the US President is being sucked into ground operations by the induction of special forces. The official goal is to destroy the ISIS.
Upon reflection, the kind of rhetoric being employed by Mr Trump and some of his fellow Republicans will harm the country’s foreign policy interests. Muslims constitute a significant proportion of the world’s population and rule a number of important states, many of them American allies.
Perhaps the US is banking on the fact that election rhetoric is like water off a duck’s back and there is the reality of American power. Despite its recent relative decline, it remains the most powerful nation in the world. China has come up in recent times and likes to class itself as a G-2 country, but the difference with American power remains huge and is unlikely to be bridged for some 50 years.
