Yahoo Finance

What might his return to the Oval Office mean for the US and the wider world? Appearing on an ABC talk show earlier this month, Hillary Clinton, who lost to Trump in 2016, said: “I think it would be the end of our country as we know it.”

Trump, for his part, claims Biden has set his country on the path to World War Three: “If we don’t win this election, our country, I think, is finished, I really do.” Even accounting for political hyperbole on both sides of the aisle, it’s clear the stakes are high.

The rising fear among liberals is being stoked by what Trump has publicly said he will do if re-elected. His first term was dominated by the pandemic; his second is likely to be shaped by rising geopolitical tensions.

America remains the undisputed number one global superpower and its leadership has underpinned the world order for the best part of a century. That can no longer be taken for granted with Trump repeatedly pouring scorn on old alliances and heaping praise on the world’s autocrats. His worldview can be summed up in two words: America first.

There’s also a sense that he knows better now how Washington works, is developing plans to circumvent the various checks and balances, will surround himself with ultra-loyal advisers and, as second-term president, will be unencumbered by the need to seek re-election. All told, if you thought Trump’s first term was a wild ride, you likely ain’t seen nothing yet.

The trouble with Biden

Nevertheless, it’s clear Trump’s extraordinary resurgence is as much down to Biden’s unpopularity as the Don’s own appeal.

However, under Biden the US economy has recovered faster from the pandemic than most other developed nations. Inflation, which has been an issue everywhere, is falling. The President’s economic policies – hawkishness towards China coupled with a blend of industrial protectionism and interventionism – are not overly dissimilar to Trump’s.

The withdrawal from Afghanistan was undoubtedly a blemish. But Biden has been steadfast and collegiate in his support for Ukraine. His recent trip to Israel was a model of statesmanship. He unequivocally and sincerely condemned the Hamas attack, referencing his own experience of bereavement to assure Israelis he understood their pain. Yet he also cautioned Benjamin Netanyahu’s government against overreacting and making the same mistakes the US had in the wake of 9/11.

Biden has three huge problems. Firstly, he has an almost uniquely unpopular Vice President in Kamala Harris. Secondly, only 14pc of Americans think he has improved their economic lot, according to a recent poll by the Financial Times. Thirdly, around three in every four Americans believe he is, at 80 years of age, too old to serve a second term. Biden can do something about the first of these problems, a bit about the second but nothing at all about the third.

At 77, Trump is no spring chicken (both Bill Clinton and George W Bush, who left office in 2001 and 2009 respectively, are the same age). However, he gives the impression of having far more energy and vigour than Biden, America’s oldest ever president, who occasionally slurs his words and is prone to gaffes.

Earlier this week, Biden had to give up trying to pronounce a tech company’s name during a speech to Silicon Valley chief executives. At a press conference the day before, the President referred to Chinese premier Xi Jinping, whom he had just met in San Francisco, as a “dictator”, causing the Secretary of State Antony Blinken, sitting in the front row of the audience, to wince visibly.

Biden also moves hesitantly. In the summer he tripped and fell after handing out diplomas at a graduation ceremony at the US Air Force Academy in Colorado. Few Americans need reminding of Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole, whose single fall from the stage at a rally during the 1996 campaign is believed to have played a key role in his eventual defeat to Clinton. Dole was just 73.

Trump’s revenge

If Biden’s age does indeed prevent his re-election, no one needs to guess what Trump would do during a second term. The man himself has been very clear about his plans in speeches and on his Agenda47 website. Victory alone isn’t enough; he wants revenge. Addressing the Conservative Political Action Conference in March, Trump pitched his comeback in biblical terms, telling supporters: “I am your retribution.”

Trump has already promised to pardon the January 6 insurrectionists. He also plans to disband what he terms the “deep state” by removing thousands of civil servants via the so-called “Schedule F” process, replacing them, according to Axios, with a “pre-vetted, pro-Trump army of up to 54,000 loyalists across government”.

A recent article by the New York Times detailed how the Trump team was identifying a cadre of right-wing lawyers to fill roles in key government agencies. Another by the Washington Post reported discussions about getting the Justice Department to drop its investigations into him and start probing his many enemies.

