
You read it here first: Trump won’t run in 2020
Trump’s presidency is cooked, but that won’t be end of the fight
BOB Woodward has a new book called Fear about to hit the shelves which promises to be the definitive insider account of the Trump White House.
A Bob Woodward book is usually a major event. Woodward is arguably the most famous living journalist in the world; at the very least, his work with Carl Bernstein to uncover the Watergate scandal that led to Richard Nixon’s resignation remains the historical high water mark for investigative journalism.
Since Watergate, Woodward has carved out an an unparalleled record over half a century of insider scoops, particularly focusing on the workings of the White House, including two about the Obama era and three about the George W. Bush presidency.
More importantly, Woodward’s reputation as an accurate and balanced reporter is above reproach. No-one has ever found serious fault or error with anything he has published. Not even Nixon, in the end.
So it’s worth repeating that a Bob Woodward book is an event. And the anticipation about Fear is high. If the teasers are accurate, then it will contain enough revelations to ordinarily bring down any president.
From the advance publicity, we know that Woodward will report that Trump describes his Attorney-General Jeff Sessions as “mentally retarded”, that his chief of staff John Kelly describes Trump’s White House as “Crazytown” and the president as an “idiot”, and that his senior staff, including his Defence Secretary, routinely hide information from him because they are afraid of the immature way he would handle the information if he was aware of it. Like declare a nuclear war, or something.
This is incredible stuff. But this is the Trump era, and we have now got to the stage where nothing will surprise us.
So rather than be the defining moment of the Trump presidency, Woodward’s book is likely to be nothing more than a bit of extra fuel to a raging inferno which Trump himself has lit and tended.
That hasn’t stopped the predictable response from Trump and his toadies in the White House, who have denounced Woodward’s book — unsighted — as a collection of fabricated stories.
But unlike Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, it is much more difficult to attack Woodward, who has always been a stickler for multiple sources and fact checking, while Wolff has a reputation for being a little loose with the truth.
After all, the insults Trump is alleged by Woodward to have made in private about Sessions are not much worse than what he regularly says about him on Twitter. And this is a man who uses the megaphone of Twitter to describe former loyal staffer Omarosa Manigualt Newman as a “dog”, who also uses Twitter to regularly deride the former heads of the FBI and the CIA in the most crude terms, and who was recorded on tape as boasting about how he could “grab pussies” whenever and wherever he wanted.
The same man who falsely claimed that John McCain sought to be released early from a prisoner of war camp, when the exact opposite was true, and spent the day of McCain’s funeral playing golf.
And even before Woodward’s book is available for sale, White House staff (possibly the Vice-President or Secretary of State) have anonymously backed it up, prompting further accusations of “treason” from Trump.
BOB Woodward’s book will no doubt be fascinating, but what is more interesting is the reaction to it.
For the reality is that while the publication of Fear will probably be a significant milestone in the Trump presidency — alongside Charlottesville and the backdown over separating the children of illegal migrants from their parents — that will be the extent of its impact.
The scandals are now piling up so high that it feels like there is nothing Woodward could report that would shock us now. The weirdness, the sheer incompetence, and the offensiveness of the Trump White House has become normalised.
In the last fortnight alone — on the same day! — we have seen both Trump’s 2016 campaign manager Paul Manafort go to jail, and his long-time lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen plead guilty to a range of offences and implicate Trump in breaking election disclosure laws by authorising hush money payments to a porn star who alleged she had an affair with Trump while their wife was recuperating from giving birth to their child.
And that’s just in a single 24 hour news cycle. Seriously, what is there that Woodward could uncover that would top either of those scandals?
Woodward’s book is about to be released in the wake of plummeting opinion polls for Trump. Just days earlier, a Washington Post/ABC News poll found that not only did Trump have a new high disapproval rating of 60% (higher than Nixon during the Watergate impeachment hearings) but 49% in favour of Congress beginning impeachment hearings now.
These are disastrous figures, and they contribute to the feeling that the Trump presidency has entered a dark new chapter in recent weeks. Perhaps even, the final chapter.
TRUMP is a unique beast who has survived negative approval ratings almost since the first day of his presidency. But it’s clear now that his unpopularity is firmly entrenched, and is very unlikely to improve
Trump’s improbable rise to the White House has been a role model for other ultra-nationlist, right wing politicians around the world. But within his failure once he was in the Oval Office are a number of salutary lessons for the same right wing acolytes.
There are three clear take outs from Trump’s fall from grace for any future right wing demagogues.
The first is that much as Trump and his supporters seek to play them down and deride them as “fake news”, the rising tide of scandals do matter to the public.
A narrative has now been established of an irrational, incompetent, self-obsessed commander-in-chief who is a danger to the nation and has surrounded himself with cronies and crooks. One who may even be occupying the office of President illegally. And it frustrates the hell out of Trump that he has no control over the narrative.
