Former president Donald Trump hates dramatic surprises that are not of his own making – especially when they come with a price tag: ‘We spent $100m fighting crooked Joe Biden. And then all of a sudden, they decide to take him out and put somebody else in. She [Kamala Harris] never got one vote [in the primaries].’

That wasn’t the only surprise of the summer. In under a month, between 27 June and 21 July, a televised debate between the two main candidates ‘revealed’ President Joe Biden’s incapacity; Trump narrowly survived an assassination attempt; and Democratic Party grandees forced their official candidate, who had won all the primaries, to withdraw in favour of his vice-president, whose poll ratings at the time were even worse than his. But that too would rapidly change. Kamala Harris, previously seen as opportunistic and insincere, suddenly burst forth as radiant and joyful. It felt like the Democrats had remembered that their party’s anthem, from the era of the New Deal, was ‘Happy Days Are Here Again’.

From 15 to 18 July, however, the gods seemed to be smiling exclusively on their opponents, who gathered for the Republican National Convention (RNC) in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The New York Times, now actively cheerleading for the Democratic Party, summed up the regrettable state of play as ‘Republicans united behind Trump, sharks circling Biden’. Trump, not content with crushing Biden in a debate that the latter had called for, had managed to make his legal troubles pale into insignificance by surviving an assassination attempt on 13 July.

Immediately after, Trump had struggled to his feet, bleeding from one ear, raised his fist against a blue sky and American flag, and repeated, ‘Fight, fight, fight!’ At the RNC, the new supreme champion of the American right – never one for modesty and always keenly aware of the potency of the iconic moment – was counting on the party’s activists bowing down before him. They did not disappoint.

Eight years ago, Trump insulted the wife of Ted Cruz, his then rival in the Republican primaries, calling her ugly and accusing her of being in the pocket of Goldman Sachs. Not content with that, he also suggested that the Texas senator’s father had been involved in JFK’s assassination. In Milwaukee, Cruz bestowed final absolution for these offences before convention delegates, pronouncing the opening words of his speech with exaggerated solemnity: ‘God bless Donald J Trump!’

And each evening Trump was there

Normally, the victorious candidate does not attend the opening days of the convention, making a dramatic entrance just in time to accept the nomination. But nothing is normal with Trump, who respects no rules. He showed up each evening, his ear bandaged, to savour the tributes paid to him – including from at least five members of his family. The assassination attempt he had just survived capped his sense of martyrdom – persecuted by Democrats, the media, the IRS (internal revenue service), the judiciary, and now by a mysterious shooter against whom he had been inadequately protected.

The standard narrative ran: Trump could have enjoyed his fortune and focused on his family, but chose instead, at personal risk, to take care of his fellow citizens. And, with God’s protection, he would keep on fighting to ‘make America great again’ (MAGA, his slogan of choice). Kellyanne Conway, who managed his winning 2016 campaign, highlighted her former boss’s selflessness: ‘He’s a billionaire who could play golf every day. He could enjoy a magnificent life. He does not need to do this, but we need him to do this.’ And Eric Trump underscored his father’s sense of mission: ‘He decided to leave the comfort of a business empire. He knew there would be a huge price to pay.’

It’s just a basic fact that if you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. We’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it JD Vance

In choosing Ohio senator JD Vance as his running mate, has Trump picked an heir who will ensure that his transformation of the Republican Party outlives him? That’s certainly the Wall Street Journal’s fear: ‘Like Trump, Vance favours tighter borders, tariffs, more isolationist foreign policy and government intervention in the economy. He has echoed Trump’s antiestablishment message and, in his acceptance address, blasted Wall Street.’ Trump himself boasted of having rid his party of the ‘freaks, neocons, globalists, open-borders zealots and fools’.

