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Opinion
Trump can storm back into the White House if he loses his belligerence
- With Biden’s chances damaged, voters may reward a better-behaved Trump because his policies do appeal to many across the political spectrum
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Robert Boxwell has worked and lived in the Asia-Pacific region since the early 1990s.
“Trump’s policies without Trump.” Not a few Americans have expressed the attraction of this idea since Donald Trump threw his hat in the ring in 2015. It dawned on some immediately, others gradually, depending on how much tolerance one had for his mouth and demeanour.
The belittling nicknames Trump coined for his opponents during the 2016 campaign were singularly amusing, and his reference to the Washington establishment as “the swamp” resonated with tens of millions of voters. But he took insults to new lows, like when he questioned whether the late senator John McCain, who spent years in a Hanoi prison during the Vietnam war, was a war hero. Campaigns are nasty. Trump delivered.
Assuming at least some people who joined his administration advised him to put a lid on it when he became president, that advice was ignored. He never transitioned from the brawler of his campaign to being “presidential”. Whatever that word means, it is how Americans largely want and expect their president to behave. There are nice and diplomatic ways to say even unpleasant things; Trump couldn’t be bothered.
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