Opinion | Facing the reality of a potential Trump return

By Tom Fowdy

Last week saw what may prove to be one of the most decisive moments of 2024, and with it, a potential turning point in world history. The US Presidential Election debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump saw the incumbent suffer a car-crash performance, with the President appearing lost, frail, and confused. The horror shows the world witnessed resulted in scores of America's top newspapers producing op-eds and editorials calling for the 82-year-old officeholder to stand aside, producing a civil war inside the Democratic Party on what to do with him.

All kinds of rumors and speculation abound. While nobody knows what will ultimately happen, this level of doubt and uncertainty does not breed confidence in his suitability to continue as President of the United States and thus there is a feeling these events will prove fatal to him if he continues. In just one night, everything his detractors had been pushing against his physical and mental capacity had been legitimated. It is no longer the usual political oppositional nitpicking; it is something that has struck a dagger into the heart of his own side.

Where does this leave us? If one is feeling pessimistic, as much as you can never tell with politics, one may argue that this has made the probability of Donald Trump's return ever more likely, a prospect which will have daunting consequences for the world over. While nothing is certain, the debate should be a wake-up call for politicians and elites throughout the globe to make contingency plans for this development, one which will be more unstable, less predictable, more chaotic, and certainly less amicable than the first round.

Donald Trump will undoubtedly return to the White House as a vengeful man who has limited time to impose his vision on America and therefore will act more aggressively than in his first time. We should expect, as he has publicly expressed on countless occasions, that he will go after those he deems to be his political opponents who "stitched him up." Indeed, even as a neutral observer, it seems obvious that the rule of law has deteriorated in America to the point it was obviously weaponized to discredit the frontrunner. The problem is not however identifying the politicised nature of this, but the fact he will absolutely put the shoe on the other foot. It may seem apocalyptic, but a 2ndTrump term certainly beckons the deterioration of the US system further.

Secondly, we should expect grave unpredictability in international relations. While I believe the US system will attempt to resist the President's effort to make radical decisions, a new Trump administration will undoubtedly throw Ukraine under the bus, enable maximum Israeli aggression in Israel, and aggressively escalate tensions with China. We should expect Trump to intensify the trade war while also appointing ideological extremists to office, such as Mike Pompeo, Matthew Pottinger and Robert C. O'Brien, who will manipulate media coverage again by pushing the narrative of the Uyghur genocide and transform tensions with Beijing into a fully-fledged Cold War.

The potential return of Donald Trump coincides with a trend in the West as a whole towards right-wing populism, with the National Rally in France taking the lead in the first round of the Parliamentary elections. Although the British Labour Party are set to win a landslide on Thursday, the destruction of the Conservative Party, the likely election of Nigel Farage and the surge of Reform UK beckon a vastly changed political landscape. What we see overall is a growing backlash against liberal modernism and the socio-economic consequences of globalization, as if the foundations of the post-1991 Unipolar, post-Cold War order, both domestically and geopolitically, are disintegrating.

Yet throughout it all, it is one-off events such as a Presidential debate that may prove to be the most decisive turning points in this historical trajectory. But even discarding that, it is wishful thinking to assume Biden has been an effective or inspiring US President, he has not. He is presiding over the most divisive era in American politics since the end of the Civil War, marked by unprecedented bitterness and strife, and is not a figure who commands optimism or national unity. Even if by the force of a miracle he is able to prevail, we should not delude ourselves into believing this underlying sentiment will ultimately go away or everything will be normal again. It won't be. We undoubtedly face a frightening and unknown world where trouble seems to lie around every corner.

The author is a well-seasoned writer and analyst with a large portfolio related to China topics, especially in the field of politics, international relations and more. He graduated with an Msc. in Chinese Studies from Oxford University in 2018.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.

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