Has he purged them, or created converts? When I asked Jovante Teague, a delegate from Florida, on the convention floor, he was in no doubt: ‘I really liked the Bushes, George W and his brother Jeb [former state governor, whom Trump trounced in the 2016 primaries]. “W” was one of our best presidents. But Iraq was a bad war. Bush did what he could with the cards he was dealt.’ Teague is now fully committed to the ‘America First’ policy that Trump and Vance champion: ‘We did everything we could in Ukraine. We gave a lot and got very little in return.’

A few days later in Alabama, Perry Hooper described his political epiphany. Hooper, who’s enthusiastic and talkative, is a veteran of seven Republican conventions, the first of which he attended in 1984 aged 24. Back then, his hero was Ronald Reagan. He later supported George Bush, father and son, John McCain and Mitt Romney, all of whom subsequently refused to back Trump, even against Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. Hooper didn’t criticise them for it but predicts an electoral landslide for his new hero, whom he has met several times since his political conversion. That dates from 2016, when a business associate recommended he read The Art of the Deal, the bestseller by the then New York real estate developer. A few years later, Hooper sponsored a resolution in the Alabama legislature declaring Donald Trump ‘the best president in US history’.

How does Hooper justify that claim when a panel of historians rate him as the worst? He reeled off his reasons: ‘Immigration, the economy, the wall, deregulation, peace treaties, the Abraham accords in the Middle East, the three justices appointed to the Supreme Court’. He grew emotional as he added, ‘He’s all about the American worker, he’s all about you, about us. He’s not an establishment-guy Republican. He’s more of a populist conservative. This is a billionaire and if he gets to his office at 5.30 in the morning, the first people he goes to see is somebody sweeping the street, working in the basement of a new building he had [just built] and he sits 30 or 45 minutes talking about his life.’ Currently, Hooper, a lawyer and lobbyist, is fund-raising for the Trump campaign.

Republicans are convinced that Americans don’t hate the rich if they speak to them simply and don’t lecture them (1). So they will always prefer a brash real estate developer to a sanctimonious university professor. Their backing of anti-intellectualism, based on the Democrats’ attachment to experts and the ‘knowledge economy’, helps make sense of voting patterns. In 1980, 76 of the 100 counties with the highest proportion of college graduates voted for Reagan. In 2020, 84 of those 100 counties supported Biden (2).

As the overall proportion of college graduates continues to rise, along with that of immigrants, Republican strategists have recommended that their party court educated middle-class voters, especially women, and tone down the anti-immigrant rhetoric. Such a tactic runs counter to all of Trump’s instincts, so he has chosen to do the opposite – that is, to mobilise the disillusioned white working class (mostly male) by railing against both ‘American carnage’ (caused by deindustrialisation and free trade) and immigration (which Trump associates with crime, drug trafficking, but also downward pressure on wages), as well as ‘endless wars’ (demanded by journalists, neoconservative thinktanks, and also progressives, ever eager to play the moral crusader abroad since it’s the working class who have to do the fighting).

Experts and intellectuals are also in his crosshairs, both because he holds them responsible for these disastrous choices (globalisation, immigration, wars) and because of their boundless contempt for the ‘deplorables’ and losers who challenge their hegemony. This hegemony, he maintains, also leads to the destruction of ‘traditional values’ for the sake of ‘political correctness’, which feminists, journalists and artists wish to impose on the whole of society, including children. Such is the caricature version of the Democratic Party that Republicans are fighting against.

‘I am who I am’

The problem with this depiction of a decadent US that, without Trump at the helm, has turned into a banana republic is that it’s a story everyone knows by heart and, over the past eight years, it has inevitably grown stale. But its creator is still clinging to his apocalyptic vision, repeating it from rally to rally in interminable tirades in which the only through-line seems to be the celebration of his genius and his presidential record. ‘His speech at the convention was too long? [92 minutes, a historic record] I agree,’ Hooper said, ‘but … Donald Trump is Donald Trump. And I’m not going to question anything he does.’

