They are scenting blood, the Democrats are. Roughly half the US, a country of 330 million people, is still firmly behind Trump. Trump is the Party, as a placard waved amidst the riotous mob that stormed the Capitol said.
Yes, Trump is the Republican party, Yes, still. It’s become a party of race baiters, the KKK, the Proud Boys, QAnon and other hate groups. The primary target of Trump’s Republican party are the Jews. It’s funny, because Trump allowed his favourite offspring, Ivanka, to convert to Orthodox Judaism and give him three Jewish grandchildren.
It’s almost like the minority baiting Subramanian Swamy in India says how can he be a racist when his wife is a Parsi and his son-in- law Muslim. I guess in the case of both Trump and Swamy, you can practice something in private and preach something else for political gain.
Joe Biden now faces the Ford-pardoning- of-Nixon dilemma. Ford pardoned Nixon, the nation never forgave him for it and so Ford lost the 1976 election to Carter. Trump has been impeached in the House of Representatives, again. He alleges a witch-hunt. The first time the impeachment was on quite flimsy grounds.
He had asked the president of Ukraine to do Biden in. He had done it brazenly and openly. That was his mistake. Many a world leader requisitions the help of other world leaders in their elections. Most recently, you are seeing the spectacle of Justin Trudeau of Canada and Boris Johnson of the UK appeal to their Sikh vote banks by interfering in farmer protests in India.
The first impeachment process failed miserably in the Senate. The failure only added to Trump’s popularity. He seemed coasting to a win in 2020, except that the coronavirus struck. He managed the outbreak miserably. Yet his supporters stuck by him. Ultimately though the deaths from Covid in the US, the largest of any country in the world, overwhelmed him and sank his presidency.
Instead of gracefully admitting defeat and living to fight another day, Trump played petulant. The election was rigged, he alleged. He had been cheated of a win, Biden and the Democrats were frauds. His core base bought into his spiel. And that’s how the attack on the Capitol happened.
There is no doubt that this, the second time, Trump needed to be impeached by the House and needs to be convicted by the Senate. But Biden will be the president when the time for Trump’s trial in the Senate comes up. Well begun is half done, is an old adage. Biden is already facing massive challenges. The pandemic reaches new highs every day. Yes, the vaccines have arrived, but they need to be distributed efficaciously. And then there is no guarantee how they will perform in a mass rollout.
The economy is in the tank. Biden is turning to clean energy to bail the economy out. He is completely wrong here. Oil and natural gas are the only ways to resuscitate the economy. Obama tried hard to depend upon green energy to resuscitate the economy in 2009, failed miserably, and then turned, successfully, to oil and natural gas. Biden was part of Obama’s core team. He seems to have learned nothing from his own experience. In the midst of all this, if Biden allows a Senate trial of Trump, that wi l l r ip the country asunder. Democrats are hell-bent on convicting Trump because they want to debar him from running for president in 2024. But if Biden pursues and executes on a winning agenda, he should be able to defeat Trump in 2024 anyway.
But Biden’s agenda is all confused. Bernie Sanders, the icon of the left, is the chairman of the Senate’s powerful budget committee, and won’t let many moderate actions of Biden go through. Biden got many Republican supporters this time because of Trump’s mishandl ing of the pandemic. He wants to retain them for 2024, that’s why he’s refusing to do anything on police reform. So Biden’s caught in a clef t st ick: appeal to the lef t through clean energy, and appeal to the right by foregoing police reform.
On the foreign policy front, Biden wants to sign an Iran nuclear deal. That is sure to alienate the Israelis and the Arabs, who have been long-standing US allies. Trump disdained the Iranians. The Israelis and the Arabs loved him for it.
Trump undid whatever Obama had done. Now whatever Trump stands for, Biden stands against. If Biden doesn’t reduce the pandemic and improve the economy in his first year in office, people will start turning against him. Trump’s base loves him, no matter what. Biden’s base doesn’t love him. It wants performance from him.
Proceeding with the Senate trial will hamstrung, maybe even kill, Biden’s presidency. Letting Trump go free may be the only option. Biden’s flawed economic agenda is not improving the economy anytime soon. The true climate believers have arrived and they are going to conflate, wrongly, their beliefs with economic revival. And that’s why Trump will win in 2024.
The writer is an expert on energy and contributes regularly to publications in India and overseas.