This election has cemented the divisions tearing America apart – and Trump is at the heart of that

Given the US presidential election is a fight to choose the “most powerful man on earth,” it would be great if everyone on earth had a vote. That way, the Biden landslide that many were hoping for – including, I suspect, most people reading this – would have been a lot likelier. 

Outside of Russia, Brazil, India, Hungary, the Philippines, Downing Street and other populist coronavirus hotspots, Donald Trump has few places, other than the US, where all but a small minority would love never to hear from him again.

But we don’t have a vote. It is the American presidential election, he really means it when he says “America First”, and though China may see itself as the most powerful country in the world, America is the most powerful democracy. So whether we like it or not, American voters have a lot more influence on our lives than we have on theirs. 

And before Brits get too harrumphy about the quirks and anomalies of the American system, the vagaries of the electoral college, the slowness in counting votes, the fact that the one with the most votes doesn’t always win. 

I’m sure many in the US feel very bemused about ours when they see men with buckets on their head standing alongside a prime minister waiting to hear a local result, and a party that could win a national landslide without getting close to half of the votes in the country.

So, if I can use a phrase I am sick to death of hearing in relation to Covid-19, “it is what it is.” And what it is, right now, is a bit of a mess, and will be messy for a while. But when all is said and done – and given the global TV breath-fest going on right now, more is being said than done – all that matters out of all of this is who is in the White House by January. 

Remember the hanging chads in Florida, and the fight that went all the way to the Supreme Court, which declared George W Bush the winner over Al Gore? A man who accepted that brutal decision with a grace that we know is beyond Trump. Of course you do. But what history remembers is that Bush became president, and Gore did not.

In my heart, I wanted the Biden landslide, every bit as much as the one I worked for with Tony Blair in 1997. But have you ever been to Florida, Georgia or Texas? Not easy, and it was evidence of how nervous Trump was in the early hours that he called these “states we were not expected to win”.

In my head, given just how angry and polarised the US is right now, I suspected it was always likely to come down to a small number of states which, every four years in recent times, become the epicentre for political obsessives all over the world – especially Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania. Whoever gets two of those three in the next hours – please God don’t let it be days – wins the electoral college. And then, especially if it is Trump who loses two of the three – courtland here we come. That much was clear from his disgusting “we already won” ramble.

You can often work out what your opponent’s approach is from what he says about you. So that Trump’s first comment in the early hours was a tweet that Democrats were trying to “steal” the election, complete with the misspelling of polls as “Poles,” made me wonder whether he knew more about what was happening in those three key states than we did, or the pundits and pollsters did, and he was scared. A confident Trump would have let Joe Biden do his “we are on course to win” statement and just get on with it, and wait for the votes to be counted.

Nor is it surprising that it should be an action by a media organisation – Fox News – that appeared to tip Trump from confidence and calm into a Twitter tantrum (the Polish tweet was immediately deleted) and then his raging about electoral theft when the only real electoral scandal has been the Republicans’ deliberate attempt at voter suppression, rather than any major evidence of voter fraud.

After four years of Trump in our lives, we should be surprised at none of this. We should not be surprised that his argument against Fox declaring Arizona for Biden – namely, that they should not be declaring the result until all the votes are counted – is the exact opposite of the argument on which he bases his claim that the election was being “stolen” in the so-called swing states. Places where he just happened to be ahead, and where he said the counting of votes should stop.

The story of the Trump presidency was always going to be whether the guardrails of American democracy and institutions were able to deal with his wrecking ball approach and personality. The Republican Party caved early. The Senate has been weak. The media in the main has tended to fuel the polarisation he exploits. For the courts, a mixed picture.

But amid all the noise and all the rage, one thing still matters more than any other – who gets across 270 in the electoral college first. My heart and head still say Biden. But it could take a while. Thanks to Trump’s very deliberate act this morning, it could get violent, which is what he has been angling for, ever since his “stand back and stand by” message to his more violent supporters, in the first presidential debate.

If he wins two out of the three, he stays in the White House, and most of the world feels sick. If he doesn’t, but he continues on his current tack, and Biden eventually takes office, a very tough job gets a lot tougher for the former vice president. 

That is because this election, and especially Trump’s handling of it, has cemented, rather than eroded, the divisions tearing America apart.