Since his campaign began to falter, Trump has been advised to be more upbeat, to put forward policy proposals, to stop calling Harris ‘stupid’ and ‘crazy’ and saying that she has ‘the laugh of a person with some big problems’. Ann Bennett, a diehard Republican activist like her husband Kevin, also worries about Trump’s behaviour: ‘I’m afraid he’s going to blow it. He should speak properly, not insult Kamala.’ It’s a lost cause; the former president has already made clear ‘I am who I am.’

Indeed, anyone on a quest to find out who is pulling his strings is wasting their time. Democratic media and the European press, which takes its cues from them, recently devoted a slew of articles to a 900-page programme, Project 2025, developed for Trump by an ultraconservative thinktank, the Heritage Foundation. Trump, who obviously had not skimmed it, let alone read it, immediately distanced himself from its authors and made it known they would have no role in any future administration. ‘Trump does not make policy,’ Bennett says. ‘He makes general statements at rallies, sees how the people react, watches TV to see how this plays. He doesn’t do polling on issues, he only mentions polls regarding his standing.’

By way of example, in June 2023, at a rally in North Carolina, one of Trump’s long list of assertions was that he would ‘keep men out of women sports’, a topic that had been raised by one of his challengers. Then, almost instantly, he explained to the crowd how his political instincts worked: ‘I’m talking about cutting taxes, people go like that’ – he mimed dutiful applause – ‘I talk about transgender, everyone goes crazy! Who would have thought? Five years ago, you didn’t know what the hell it was.’ The topic is now one of his obsessions. This is culture war, as dictated by the clapometer.

Up against the Democratic candidate, the all-male Republican ticket seems to have written off the other half of the electorate. Police officers, priests and wrestlers were the guests of honour at the RNC. On the third night, Trump entered to the sound of ‘It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World’, a song title well matched to the occasion (though the lyrics of the James Brown song are resolutely not a paean to male supremacy). But most significantly, to warm up the crowd before his speech, Trump picked Hulk Hogan, a world-famous champion wrestler, also known for his role in Rocky III.

‘We’re going to bring back America’

Hogan was the star of the convention and summed up what it was about better than most of the political speeches: ‘When I came here tonight there was so much energy in this room, I felt maybe I was in Madison Square Garden getting ready to win another world title. With our leader up there, my hero, that gladiator, we’re going to bring back America together.’ He then ripped open his Stars and Stripes T-shirt with both hands to reveal another underneath with the names of Trump and Vance on it. The crowd roared their approval.

‘I am here tonight because I want the world to know that Donald Trump is a real American hero,’ Hogan went on. ‘The last time I was up on stage, I was bleeding like a pig and I won the world title right in front of Donald J Trump. We’re all going to be champions again when he wins … And when he’s back in the White House, America is gonna start winning again … I know tough guys, and let me tell you, brother, Donald Trump is the toughest of them all. They’ve thrown everything at Donald Trump. All the investigations, the impeachments, the court cases, and he’s still standing and kicking their butts.’

The choice of JD Vance as Trump’s running mate is unlikely to temper the unabashed machismo that attaches to the Republican Party and its candidate. For while Trump is uncontrollable and speaks without thinking, the remarks that provoke criticism of his running mate express a structured, powerful and radicalising intellectual trend.

In 2021, encouraged by his interviewer Tucker Carlson, beloved in conservative and libertarian circles, Vance blamed some of the US’s problems on ‘a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too. It’s just a basic fact that if you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez], the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?’

Vance, the author of Hillbilly Elegy, a bestselling book about his working-class childhood in Appalachia, is a convert to Catholicism and an opponent of abortion. He represents an America anxious about changes in family structure – Buttigieg, the transportation secretary, and his husband adopted twins a few days after the Carlson interview – and about declining fertility and birth rates, and the increasing presence of women in a labour market where (male) blue-collar jobs are disappearing. Couples no longer have as many children, and those children have fewer siblings and cousins to play with. As if to signal that this demographic problem was of lesser concern to Latinos or African Americans, Carlson concluded, ‘Whites are hated. They hate themselves. They don’t reproduce. They are disappearing.’

