Irish Examiner view: Trump's supporters are right to be worried as presidential election hots up

As the Kamala Harris-Tim Walz campaign gets going, Donald Trump is looking increasingly lost and directionless — much as Joe Biden did before he stood down

US vice president Kamala Harris and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. Picture: Charles Rex Arbogast/AP

There is more than a hint of irony in the fact that the reason why Joe Biden stepped down from his bid to be re-elected is the very same reason that is now making Republicans nervous about their candidate, Donald Trump.

While Biden said he ended his campaign for the good of the country, the real reason was that he was too old.

That simple fact, rendered manifest in his stilted and often incoherent way of speaking, left him incapable of consistent, intelligible, and lucid messaging about the perils of a second Trump term in office.

There is now a palpable sense of fear in Republican ranks that their candidate is increasingly incapable of building a comprehensible case against the Kamala Harris/Tim Walz ticket.

Last week, Trump emerged from relative obscurity to deliver a rambling and often unintelligible press conference — failing to deliver any sort of a lucid case as to why voters should back him and not Harris.

The event was called as a response to Harris’ seemingly unstoppable rise in nationwide polls, but it presented nothing of a cogent argument on policy or any of the potential sticking points for the Democrats — specifically immigration, inflation, energy prices, or crime.

As is his wont, Trump riffed on and on about how Harris and her running mate were “bad on issues”, without clarifying what those issues were and why Harris and Walz were failing on them. 

Trump has looked increasingly lost and directionless, much as Biden did before he stood down.

That has to be a concern not only for Trump’s own supporters but across the Republican party as a whole, and the previously unconditional support he had among both groups has, as a result, begun to fracture and play a blame game.

It appears Trump is now running scared of the Democrats, focussing only on those narcissistic elements which seem to mean so much to him — rather than anything by way of political discourse. His supporters are right to be worried.

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The mega-rich should pay up

It might well behove Ireland — and many other nations — to study closely the case being made for a global pact to levy annually a minimum of 2% of the wealth of the world’s estimated 3,000 dollar-billionaires. 

The proposal has come from the French economist Gabriel Zucman  , at the behest of the current leader of the G20 group of major economic powers — Brazilian president Luis Inácio Lula da Silva — and he argues it could raise $200bn-250bn (€183bn-230bn) a year to fight global hunger or health, or even fund a fair transition to a green economy worldwide.

Zucman even argues that extending the levy to centi-millionaires — those worth over $100m, of which there are 65,000 on the planet — could generate a further $100bn-135bn.

The G20 has put the proposed levy on its autumn agenda, while the US president, Joe Biden, has already proposed a “billionaire minimum income tax” of 25% which countries such as France, Germany, South Africa, and Spain have rallied behind.

This comes at a time when billionaires globally are paying a tax rate equivalent to 0.5% of their wealth.

There are estimated to be 11 billionaires in Ireland and their combined net wealth reached €49.12bn this year, a big increase on their €33.16bn worth last year. A 2% tax on that wealth could net the exchequer €1bn a year.

It is possible that residual ideological objections might quell enthusiasm towards embracing Zucman’s proposal, but in the light of the inflationary economy and the pressing need for new housing, that is money that could be put to good use here on an immediate basis and with an eye on future needs.

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Orwellian state

It’s 75 years since George Orwell’s seminal dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was published and now more than ever the book’s vision of a totalitarian and state-controlled future is as pertinent as it was when it was first released in 1949.

Orwell’s imagined future sees the world’s population governed by three autocratic states which are constantly at war and whose peoples live under constant surveillance and oppressive dictatorial control.

In our world today, countries such as China impose a social credit system whereby people’s trustworthiness is ranked through constant supervision; Russia’s state-controlled media does not speak of a war against Ukraine, but of a “special military operation”; in North Korea, a cult of personality props up the regime of Kim Jong Un.

Such despotic regimes mirror the totalitarian world painted by Orwell in which Great Britain is a province of the superstate Oceania, ostensibly run by the dictatorial leader Big Brother (who may or may not be real) and terrorised by the fanatical enforcers, the Thought Police.

Broadly speaking, Nineteen Eighty-Four examines the role of truth across society and the manner in which facts can be manipulated to wean people into complicity with whatever Big Brother or the ruling Party feel is necessary. Constant propaganda and the prosecution of those engaging in free thinking and any form of individual expression is what is foisted on those inhabiting the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Truth, for them, is merely a starting point which can be reconstructed and deconstructed to fit any narrative.

In our own age, disinformation has become the norm and deepfakes a daily reality in a world where populist autocrats rule fragile democracies. Censorship, depending on where you live, has reached intolerable levels and ‘alternative facts’ are an accepted method of distorting the truth.

Orwell’s book remains a bleak look at how societies can be led down an oppressive one-way street, but also a sobering overview of how close a neighbour tyranny is to truth.