Former US president Donald Trump may have been the one in a deranged assassin’s crosshairs last Saturday but, no matter how you look at it now, President Joe Biden is the dead man walking.
There is no way that Trump, who survived the attack and rose from the stage floor to shake his fist defiantly, can lose the US presidential election in November to a Biden who appears confused and about to collapse from exhaustion after every encounter with the public.
Trump has become the American dream. He is the man who cheated death. He is the comeback kid, impervious to all the legal cases against him, and he will ascend to the throne once again. Cue the music, the lights, the fireworks as Captain America takes charge.
On Monday, two days after surviving the attempt on his life, Trump announced that he had picked JD Vance, a young, energetic candidate who shares his worldview and plans, as his running mate.
By picking the 39-year-old Vance, author of the best-selling working-class memoir Hillbilly Elegy, Trump was nodding to a constituency that feels marginalised, judged, threatened and alienated. Forget whether the grievances are valid or not. The fact is that this constituency exists — and it needs a home. That home is Trump’s America.
Trump has become the American dream. He is the man who cheated death. He is the comeback kid
In the aftermath of the assassination attempt, I see no chance for Biden’s campaign to wake up or catch up. I always believed that Trump was ahead, that Biden was uninspired and exhausted, and that the Democratic Party should urgently find an alternative candidate. But the Democrats failed to act, and the US and the world are now at this inflection point.
In future our children and their children will look back on this point in history and reflect on what we knew — and how we failed to adequately interrogate the implications.
The thing about Trump and the people around him is that they do not hide. We know exactly what they stand for, how they intend to change policy and wield power, and what the world they want to usher in looks like.
At the heart of Trump’s worldview is Project 2025, a 900-page document of policy proposals put together by The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank that has influenced Republican administrations since Ronald Reagan’s presidency in the 1980s. In 1985, for example, it encouraged Reagan to reject imposing sanctions on apartheid South Africa.
“The administration should actively encourage US firms to invest in South Africa … If Congress places sanctions on South Africa, or demands disinvestment, it will weaken black unions, erode the corrosive effects of economic growth, and help perpetuate apartheid,” it said.
The head of The Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, believes a conservative revolution is under way.
“We are in the process of the second American Revolution,” he told a right-wing cable channel in early July. He said the revolution will “remain bloodless if the Left allows it to be”.
Project 2025 calls for the firing of thousands of civil servants and their replacement as quickly as possible with conservative loyalists. Vance has in the past called for the firing of “every civil servant in the administrative state” and their replacement with “our people”.
The Heritage Foundation is creating a database of these loyalists. Think of it as cadre deployment on steroids.
Project 2025 aims to vastly expand the power of the president and to bring independent agencies such as the department of justice under the direct control of the White House. Think of South Africa in 2009 — and Jacob Zuma is in charge of the National Prosecuting Authority with the power to dismantle the Scorpions. What could possibly go wrong?
These are just two small examples of what lies ahead.
We are just over 100 days away from the November 5 election. The Democrats are divided, confused and leaderless. The polls show Biden is limping. Trump is invigorated and in the ascendancy. His supporters are emboldened and throwing money at his campaign.
A new dawn is rising for the US and the world.
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