America after Biden-Trump

ALL EYES ARE ON November 5, 2024 when the US elects its 47th president. If he wins, Joe Biden will be 82 before he takes office in January 2025 for the second and last time.

If Donald Trump wins, he will return to the White House aged 78, also for the second and last time.

But the real story of the 2024 US presidential election is: Who after Biden and Trump?

A second-term Biden presidency will leave the US in broadly the same economic and geopolitical square as today: defending Ukraine, weakening Russia, countering China, and backing Israel.

A second-term Trump presidency will cause greater churn. He will threaten to leave NATO (but won’t), ease pressure on Russia, blow hot and cold with China, and double down on immigration.

Both Biden and Trump have so far served only one term as president. The losing candidate in 2024 thus theoretical­ly can stand for his second term in 2028.

If Biden loses in 2024, he will, at 86, obviously not stand again in 2028.

If Trump loses, he’ll be 82 in 2028. Given his maverick temperament and the lack of Republican challengers, he might be tempted to go for a last presidential run in 2028 with Biden out of the way.

The problem confronting the US is a scarcity of young and charismatic potential presidential candidates. The Democrats are split between moderates and the party’s leftwing dismayed by Washington’s support for Israel in the Gaza war.

Among Republicans, the shift is towards the right with anti-immigration racism being the leitmotif of Trumpians. Can a deeply polarised America throw up younger candidates whose appeal cuts across the aisle?

The problem lies not in potential candidates but the American electorate. The first Trump presidency took the lid off the latent racism that the US has long tried to bottle. Trump used his anti-immigration stand to tap into the silent resentment building up since Barack Obama’s two-term presidency.

Obama was the first Black president in US history. He came at a time when America was reeling from the global finan­cial crisis triggered by the collapse of Lehman Brothers, a blue-blooded Wall Street investment bank, in September 2008.

Opinion polls had Obama trailing the Republican nominee John McCain in September 2008. By November 2008, he was ahead of McCain and would set a landmark in America’s troubled racial history.

Obama is half-white. His mother raised him in Hawaii after divorcing Obama’s Kenyan father when Barack was three years old.

Despite being acceptably mixed-race, Obama’s eight years as president laid the ground for Trump’s rise. Polarisation had set in. Immigration was a hot-button issue.

Trump tapped into the US middle-class angst at losing jobs to immigrants. America was changing colour. The coun­try’s non-white population will cross 50 per cent by 2050.

To win in a fractured America, a presidential candidate will have to transcend race and class.

The US is a wealthy but unequal country. Homeless people sleeping rough on the streets are a common sight even in San Francisco, the capital of global innovation.

Ironically, a coloured American poli­tician like former Republican presiden­tial challenger Vivek Ramaswamy has to position himself further to the right than even Trump. Before he withdrew from the primaries, some of Ramaswamy’s speeches would have been called racist had they come from a white politician.

In the past, Bobby Jindal, the former governor of Louisiana, had to convert to Christianity to become politically acceptable. Whether a new breed of leaders emerges in the US will be known as early as 2026 when either Trump or Biden is midway through his second term. Mid-term polls will be held for both the Senate and the House of Representatives.

Leaders like Vice President Kamala Harris, Vivek Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley (all three with an India link) will be in the mix again. So will Ron DeSantis and oth­ers who fell by the wayside in the 2024 presidential prima­ries. For India, nothing will change. Washington is run by a deeply entrenched ecosystem of techno-bureaucrats whose worldview is dominated by the neo-cons among them. The wars in Ukraine and Gaza and the China-Russia threat are their top priorities. India is a growing power with an inde­pendent foreign policy. It has the strategic geography and military capability that make it critical to US interests. The neo-cons in the State Department and the Pentagon are pragmatic enough to know this.

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