A second Donald Trump term could see the break-up of the US

History paused for a split second and decided that Donald John Trump, son of a woman from the Isle of Lewis, would not only live, but – bloodied and unbowed – pump his fist in the air in a show of bravado and defiance. The US election hinges not on change versus continuity, but on Biden’s age and capacity versus Trump’s character. On Saturday, Biden lost.

Of course, the Democrats could replace Biden. Which means installing vice-president Kamala Harris whose poll ratings are as bad as Biden’s. Or throw the nomination open to a bruising, televised bun fight at the party’s convention in Chicago next month.

Each route offers the Democrats a political nightmare while Trump gets on with campaigning. And every broadcast or tweeted image of The Donald will show him as the ebullient, charismatic survivor of an assassination attempt that his acolytes will pin on the left’s demonisation of their candidate.

The assassination attempt also buries any possibility that the presidential election will be fought out over other issues, in particular the economy. Here the Democrats were hoping to capitalise on the fact that the US economy is improving under Biden. Price rises cooled in June while firms hired another 206,000 workers.

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The US is growing faster than most of its competitors, but most Americans are still worse off than pre-Covid, which means they see the era of Trump’s first presidency as a lost golden time. This may explain why disenchantment with Biden is growing among groups the Democrats might normally count on: the young and minorities. Biden’s strongest support is among the older demographic.

Biden’s attempt to use the recent Nato anniversary conference to bolster his leadership credentials crashed and burned with his spectacular gaff of misnaming Ukraine’s embattled leader as “President Putin”. They must be splitting their sides in the Kremlin. Of course, Trump’s bombast about ending the Russo-Ukraine conflict inside 24 hours is pure hokum. But lots of Americans are getting fed up with paying for running the world on behalf of US big business. Trump appeals to their latent isolationism.

What will a Trump 2.0 presidency look like? He has endorsed a 20-point platform for the Republican Party convention, though – as always – we need to remember that The Donald has a way of flying by the seat of his pants when in power.

The Republican plan is full of the usual platitudes but is a guide to where Trump’s focus may lie. Stopping illegal immigration comes top of the list with a promise to “seal the border” and carry out “the largest deportation operation in American history”.

Whether a second Trump administration will be any more successful at that than the last time remains to be seen – deporting people means you have to have somewhere to take them.

The more pertinent theme in the Republican election platform is a de facto declaration of cultural war with liberal America. Certainly, this conflict has already started with the reversal of the right for a woman to terminate a pregnancy. But Trump 2.0 threatens to take this much further with the removal of federal funding for schools and institutions teaching anything it deems inappropriate or “un-American”.

Essentially, a Trump administration will use federal power to recast the government – federal or state – in its ideological image. This will presage the eventual break-up of the United States. And possibly a second Civil War.

I realise that is an apocalyptic forecast. But no state survives forever and certainly not without some form of radical recasting. Even in the British homelands, Ireland tore itself away in the 20th century in a bloody insurrection. The Germany of today is half the size it was in 1939. A raft of successful European countries did not exist before 1989. Contemporary Russia has shed many of its Central Asian provinces. An America so divided on cultural, political and economic lines might well split asunder or face decades of internal strife and violence. This could be Trump’s ultimate legacy.

The point I am trying to make is that this new era we are living in, of global competition and conflict, does not stop at national frontiers.

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Nations themselves are fragile things, especially as the existing political elites lose ground and national solidarity splinters. Economic competition, gargantuan technological change and the climate emergency have triggered new and unstoppable forces: mass global migration, inter-imperialist wars, cultural and religious frictions, and the spread of new and easily accessible ways of mass destruction. These forces cleave through nations as well as set state against state.

Trump is but one political embodiment of these developments, though pivotal. At a pragmatic level, he represents the interests of that portion of domestic US capital that has suffered most from Chinese and European competition and which benefits from his protectionist policies. But ideologically, Trump – deranged, narcissistic, demagogic – has provided a rallying point for a populist movement of all those most affected by the violent economic and social convulsions of the neoliberal globalist era.

Rather than confront him politically, the US elites sought to criminalise him and send him to jail. That miscalculation only boosted Trump’s ego and popularity.

Trying to shoot him will have a similar effect.

Trump is now a virtual shoo-in for the White House. The second Trump administration will accelerate all the tendencies to global self-destruction. The new Republican electoral platform promises not only to accelerate US military spending but to build an “iron dome” to make America invulnerable to missile attack. Of course, in the nuclear age, such invulnerability is a chimera. But the very act of constructing such a defensive shield will trigger a new arms race as China and Russia start to fear a US first strike – perhaps rightly.

(Image: AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

At the recent Nato summit, Biden announced that the US would end its 40-year moratorium on positioning nuclear missiles in Germany – missiles that can take out Moscow in a matter of minutes. Keir Starmer, of course, applauded this ominous development; a move that reinforces the Clyde Naval Base becoming a Russian target.

No, I don’t wish that bullet had been a few inches to the side. Assassinating Trump would change very little. King Donald is a political cypher. Killing him would do nothing to alter the great social and economic forces now in play. What we require is mass political action, especially in Europe, to end the Gadarene rush to nuclear war, and to replace decadent, competitive capitalism with a co-operative, planned economy.

We can begin that process here and now. We can take an independent Scotland out of Nato and provide the material base for a pan-European anti-war movement. We can create an economy owned by Scotland’s people and run for use not profit. All it takes is for Scots to get off their knees.