Many American voters may initially have given Trump the benefit of the doubt, but once people close to him start going to jail, it’s much harder to ignore. Trump is hurting from these scandals, and he knows it. You can tell by the way he is lashing out now on a daily basis in any direction he can.
He is a cornered man, and whether there is a proven case of collusion with Russia during the 2016 election, and whether Trump himself is a crook, doesn’t really matter much now.
The reality is that Trump has been seriously, fatally, tainted by the bonfire of scandals around him.
The second take out is that Trump is incredibly good at preaching to and motivating his base, but in the long run it doesn’t really matter.
His base is at tops a solid 30–35% of the voting public — which is a scary figure in itself — but that’s as high as it’s going to get, and it isn’t growing.
With every outrageous utterance, especially if it has a racist overtone, Trump’s base becomes ever more loyal and solid behind him. With every attack on him, his supporters pledge their allegiance to him. But a rust proof base is no use to you if it has a limit of about a third of voters. And after almost two years in office, we now know that is Trump’s ceiling and he is never going to crack through it.
In the short term, Trump can motivate his base and raise more money from them. He can use his base to remodel the GOP in his own image, and to get Trump imitators chosen in primaries around the country. But when it comes to a general election, that base is going to do the Republicans more harm than good.
Trump is living in a bubble which to his own detriment insulates him from the reality of how he is viewed among the wider populace. He’s trapped in a feedback loop that encourages him to say ever more outrageous things that energise his base and excite the Fox News commentariat.
But the boy in the bubble is incapable of realising that the exact same things that delight his base are those which alienate the other 20–25% of mainstream independent voters who he and the Republicans need if they are to be competitive in the mid-terms and beyond — the so-called ‘Trump Democrats’.
The third lesson of Trump’s abysmal approval ratings is that demographics really is destiny.
The 2016 election result created a false illusion that it was wrong to say that the changing demographics of the US — a younger, more educated, and more Hispanic population — was reshaping how people were voting.
The reality is that 2016 was an outlier, and the demographic shift with the accompanying change to voting patterns is an irresistible force.
Indeed, Trump’s presidency has had the opposite effect to that intended, by motivating a cohort of previously politically agnostic actors — Blacks, Hispanics, young college graduates, the LGBTI community, and others — to get involved in politics for the first time, with the sole objective of ousting both Trump and the congressional Republicans. Thanks to Trump, the Democrats are in better shape than they have been for a long time.
WITH the mid-terms less than two months away, the Democrats are feeling buoyant. A number of progressive candidates have won primaries against establishment Democrats to generate a sense of a changing of the guard. They have won by tapping into the anger over widening inequality in the US.
But the Democrats shouldn’t get ahead of themselves. They shouldn’t confuse Trump’s unpopularity with automatic electoral success at the mid-terms. The Democrats need to offer a vision of a better America than that of Trump and the Republicans, a real alternative.
They need to resist the lure of talking only about the possibility of impeaching Trump, and remain absolutely disciplined by focusing on how the policies and actions of the Republicans have hurt ordinary Americans, and how they would do things differently.
Of course, it’s impossible to totally ignore the Mueller inquiry or the potential of impeachment, but what people really want to hear is how the Democrats would make their healthcare affordable, ensure their kids got a good education, made sure that roads, railway lines and other infrastructure was improved, that they can earn a living wage and have a secure job.
Democrats need to remind voters that they should send them to Washington to fight for them on these issues, not to vote to impeach Trump, if that comes up. Focus on those things, and the Mueller inquiry will run its course anyway.
All signs are pointing towards a Democrat landslide in the mid-terms, but 2020 is not so promising. Two years out from the next presidential election, and there are no stand out Democrat candidates.
But here’s a bold prediction: Trump won’t seek re-election in 2020.
At some stage, those closest to Trump — maybe Ivanka, if she’s smart — will convince him that he is on a hiding to nothing if he stands again.
In fact, despite his assertions to the contrary, Trump may already arrived at that conclusion. He is an old man not in full control of his mental faculties — in fact, quite possibly deteriorated into advanced senility — and he has nothing to gain from a second term.
He proved his critics wrong by defeating Hillary Clinton in 2016, and nothing in 2020 can outdo that pinnacle.
He’s not interested in the daily grind of governing as the chief executive, and he has exhausted his policy agenda, whatever that was.
No, Trump won’t run again in 2020.
But rather than celebrate, we should be very scared. Because if Trump does step down, that clears the way for Vice President Mike Pence to run unopposed as the Republican candidate.
As Trump’s loyal deputy, Pence will be able to both hold onto the base, while, as a so-called sensible establishment Republican, bring the major donors and Republican supporters back inside the tent.
Pence might not say much, but have a close look at his record as a Governor of Indiana, where he governed as both a traditional pro-business conservative, and an anti-abortion religious crusader.
Pence may have all the charisma of a flat tyre, but he’s a lot smarter than Trump, and the words “President Pence” should make us very, very afraid.