Trump is said to be thinking about invoking the Insurrection Act on his first day in office, which would allow him to deploy the military to crush protests.

When the murder of George Floyd sparked demonstrations in 2020, the then-president was keen to call in federal troops but was talked out of it by then Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper. He also reportedly hankered for a military parade down Pennsylvania Avenue on Veterans’ Day but was dissuaded by advisers.

Trump is certainly planning to reverse Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. The current President’s broader climate agenda would very quickly be balled up and thrown in a non-recyclable trash can. Trump would cancel restrictions on drilling for fossil fuels and scrap proposed federal vehicle emission targets designed to pressure carmakers into producing more electric vehicles.

He is very likely to pick up where he left off on immigration, including building an extension of his signature “wall” on the Mexican border and reimposing a ban on travellers from predominantly Muslim countries.

Trump has said he wants to end birthright citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants and use special forces troops to fight drug cartels in central and Latin American countries.

Certainly, no one could accuse Trump of being short of ideas. He wants to build a defence system similar to Israel’s Iron Dome, set up a competition and award charters for the building of 10 new “freedom cities”, spark a flying car revolution and deal with homelessness by building tent cities.

He has also laid out plans to ban biological men from competing in women’s sport, punish schools that push “gender insanity” and critical race theory, impose the death penalty for drug dealers, award “baby bonuses” to new families and hold a Great American State Fair in Iowa to mark the country’s 250th anniversary in 2026.

Hamas’s terror attacks against Israel have provided Trump with an opportunity to point to one of the main foreign policy successes of his time as president, the Abraham Accords. The deals brokered by the White House in 2020 were aimed at improving relations between Israel and a number of other countries in the Middle East, including the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco.

However, Trump’s broader foreign policy is likely to be far less internationalist than the rest of the world has come to expect of the US. In his first term, Trump regularly accused America’s allies of not contributing enough to collective security. He also threatened to pull the US out of Nato and remove troops from the Pacific Rim.

Richard Haass, the former president of the Council of Foreign Affairs, told Foreign Affairs Magazine that Biden has swung US foreign policy “from ‘America first’ to alliances first”. The current president has worked closely with European countries on the collective response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and built up agreements with countries to counter the rise of China in the Asia-Pacific region.

Biden has bolstered the “Quad” security alliance between the US, Australia, India and Japan and helped forge the Aukus defence partnership between Australia, the UK and the US. The White House has also strengthened its cooperation agreements with Taiwan.

It is widely assumed that Trump, who claimed to be the “apple of [Putin’s] eye”, would walk back, if not disband, many such agreements. Moscow is understood to be holding off on any rethinking on its approach to Ukraine until the likely results of the US election become clearer. Trump has claimed that, if re-elected, he would end the war between Russia and Ukraine in 24 hours.

President Trump regularly accused allies of benefitting from unfair trade deals, denouncing the World Trade Organization and describing the North American Free Trade Agreement, which he renegotiated to create the United States Mexico Canada Agreement in 2020, as “the worst deal ever made”.

In a second term he plans to impose retaliatory tariffs on imports from foreign countries that impose tariffs on US-made goods. He is likely to maintain a hawkish attitude towards Beijing and has promised to curtail Chinese ownership of US infrastructure and land.

Trump’s attitude towards individual countries is harder to predict because he proved so fickle last time around. His dealings with Venezuela, as outlined in John Bolton’s book The Room Where It Happened, are indicative. According to the former national security adviser, Trump vacillated between invading the Latin American country to depose Nicolás Maduro because it would be “cool”, or working with the opposition to unseat him.

However, he also described the socialist Venezuelan president, who was widely understood to have stolen the 2018 election, as “smart” and “tough”, while expressing admiration for “all those good-looking generals” who, according to UN reports, were responsible for the torture and disappearance of thousands of Venezuelans.

He claimed that “Venezuela is really part of the United States”, suggested to the opposition that his support depended on being awarded preferential access to the country’s oil riches, and then scaled back planned sanctions against Maduro (who remains in power to this day), much to Russia’s delight.

Slowing the march

Who or what could stand between Trump and the White House? Last weekend, Senator Tim Scott dropped out of the race for the Republican nomination, the latest step in the process, which should reach its climax sometime after the January 15 Iowa caucuses, by which anti-Trump Republicans start coalescing around a single candidate.

