“Right to try, where we can try space-age materials instead of going to Asia or going to Europe and trying to get when you’re terminally ill,” he said in June.
“Now you can go and get something. You sign a document.” This stream of consciousness, quoted word-for-word by The Economist, emerged from his June debate with President Joe Biden, who subsequently withdrew because his performance was incoherent.
In the past few weeks, Trump’s campaign utterances have become even more strange. On 19 October, he started a rally in Pennsylvania with a 12-minute anecdote about the legendary golfer Arnold Palmer that included a reference to the late golfer’s private parts.
Earlier this month, at another campaign rally in the state, loudspeakers belted out his Spotify playlist for 39 minutes while he danced on stage. More worryingly, he has described his political opponents as “the enemy within” and even suggested the US Army deal with them.
He has repeatedly said the election may be rigged, just as he claims the last one was, without evidence.
On the side of the Democrats too, there have been strange moments. This month, former president Barack Obama appeared at a rally in Pittsburgh and suggested that African-American men weren’t supporting Vice-President Kamala Harris’s candidacy adequately.
His scolding tone, implying that they were being male chauvinists, made things worse. Many commentators pointed out that opinion polls showed she was doing as well or better than Biden before he quit the race.
Harris, though, seems to be getting less support from both young Latinos and young African-American men than Biden did in 2020, which is another odd twist in this weird election.
This electoral battle of harsh words is playing out against several worrying long-term social phenomena in the US. One is what the American sociologist Robert Putnam has termed “the great divergence”: i.e., a continuing increase in income and educational inequality that has been getting worse.
It translates to very different worldviews in the US between those who did not go to college (and whose children cannot afford to enrol for higher education) and college graduates, who mostly support Democrats.
The less well-off are migrating to the Republican Party because its nostalgic message of ‘Make America Great Again’ and curtailing immigration speaks to them. As Putnam observes in his 2020 book The Upswing, intergenerational mobility in the US has been declining for half a century.
In 1990, he rang alarm bells over America’s weakening social engagement through civic communities such as bowling clubs and churches. This has been worsened by people turning instead to social media, an amplifier of hate speech and conspiracy theories.
Elon Musk, owner of X, has described 2024 as likely “the last election” if Harris wins; his ‘logic’ is that her party will turn so many illegal immigrants into Democrats that the US will become a one-party state. Musk’s control of such a popular platform now looms so large over this election that he might as well be a third candidate.
Since social media spreads conspiracy theories, it is not a given that the election count will be accepted as free and fair. The attack on Capitol Hill on 6 January 2021 to prevent then vice-president Mike Pence from certifying Biden’s election is seen by many Republicans as justified.
Trump’s claim that this election may be rigged comes in spite of his being tied with Harris in pan-US polls and his apparent lead in key battleground states. The likelihood of another post-election riot is high.
Optimistic readers with a historical bent will point to violence during the 1968 US election and say that was worse. Both Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, who was running for the Democratic nomination after President Lyndon Johnson said he would not stand for election, were assassinated that year.
Divisions over the Vietnam War were more acute than current divisions over Washington’s support for Israel.
That is true, but in election after election, from the UK’s 2016 Brexit vote to the far-right’s victories in Austria and the Netherlands last year, social media has let lies about immigrants (and much else) be peddled as fact. This has undermined faith in government and its institutions.
This week, Trump claimed that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) had not responded to people rendered homeless after a hurricane struck North Carolina because FEMA’s budget is spent on helping illegal immigrants. This led to concerns about possible attacks on FEMA workers and hampered their work in the storm-afflicted area.
As with falsehoods about FEMA, Trump continues to repeat that Democrat senators Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff are “enemies from within.” Schiff rebutted this calmly enough, but pointed out the dangers inherent in allowing an unpoliced social media to take on such an outsized role in this election.
As fake news on X showed by fanning mob violence in the UK this summer that resulted in attacks on British South Asians and immigrants, not to speak of hoax alarms about bombs on Indian planes, social media brings out the worst in many of us. In country after country, we are engaged in an endless uncivil war with ourselves.