President Donald Trump speaks during an East Room event at the White House Photo / Getty Images
President Donald Trump speaks during an East Room event at the White House Photo / Getty Images
COMMENT: In 18 months, America will be back at the polls - and after yesterday, Donald Trump is going to be almost impossible to beat, writes Alex Carlton.
As Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into the 2016 US Presidential election revealed there is no evidence to suggest Trump or his campaign colluded with Russia, one thing is increasingly certain.
Unless some unimagined catastrophe hits between now and November 2020, Donald J Trump, the 45th president of the United States of America, is going to win a second four-year term.
I say this as someone who was once an avowed Trump denialist. In 2016, I, like almost everyone in the world, not least Trump himself, was convinced that the New York real estate tycoon had zero chance at securing the top job.
"Trump is the Y2K Bug of presidential candidates," I declared confidently. "He is a false fear. He'll never sit in the Oval Office."
Trump would have loved to see my look of utter disbelief as I sat at my cheerful little at-home US election party and watched those unwinnable states turn red, one by one. Ohio. Michigan. Florida. He did it.
In 2019, with the election to decide whether or not he'll serve another four years just 18 months away, I'm equally convinced he'll be in the Oval Office again at the end of 2020.
For starters, almost every American president serves two terms. It's the norm. Of the 44 presidents since George Washington (not including Trump) only 11 weren't re-elected when they ran for a second term (a small handful of others died in office or chose not to run a second time).
The most recent one-termer was George H.W. Bush who failed in his 1992 re-election bid after enraging his own party by jacking up taxes when he promised he wouldn't (in his famous "read my lips — no new taxes" speech).
Taxes are to Republicans what gluten is to a wellness blogger; and this critical mistake (albeit one that ended up helping the country out of a recession) led to the elder Bush's political demise.
People attend a rally in support of US President Donald Trump near Trump Tower this week. Photo / Getty Images
Trump, on the other hand, enjoys enormous support from his own party. According to the most recent Gallup poll, he commands a 90 per cent job approval rating among Republicans. And in a country without compulsory voting, winning elections isn't about bringing round the other side. It's about convincing your own supporters to love you enough to go to the polls.
The next issue for a Democratic candidate hoping to snatch the White House away from the sitting President is the fact that the vast majority of the doomsday predictions that Democrats and others forecast before Trump moved in to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue haven't come true, staggering as that sounds.
The anticlimax of the Mueller report is only part of what makes Democratic predictions appear so hollow.
Analysts also believed Trump would obliterate the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. People would die in the streets, they said.
In the end the Republican-controlled Congress, realising Obamacare's growing popularity with voters, refused to let him do it, and voted against repealing the groundbreaking healthcare program several times. Instead, they tinkered round the edges in ways that neither particularly helped nor hurt anyone.
There were also huge fears that Mr Trump would start a nuclear war with North Korea. Instead, the two erratic world leaders have become smitten penpals, sending each other what Trump, with his usual weird tone-deafness calls "love letters" that promise to strengthen their ties and minimise their threat to one other.
Of course nothing has really changed materially — North Korea still has its nukes — but the country's leader Kim Jong-un hasn't hurled a missile into the Sea of Japan since November 2017.
President Donald Trump makes statements in the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House in Washington. Photo / AP
Trump has also managed to claim victory over ISIS in Syria, in a war that looked like it could drag on indefinitely. This flies in the face of the predictions that a Trump presidency would lead to further destabilisation in the Middle East, if that were humanly possible after the disastrous policies of both George W Bush and, sadly, Barack Obama.
But the most damning evidence of all that we'll still be reading Trump's all caps tweets all the way to 2024 is that the American economy is firing on all cylinders.
Unemployment is down. Wages growth is steady. There are wobbles of course — the market trembles here and there and experts predict Trump's gigantic corporate tax cuts and their subsequent debt escalation will only keep things chugging along for so long — but pre-2016 predictions of financial chaos have not yet come to pass.
And when the US economy is going well a sitting president could cheat on their wife with Jess from Married At First Sight and the voters would still grant him a second term.
The only analysis of Trump that has remained absolutely unchanged since 2016 is that he remains a truly unpopular personality worldwide.
But while "because I don't like him" might be a good reason to vote against someone running for primary school class captain, it's not going to be enough to turn off the diehard Trump Republican base who are absolutely thrilled that Trump gives them more and more reasons every day to "own the libs".
Look, I was wrong before and nothing would give me greater pleasure than being wrong again now. I believe the man has still done untold damage around the world in ways that are less tangible than wages or wars, particularly around bolstering white supremacists and marginalising minorities.
But I'm sorry to say that from where I'm sitting it looks like Trump was the Y2K Bug after all but not because he didn't make it to the White House. He made it there all right, but somehow the world kept turning.
Alex Carlton is a freelance writer based in Australia.
