Will Trump Defeat Trump? What Got Him This Far Won’t Get Him To White House

It is still too early to call the US Presidential campaign, but the huge lead garnered by Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton over grudging Republican nominee Donald Trump is now wide enough for observers to start conceding the fight to Clinton. The bookies are betting 76:24 in favour of Clinton.

Real Clear Politics (RCP), a website which tracks opinion poll trends, gives Clinton a seven-point lead over Trump (47.3 : 40.1), and the latter’s showing in the electoral college – which is what decides the winner – is worse. Clinton is almost there, just 24 electoral college votes short of the magic number of 270 out of 538, which will get her to the White House. Trump is far behind, with just 154 votes.

If he has to win, he has to clean up in almost all of the 11 toss-up states, which hold the remaining 138 electoral votes. Among these are Florida, Ohio, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Arizona, Missouri and Wisconsin, which collectively hold 115 states. This seems unlikely right now, and many previously Republican states seem to be shifting to neutral territory.

RCP’s figures reflect polling averages on a rolling basis, and thus get updated every day, and Trump seems to be losing it – both the public’s indulgence and his own balance. His decline can probably be traced to a moment in the Democratic National Convention last month, when a Muslim couple, whose son Captain Humayun Khan was killed in a 2004 suicide bomb attack in Iraq, blamed Trump for rising Islamophobia in America. Among other things, Trump has said that, if elected, he will build a wall to keep immigrants , especially Muslims out.

At the convention, Khan’s parents, Khizr and his wife Ghazala, castigated Trump for his bigotry and asked him: “Have you even read the US Constitution?” To which an angry Trump responded with his usual aggression, saying Khizr had “no right” to criticise him, and pointedly referred to Ghazala as someone banned from speaking in public. “She had nothing to say. Maybe she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say.”

From then onwards, Teflon Trump, who could get away with saying any obnoxious thing, has been on a downward spiral. His fall from grace started the moment he showed disrespect to a US war hero who happened to be a Muslim.

Perhaps, Trump may still see a recovery, but this can happen only if he shows a sharp change in his personal demeanour. Americans know that candidates say all kinds of things in primaries, when local frustrations and narrow interest groups have to be tapped to obtain a party nomination. But once this is done, Americans expect their nominees to behave presidentially, and not like a street thug or foul-mouthed scrapper.

The issues Trump has raised – about immigration, job losses, terrorism, etc – have a lot of resonance in America today, especially in the rust-belt states where job losses are high, and which are in a position to swing the vote one way or the other.

But what got him so far will not get him closer to the White House. By alienating women, immigrants, Muslims and the WASP establishment, Trump has effectively become too much of a renegade candidate to win. America is a nation of immigrants, and even though Islamophobia is an important undercurrent in American politics, any overt form of bigotry holds a mirror to a society that would not like to acknowledge the truth.

Trump is not what Americans believe they are about, even though there is a Trump streak in every red-neck American or Christian evangelist in America.

Maybe Trump will avoid unnecessary gaffes and extreme political incorrectness in the remaining three months of the campaign. But so far he has not shown the ability to rein in his unruly self.

If he loses to Clinton this November, it will be because Trump seems capable of defeating himself.