#dnaEdit: No stopping Trump

With Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton winning seven of the 11 states that polled in the US presidential primaries on “Super Tuesday”, both candidates have become clear front-runners to be nominated for the presidential polls later this year. Both are unique in their own ways. Clinton may become the first woman to be nominated by a mainstream party to contest on the Presidential ticket. But it is Trump’s candidature that has invited both alarm and ridicule. From starting out in the primaries campaign as a joker in the Republican pack, the billionaire businessman has captured the imagination of white voters by eschewing any pretensions of political correctness and regaling his supporters with a string of controversial and offensive statements. The manner in which Trump has appealed to discontented Republican voters has clearly stumped the party’s establishment. And Republican leaders have only themselves to blame for a rank-outsider pointing fingers at them and virtually stealing the party ticket. Rather than work closely with the Democrats after the disastrous George Bush years and the Great Recession, the Republicans, controlling both houses of Congress, turned dangerously defensive and played an overtly obstructionist role. 

The constant vilification of President Barack Obama has only served to drive the party and its supporters further to the right and created a social divide that is becoming difficult to bridge. Not surprisingly, bipartisanship and deal-making has unfortunately become synonymous with political skulduggery and those Republicans, with moderate views, have been upstaged by the ultra-conservative Tea Party wing of the party. The irony in all this is that even the Tea Party favourite, Ted Cruz, has found himself on the defensive against Trump’s anti-establishment rhetoric. But elections are not just a reflection of a country’s politics but also its society. Trump is winning despite derisive remarks against Muslims and Hispanics and his refusal to reject the support from white supremacists or renounce the Klu Klux Klan’s hateful legacy. He has also vowed to abolish income tax and proposed to deport all illegal migrants and build a wall in the South to keep Mexicans out. Republicans wondering how their party reached this road to majoritarian populism would do well to turn the mirror on themselves.

Like Trump, the Democratic Party has also had to contend with a late entrant in Bernie Sanders who joined the party last year. His evocation of democratic socialism tripped up Hillary in the early primaries, but Sanders’ failure to build bridges with non-whites and the democratic establishment has hurt him badly on Super Tuesday. For a country that fervently proclaims its capitalist credentials, Sanders has been at pains to distance himself from pronounced leftist positions. But his pledge to take on Wall Street, tighten financial regulations and tax the super-rich has won him supporters among the Democratic faithful. They believe that Obama disappointed them on these counts and Clinton is too much of a centrist to conceive any measures that would disrupt the financial status quo. Clinton’s long innings in public life — as First Lady, senator, Democratic challenger in 2008, and Secretary of State — is both a source of her strength and weakness. Against candidates like Trump and Sanders she can project her considerable administrative experience, but the long engagement has also come with controversies, scandals and dubious associations that her rivals have pounced upon. The rise of Trump amid the deep polarisation in American society and the average Republican voter’s drift to the extreme right has global implications too. It remains to be seen how America’s two-party democracy, and the Republican Party in particular, will resolve this diminution of its political centre.