Republicans grown milder on abortion

Republicans have understood, however, that when it comes to the decline of traditional families, the fight against abortion stopped being a vote-winner for them after an unpopular Supreme Court decision allowed 18 states to ban it almost outright, or – which is often effectively the same thing – to only permit it up to the sixth week of pregnancy. Gay marriage, another former battleground in the culture wars, is now widely accepted. So the US right has turned its fire on transsexuals, including schools that encourage transitioning, states that don’t keep parents informed and sports that allow biological men to compete in women’s events. All signs, in their eyes, of American decadence that only Trump’s reelection can possibly halt.

That Trump should be cast as the virtuous saviour is surprising, but as the pastor of Opelika Baptist Church in Alabama reminded his congregation in July at Sunday service, ‘We walk where Jesus tells us to walk even if we don’t have an understanding of where we’re going. You’re never going to understand all that God’s doing.’ Later, one of his colleagues explained: ‘God will use evil to accomplish his divine will. God uses evil, false prophets to accomplish good.’ Did he mean Trump? Make of it what you will – the only current event referenced that day was the recent opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics: a ‘visual debacle’ and a ‘blasphemy’, so the pastor said.

Trump was back in North Carolina on 14 August, not to talk about transgender issues this time but to outline his economic plan. His reluctance was soon apparent: ‘This is a little bit different day because we’re talking about a thing called the economy. They wanted to do a speech on the economy. A lot of people are very devastated by what’s happened with inflation and all of the other things. So we’re doing this as a[n] – intellectual – speech. We’re all intellectuals today. Today we’re doing it and we’re doing it, right now.’ But not for long.

Departing from his prepared text, which he had been reading out as if it were homework, he returned to his favourite topics: immigration, of course, but also the ‘tough guys’ in Russia, China and Iran who respected him when he was president, thereby keeping the world safe from the kinds of wars that have broken out everywhere since he left office. Once again, it was a long, rambling speech and a failed PR exercise. ‘Trump is a great president and a very bad candidate,’ Bennett said.

The economy no longer inspires him since Biden, adopting ideas from his predecessor, has combined a protectionist trade strategy with a major-infrastructure industrial policy. Biden brought in a $1.9tr stimulus plan, with another $1tr in infrastructure spending. And what’s more, for once the working class has benefited from these public policies, which favoured US manufacturing and workers. Biden went so far as to say, ‘We don’t need everyone to have a four-year degree. It’s great if you can get one; we’re trying to make it easier for you to get one. But you don’t need it to get a good-paying job anymore.’

Trump, unable to keep railing against high unemployment, free trade agreements and offshoring, is now focused on rising inflation. He tirelessly details the price of gasoline, bacon (which he claims he can no longer afford) and insurance. Departing from Republican orthodoxy, he barely touches on the national debt, never mentions raising the retirement age and promises to protect welfare programmes – except, of course, for immigrants.

Getting along with Kim Jong-un

Foreign policy, however, is where his takeover of the Republican Party has been most dramatic (3). The break with neoconservatism was evident at the RNC in Milwaukee. Whereas in 2002 President George W Bush denounced a three-headed ‘axis of evil’ that included North Korea, accused of ‘arming to threaten the peace of the world by seeking weapons of mass destruction’, Trump had no qualms about boasting how well he got on with Kim Jong-un: ‘I got along very well with him. The press hated when I said that. I got along with him and we stopped the missile launches from North Korea. Now, North Korea is acting up again. But when we get back, I get along with him. He’d like to see me back too. I think he misses me, if you want to know the truth.’ A US president eagerly awaited by the leader of North Korea’s Communist Party – such an idea would have once chilled Republican activists’ blood. But no longer. Some delegates even found it funny.

