Wild West Politics in Trump’s America
| Author | Alex Waddan |
| Date | 01 June 2020 |
| Published date | 01 June 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/2041905820933375 |
JUNE 2020 • POLITICAL INSIGHT 37
From the impeachment hearing to his chaotic COVID-19 response,
Donald Trump has seldom been out of the political spotlight in recent
months. Alex Waddan assesses the President’s position and his
prospects ahead of November’s election.
As Donald Trump entered the
final year of his first term as
President, it had become a
cliché that while his behaviour
had regularly brought an atmosphere of
crisis to Washington DC, his leadership
skills had not been tested by a seismic
event on the scale of 9/11. Journalistic
accounts chronicled how members of
the administration, such as Chief-of-Staff
General John Kelly, had mitigated some
of the President’s rashest impulses, but
these stories had not reduced Trump’s
standing with his core supporters. Hence,
as 2020 dawned, despite the ongoing
impeachment proceedings and an
approval rating that remained under water,
the President was able to boast about a
robust and growing economy, and if this
relative prosperity did not exactly come
with ‘peace’, it was the case that the US had
not engaged in any extensive new military
operations since January 2017.
Furthermore, Trump’s re-election
prospects seemed as if they might be
boosted by a dragged-out fight for the
Democratic presidential nomination
between the party’s more moderate and
progressive wings. Former Vice President
Joe Biden had consistently led in polling
through 2019, but his performances in
the early candidates’ debates had been
faltering at best. Furthermore, in the final
quarter of 2019, Senator Bernie Sanders
of Vermont, a self-described ‘democratic
socialist’, posted a fund-raising figure
almost $12 million more Biden’s.
By mid-April 2020, the grounds for
political engagement had been redrawn.
There was relatively speedy bipartisan
agreement in Washington DC on major
spending commitments to prop up the
economy, but even a viral pandemic did
little to mitigate the intense partisan
Wild West
Politics in
Trump’s
America
acrimony in US politics. That rancour had
been on an upward trajectory for the
previous quarter century but had become
supercharged during Trump’s presidency.
Before looking at US politics in the age of
COVID-19, however, it is important to take
stock of the previous turbulent months.
Impeachment
The impeachment of President Trump in
the House of Representatives in December
2019, was a result of his alleged eorts in
the summer to pressure the newly elected
Ukrainian government led by President
Volodymyr Zelensky, to announce an
investigation into the activities of Joe
Biden and his son, Hunter, when the latter
had been an adviser to the Ukrainian
energy company, Burisma, as his father
was Vice President. Burisma’s owner
had been under investigation and there
were unsubstantiated allegations that
Biden Senior had helped deect those
investigations. In turn, Trump was alleged
to have pushed Zelensky into re-opening
the investigation by dangling a White
House meeting as a carrot and threatening
to withhold $400 million of military aid to
© Press Association
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