The one-time leading contender for that role, Florida’s Ron DeSantis, has recently been treading water in the polls while Nikki Haley, the ex-governor and former US ambassador to the UN, has been gaining ground and Wall Street donors thanks, in part, to her bonafide foreign policy credentials.

Trump has many fervent supporters but clear-eyed Republicans know he’s also something of an electoral liability. He lost the popular vote in both of the last two presidential elections and the GOP performed badly in 2018, 2020 and 2022 when he was their figurehead. In last year’s midterms, Republicans who deployed Trump’s MAGA and election-rigging rhetoric performed significantly worse than more moderate candidates, resulting in a series of Democratic victories.

After refusing to attack him in the early stages of the Republican nomination process, all five of the challengers tore into the absent ex-President during a recent prime time debate in Florida, blaming him for the party’s poor showing in several “off-year” US state and local elections at the beginning of the month. Haley, who was nominated for her ambassadorial role by Trump, said: “I can tell you that I think he was the right president at the right time. I don’t think he is the right president now.”

However, it was the third time that Trump has avoided the debate stage, his absence providing the clearest indicator of his status as out-and-out Republican frontrunner, untroubled by the need to engage directly with his rivals. Scott Reed, a veteran GOP strategist, believes none of the other contenders will be able to make up the ground to challenge the former president: “Trump is a runaway freight train.”

Nevertheless, Trump’s legal woes could still throw up sizable obstacles on his march to the White House. Those same New York Times polls showing Trump beating Biden in key states also suggest the former president’s support would fall away sharply if he was convicted.

Trump’s most bullish supporters claim he could govern from behind bars. Indeed, there’s no law to prevent that (in 1920, the socialist Eugene Debs campaigned from prison and managed to garner nearly a million votes). But, in the real world, it’s an extremely outlandish scenario.

And, although Trump now appears to have the edge over Biden, what if Biden doesn’t run? David Axelrod is among the influential Democrat voices that have started to suggest the President makes way for a younger candidate who could attract more support. Last week, Karl Rove, who was George W Bush’s senior adviser, wrote: “The party that picks the fresh face will win the White House.” The question, however, is: who? Biden’s party is not blessed with a deep bench.

Even if the Democrats stick with an older face, Biden has a habit of exceeding low expectations. A year out from the election, there’s a reasonable chance he may be able to pull off that trick again.

The reason why most voters are not giving the President credit for his management of the economy is that they are still feeling the pain each time they shop for groceries and fill up their cars. Consumer sentiment is falling even as most other indicators have started pointing in the other direction.

Arguably one of the most important political stories last week may well have passed most people in Washington by. In an earnings call with analysts on Thursday, Doug McMillon, the chief executive of Walmart, pointed out the prices of US groceries and general merchandise are higher than a year ago and sharply up on two years ago.

However, he also said those increases are starting to slow and could even reverse: “In the US, we may be managing through a period of deflation in the months to come.”

If the head of the world’s largest retailer is right, and Americans soon start to feel the inflation pressure easing, there’s a very good chance Biden’s ratings could start ticking upwards.

Trump may have upended many political certainties but you’d still be stupid to ignore the importance of the economy. Couple that with Trump becoming more visible, complaining loudly about stolen elections, as the campaign crescendos and voters might well decide they prefer a quiet life.

Even if Trump does do better than in 2020 and is reelected, there’s a very good reason to believe the most extreme hysteria that is starting to build about the 47th President’s second term are misplaced: the US Constitution.

Both the Supreme Court and the lower courts have repeatedly rejected Trump’s attempts to overturn the last election. Biden has appointed a swathe of judges in the last three years, meaning the courts are becoming even more unsympathetic to Trump’s worldview. It’s also unlikely the Republicans will have the necessary 60-seat Senate majority required to pass legislation with ease.

There’s little Trump could do to remove these guardrails to democracy, which were put in place by the founding fathers specifically to prevent any one person amassing too much power.

Trump may or may not want to rule like a dictator. But, one way or another, he shouldn’t be able to.

Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month, then enjoy 1 year for just $9 with our US-exclusive offer.