Sue Ann Balch, a member of the Republican Women’s Association, is pinning her hopes for international détente on two of the former president’s personal characteristics, not necessarily admirable ones: ‘Trump is a narcissist. And Trump is all about Trump. If it is good for Trump, it’s good for America. So, wars are not good for the hotel, casino, restaurant or the real estate business. So Trump is not going to get us into a war. And he’s strong-willed. And the rest of the world is still male-centric … The vast majority of the world, in power, is still very male, and so they respect an alpha male. Even Putin respects it. And it’s true, he would have never got in the Ukraine if Trump had still been in office.’ Eight years ago, Democrats feared that a Republican victory would threaten world peace. But Trump didn’t start any wars when he was in the White House. It’s a rare thing.

If it is good for Trump, it’s good for America. Wars are not good for the real estate business. So Trump is not going to get us into a war Sue Ann Balch

That doesn’t stop fearmongers from continuing to dominate the discourse. From one election cycle to the next, it’s impossible to miss the growing influence of social media and the proliferation of partisan video clips that every activist sends you as soon as you challenge any claim. The enemy is always the enemy within: ‘In many ways, the people from within are more dangerous than the Russians and the Chinese,’ Trump said in his softball interview with Elon Musk on 12 August. In May 2023 Ted Cruz turned the tables on his interviewer, Fox News journalist Sean Hannity, saying: ‘Imagine you sat down with the objective, I want to destroy America. What would you do differently than Joe Biden’s done in the last two years?’ Hannity replied, ‘Nothing … I am very concerned China sees Joe’s weakness, Russia sees it, Iran sees it.’

As sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild has explained, Republicans present everything that has been ‘lost’ as something that has been ‘stolen’ from them: elections, America’s greatness, outdated notions of masculinity (4). As they see it, by persecuting Trump, who is capable of righting the ship, Democrats are trying to steal him from his people, too. But far from weakening him, the 91 indictments against him helped secure his primary victories. ‘Let’s rally around the man that the Deep State has been coming after for seven years, that they are trying to throw in jail for defending us, a man who fought for us so hard, they’re literally trying to incarcerate him,’ exclaimed one of his most enthusiastic advisors at the time.

When I asked about her candidate’s chances, Balch told me she didn’t think he would be allowed to win: ‘I don’t think he’ll get in. We’re going to have another pandemic and there will be another reason to lock us down. There will be another reason to have nothing but write-in ballots, and this recent computer problem we had, those are people who are controlling our voting machines.’ Republicans love their candidate, but they hate his opponents even more.

And the feeling is mutual. To the point of it being almost impossible not to smile when Clinton urges her fellow Democrats not to underestimate the Trump threat. There’s no danger of her doing that. For example, she ‘wouldn’t be surprised’ if Tucker Carlson, ‘a member of Vladimir Putin’s fifth column’, were in the pay of the Russians. And former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi claimed in January that the protesters demanding a ceasefire in Gaza were ‘directly linked to Russia’ and that they too were relaying ‘Putin’s message’. She then called for the FBI to investigate them. Moscow continues to drive Democrats crazy. When I showed a New York broker a Republican poster with the message ‘Trump = Strength; Biden = Weakness’, he immediately responded, ‘Trump = Putin; Biden = Democracy.’

According to Clinton and her media echo chamber, democracy could indeed be at risk because Trump’s return to the White House would mean the end of free elections in the US. The 6 January 2021 assault on the Capitol of course plays a part here. And to prevent it becoming – like Hitler’s 1923 beer hall putsch in Munich – a fiasco that lays the groundwork for what comes after, a dress rehearsal, almost any means is justified.

There’s no guarantee that this type of historical analogy, ubiquitous among educated Americans, resonates with undecided voters, who are likely more conscious of their diminishing purchasing power, which has been badly eroded by inflation over the past three years. They may also remember that Trump has already been president without the US and its local and judicial systems of checks and balances being overwhelmed. Nevertheless, comparisons between Trump and Hitler further entrench Republicans in their persecution complex. Annie Eckrich, a delegate from Indiana who works as a realtor, was very surprised when a client told her, ‘If I’d known you supported Trump, I wouldn’t have bought my house through you.’

Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric – migrants are ‘poisoning the blood of our country’, ‘communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical-left thugs live like vermin within the confines of our country’ – fuels this climate and is eagerly pounced on by his opponents, who are all too happy to signal their virtue by playing up their fear. However, since Democrats claim that he constantly lies, indeed, that ‘he’s a pathological liar’, which isn’t false, why do they take his bluster at face value?

Trump’s exhausting presence in political life so distorts some of the transformations in US society – such as the erosion of civil liberties and the impact of Covid – that they barely occupy space in the presidential debate. Thus, preventive censorship and police surveillance have become commonplace under the pretext of combating disinformation and domestic terrorism. The pandemic made glaringly obvious the unequal access to education, the Internet and the public health system, while also increasing distrust of experts, the media and the government.

‘Trust in our government destroyed’

Ann Bennett says, ‘Democrats have destroyed our trust in our government’, a claim that on the face of it is unsurprising from a Republican. However, she’s complaining not just about taxes, regulations and social welfare as in Reagan’s time, but also about the judiciary, the police and collusion between intelligence agencies and big tech oligopolies. When the state’s repressive machinery was hunting down leftwing subversives and imprisoning ‘enemy combatants’ without trial in Guantanamo, Republicans lapped it up. That support has evaporated now that censorship and repression have targeted Trump supporters.

Bennett’s husband Kevin is incensed at the judicial system for persecuting the former president and, he says, failing to investigate cases of electoral fraud. But he’s also concerned about the brutality of the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation). ‘I would dismantle the FBI,’ he told me. ‘Since John Edgar Hoover, it’s had too much power. People have disbelief about assassination attempts, JFK, MLK, Bobby Kennedy. The top ranks of FBI are overtly political. [Its] DNA has problems from the beginning.’

He then recounted the case of airport director Bryan Malinowski, who was killed by federal agents in March in a dawn raid on his home. They broke down his front door and, when Malinowski opened fire, killed him with a shot to the head. I pointed out that the FBI liquidated many Black Panthers in a similar way, sometimes in their beds, which he acknowledged. The ‘militarisation of the police’ now worries him, as does the regular renewal of anti-terrorism laws passed after 9/11 (Patriot Act) at the initiative of a Republican president. He even recognised that, drunk with power, Trump ‘could become a tyrant’, but he is gambling that he won’t and that the assassination attempt has sobered him up. If so, it’s not obvious yet…

In Trump’s eyes, Covid destroyed the amazing economy he had built and enabled the widespread use of mail-in voting, which produced the fraud that drove him from the White House. Most Republicans take a less paranoid view of an ordeal that cost 1.2 million lives, the highest death toll in any country, and among the highest mortality rates on the planet. Many remember a society fragmenting, and everyone getting by as best they could.

Tracy West, who runs one of Alabama’s poorest school districts, in a state itself at the bottom of household income rankings, is a Republican politician. Her district covers 14 mostly rural counties and has 100,000 students. When the pandemic hit, she explained, ‘It was impossible for us to just ask everyone to stay home. When you’re poor, that’s not an option. Many children who depended on our free meals would have gone hungry. With the help of churches, associations and food banks, we found a way for parents who were no longer getting supplied by school buses to get a few pints of milk, a loaf of bread, eggs.’

Given the lack of network coverage in many of these counties, the same kind of improvisation applied to education while schools were closed: ‘We bought and installed WiFi hotspots in buses so students could download their coursework. Cars would park right next to them or the bus would come near the home.’ Then the students could work without a connection, using a loaned tablet if they didn’t have a computer, with one allocated per family. ‘We did all we could,’ she says.

Neither Trump nor Harris seems to think that stories like these are relevant to what divides them. They both care more about the poll predictions, though in 2020 the polls proved more unreliable than they had been since 1980.

But that’s not the only reason to worry about election day. Because who believes that Trump will accept a Democratic victory? ‘These people want to cheat, they cheat, and frankly that’s the only thing they do well,’ he regularly claims. He won’t be willing to leave the stage as quickly as the man who succeeded him.