So much for ‘the adults in the room’

‘The adults are back in the room.’ Has there ever been a political cliché as hilariously self-serving and inaccurate as that? These words, screamed by every broadsheet newspaper and TV-pundit hack after Joe Biden triumphed over Donald Trump in 2020, ring particularly hollow right now as Trump threatens to do the unthinkable (again) in today’s presidential election.

Four years on from the ‘grown-ups’ taking back control and a lot of Americans are wondering what they have to show for it. Inflation has left prices 25 per cent higher than they were in 2019. The world is on fire, with the prospects for World War Three now the stuff of daily cable-news chatter. Illegal border crossings have hit the highest on record, delivering a boon to organised crime.

You can’t blame the Democrats for everything that has gone wrong in the world since January 2020. But their blunders and madcap policies have, at least, laid to rest the claim that they are the cool-headed technocrats who can be relied upon to weather geopolitical storms and return ‘normalcy’ to politics. For millions of Americans, the past few years have felt anything but normal.

Indeed, the greatest trick the Democrats pulled off in 2020 was to appear more normal than they actually are. Back then, Joe Biden could be portrayed as reassuringly old-school, rather than just alarmingly old, the full extent of his senility then well-hidden from the public. Plus, he had a reliable foil in Trump, whose conspiratorial tantrum following his election defeat will have left many of those who switched to Biden feeling briefly vindicated.

It didn’t take long for the mask to slip, however. Biden instantly began governing as if he were a Babylon Bee parody of himself. On day one, he signed executive orders to ‘advance racial equity’ and end ‘discrimination on the basis of gender identity’ (ie, junk the notion of sex), institutionalising the divisive creeds of critical race theory and gender ideology within the federal bureaucracy. Before long, he was inviting Dylan Mulvaney to the White House and trying to allocate Covid relief funds on the basis of race and gender.

In the end, Biden became America’s first woke president, the capstone of the hysterical, identitarian turn of the cultural elites over the past decade. Those who would dismiss all this as culture-war froth – things that few people notice and even fewer would vote on – would do well to remember that the second most-reliable predictor, after being a Republican, of whether someone voted for Trump in 2016 was if they agreed with the statement, ‘there is too much political correctness in this country’. I dare say few of those voters would feel things have improved on this front in the eight years since.

Of course, ordinary people’s concerns about wokeness – the monstrous spawn of PC – will not single-handedly swing elections. But they dovetail all too well with ordinary people’s concerns that the liberal elites have also gone insane on any number of other issues, from energy to crime – with California, the preeminent blue state, becoming synonymous with both blackouts and defecating in the street. Meanwhile, the federal government has so lost control of the border that it is no longer just border states bearing the brunt of the influx.

To millions of voters, the Democrats now appear by turns inept, loopy and illiberal. Which is why they’ve struggled to make many of their Trump attack lines stick. Economically, many voters now look on Trump’s tenure with nostalgia – even though one of his signature policies was a tax cut for the rich. On gender, he can quite safely claim the mantle of ‘normalcy’, given he’s prepared to say that men shouldn’t be in women’s prisons or MMA bouts. Plus, claims he will weaponise the justice system against his opponents would land better if the Democrats hadn’t spent the past few years weaponising the justice system against him. Only the Democrats could manage to make Trump – a strange and authoritarian character by anyone’s definition – look like a relatively appetising choice to voters fed up with a deranged, censorious and out-of-touch ruling class.

Trump certainly had some things going for him when he first arrived on the scene. For one, his lack of fealty to certain Republican orthodoxies allowed him to tack towards previously unthinkable positions on social security, healthcare and globalisation that resonated with the working class. But he would never have got anywhere near the White House were it not for America’s wayward political class, to whom voters were desperate to deliver a punishment beating in 2016.

While Trump would have – quite conceivably – imploded all by himself, elite attempts to crush him by any means necessary have only burnished his insurgent status and exposed the Democrats as cartoonishly vengeful. After Russiagate and laptopgate, there was the cascade of criminal charges against Trump, which have arguably done more to revive his prospects in this election than anything he himself has done to date. At the close of 2022, Trump was blamed for a disastrous Midterms for the Republicans and Florida governor Ron DeSantis was even edging ahead of him in some primary polls. The indictments changed all that, as they were (rightly) interpreted by millions of voters as a politically motivated witch-hunt, the stuff of banana republics.

When all else fails, the Democratic Party returns to insulting the very people it is supposed to be winning over. Hillary Clinton’s ‘basket of deplorables’ comment almost looks subtle in comparison to the open accusations of fascism now levelled at the Trumpists. Still, the hasty selection of Kamala Harris as the Democratic candidate – following Biden’s history-making car-crash of a debate performance – is perhaps the biggest insult of them all, with the coastal elites now pretending to be enamoured with a candidate they all thought was a political nonentity five minutes ago.

In 2016, the Rust Belt working class revolted against a not-so-liberal establishment that struck them as both useless and authoritarian, electing a mercurial TV populist in the process. Since then, the Democratic elites have been going out of their way to live up to type. Their hysteria following Donald Trump’s victory brought their latent disdain for the demos screaming to the surface. They revealed how far they were willing to go to ensure this democratic blip might never be repeated. And since 2020 they have only proven why voters were absolutely right to reject them in the first place.

If Donald Trump wins this election – and that is still a very big ‘if’ – the so-called adults will have only themselves to blame.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater