I gatecrashed a Maga event while covering the US election

As the meal – chopped salad and ­battered fish with a side of tartar sauce – commenced, so too did the evening’s speakers. Ron Johnson, a conservative Wisconsin senator, told the audience that Joe Biden’s immigration policies were part of a conspiracy to rig Tuesday’s election in favour of the left: “One of the first things he did as president was task his agencies through an executive order to register voters. You think that’s been done in a non-partisan way?”

Richard Grenell, who served as Donald Trump’s ambassador to Germany and might be his next ­secretary of state, argued that a second Trump term would restore “credibility” to America’s ­standing on the global stage. Matt Gaetz, an anti-woke ­congressman from Florida, joked that “illegal aliens” caught in the American prison system should be ­subject to mandatory gender reassignment surgery: “It would be a pretty good deterrent – they probably wouldn’t come!”

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This wasn’t quite the blue-collar Maga crowd I had expected. Most audience members were ­prosperous white retirees or small business owners from the Milwaukee suburbs who had been voting Republican since the early Reagan era. One couple, Tony and Kristin, told me they had recently returned from a trip around Italy where, to their surprise, ­everyone they encountered wanted Trump to win. During the Q and A session, several contributors called for an end to American military involvement in Ukraine. Others worried about the size of the ­federal budget deficit. Above all, the room was united in the belief that the polls were wrong. The presidential contest wasn’t close.

Kamala Harris – a radical left extremist, an ­unhinged liberal from Oakland – was going to lose, and Trump was certain to be re-elected. I left the event feeling unsettled. Was this gathering of upper Midwestern reactionaries (if ‘“reactionaries” is the right word here) correct? How close are we, exactly, to Trump 2.0?

I have been in the US for nearly a month now and, anecdotally, the omens have not been good. In Seattle, the first stop on my strange and disjointed American journey, one guy, a hipster entrepreneur from LA, told me that international threats – ­Russia, China, Iran, etc – made him think that America had to be strong. “Trump is an asshole,” he said, “but ­Kamala, I don’t know.”

In Portland, the mood was tense. A pro-Israeli ­campaign group had erected billboards across the city in response to campus protests over the spring. One of them, rendered in bright pink and white, read: ­“Remember when college was for losing your ­virginity, not your mind?” In snatches of ­conversation at coffee shops and grocery stores, I picked up a vibe – many Portlanders – traditionally, loyal Democrats – were dreading election day and would rather not discuss it at all.

If Trump does win next week – with two days to go, I’d put his chances at precisely 50% – the bulk of the blame must lie with the ­Democratic ­Party. The warning signs have been ­visible for a while. According to one poll, published in 2023, 4% of Americans think democracy is working “extremely or very well”. Levels of trust in the ­federal government have never been lower. In an economy still reeling from the effects of high inflation, a majority of American families feel poorer today than they did four years ago, even during the depths of Covid.

Against this backdrop, whose rhetoric is more likely to resonate?

Trump tells voters that crime is out of control; that immigrant gangs are ­eating dogs in Indiana; that the West has pushed Russia to the brink of nuclear war with Nato; that China has brought working-class ruin to the Rust Belt. On Fox and Newsmax and Breitbart, his PR ­outriders emphasise the same ­apocalyptic ­talking points. His opponent, by ­contrast, ­promises to inject “joy” back into ­American public discourse.

(Image: PA)

The problem for Harris is that this is not a joyful moment. Democrats, like the American people at large, are skittish. The party is desperate for the vice president to win, but enthusiasm for her candidacy has ebbed since Biden’s belated decision, in July, to drop out.

Throughout the campaign, ­Harris – a former California prosecutor; a black woman who has thrived in the ­oppressively white world of Washington ­politics – has seemed unsure of herself. Is she an agent of change? An anchor of ­continuity? In what way, and on which issues specifically, would she break from the Biden administration?

The air of anxiety hanging over ­liberal America wasn’t anticipated by ­commentators at the turn of the century. In 2002, two journalists, John B Judis and Ruy Teixeira, published an ­influential book. The Emerging Democratic ­Majority argued that a “strengthening alliance” of women, minorities, ­professionals, and college graduates, bound by a common cosmopolitan worldview, would soon lock the Republicans out of power for good.

“When the fear of terror recedes,” the pair wrote shortly after 9/11, “the ­country will once again become fertile ground for the Democrats’ progressive centrism and post-industrial values.”

Twenty years later, progressive ­centrism and post-industrial values ­remain ­politically imperilled concepts. Indeed, if anything, the cross-class, multi-racial coalition that carried Barack Obama to the White House in 2008 and 2012, and Biden in 2020, is starting to splinter.

Support for Harris among black and ­Hispanic men is soft. White ­people ­without a college degree will ­overwhelmingly back Trump. Young Americans are ­ideologically ­unpredictable and ­cannot be relied on to vote. Even some ­immigrant groups, so ­often the ­target of Trump’s most ­demented attacks, have drifted ­towards the Republicans in recent months.

As if to emphasise the growing sense of centrist despair, last year, Judis and ­Teixeira followed up Democratic ­Majority with a new title: Where Have All The Democrats Gone?

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A few days before my brush with the Maga movement, I watched the 44th president of the United States stalk onto the stage at the Alliant Energy Centre in Madison, a university town 80 miles west of Milwaukee. Obama’s warm-up acts were good. The actor Bradley ­Whitford, a Wisconsin native best known for ­playing White House staffer Josh Lyman in a ­popular Aaron Sorkin TV drama two decades ago, told abortion ban ­horror stories.

“You may know me from The West Wing,” he said, “but currently I’m ­working on a documentary called The Handmaid’s Tale.”

Minnesota governor and Harris veep pick Tim Walz ridiculed Trump’s de facto running mate Elon Musk for “­skipping around like a dipshit” at a ­recent ­Republican rally. (Walz – who, by the way, used to be a high school ­football coach – is a surprisingly salty and ­effective speaker: “Both members of the Democratic ticket are gun ­owners; the Republican nominee can’t pass a ­background check.”)

Then Obama emerged and the ­arena erupted. “Hello Madison! Are you ready to go?” he roared. Some 16,000 ­Democratic activists roared back. For 40 minutes, Obama pitched the anti-populist case for Harris, fluently framing politics as a painstaking process of incremental reform.

“No president or vice president or senator is going to solve every problem,” he said. “We are born into history, and change takes time.”

On Walz, he gushed: “Love that guy, love that dude. The other day, I learned that he can take a vintage truck apart and put it back together again.”

On Trump, he hissed: “Here is a 78-year-old billionaire who hasn’t stopped ­whining about his own problems since he rode down that golden elevator nine years ago.”

And yet, even Obama couldn’t disguise the scale of the crisis facing his party. Another name for that crisis might be “Joe Biden”.

The departing president, cloistered away in his ­Delaware compound, haunts the Harris campaign. Over the summer, after his disastrous debate performance against Trump, his approval ratings slumped to record lows. Since then, Democratic strategists have viewed the ailing 81-year-old as their ­single greatest electoral liability. Last week, The New York Times reported that Biden had repeatedly offered to stump for Harris – and that Harris had ­repeatedly said no.

Biden’s approach to the Middle East, in particular, carries catastrophic implications for the Democrats. On October 24, I attended a talk by Pramila Jayapal at the University of Wisconsin’s main ­campus in Madison. Jayapal is chair of the ­Congressional Progressive Caucus and a leading left-wing voice in the House of Representatives, allied to Bernie ­Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

In a small seminar room, in front of no more than 20 people, Jayapal spoke enthusiastically about what she saw as Biden’s progressive achievements, ­pointing to the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which increased federal investment in green energy, and to the cancellation of some student loan debt, as evidence that the president had been receptive to demands from the left.

But when asked about Biden’s ­decision to continue supplying arms to Israel, even as the IDF razes Gaza, raids the West Bank, and occupies southern Lebanon, Jayapal’s demeanour shifted.

“Look, I think if we lose Michigan, it’s probably because of the war,” she said. (Michigan – like Wisconsin, a key swing state – has a high density of Arab-American voters.)

“I’ve had long conversations with the president about this,” Jayapal added. “On foreign policy, this is a man who has a view of US-Israeli relations that dates back half a century.”

In other words, Biden’s personal ­determination to walk in lock-step with Benjamin Netanyahu over the past year, in the wake of the Hamas attacks, might cost Harris the election.

For reasons that remain unclear, and to the delight of the Trump camp, ­Harris has done nothing to distance ­herself from Biden on this issue. ­Instead, she has left it to fester, deepening ­internal ­Democratic tensions and bolstering Trump’s ­prospects ahead of next week’s vote. ­Naturally, the Republicans are buoyant. The American right cannot ­believe that the race is as close as it is (or appears to be). After the impeachments, the ­indictments, the convictions, and countless other assorted scandals, Trump’s presidential career should be over. But it isn’t. Trumpism, it seems, is stronger than ever.

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One theory attributes Trump’s success to the changing structure of the ­American economy. In the 1990s, under Bill ­Clinton, the Democrats swapped FDR-style social democracy for the free market, mixing Wall Street deregulation with welfare cuts and union-busting reform. Clinton signed the liberalising NAFTA initiative into law and championed China’s accession to the WTO – a major flashpoint in American industrial decline.

After the 2008 financial crash, ­Obama briefly embraced stimulus spending ­before caving to the austerity demands of a Tea Party-controlled Congress. In the years that followed, Trump gorged himself on the anger generated by ­globalisation.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton railed against Russia – at the time, a largely spectral threat. But Trump trained his fire on China, whose growing industrial heft he pledged to contain with a barrage of ­protectionist trade policies and ­tariffs. Thus began the great realignment of American political life. Historically ­Democratic constituencies – above all, white, male, Midwestern workers – moved to the right, and the Maga insurgency was born.

The theory isn’t incorrect, exactly. In September, the Teamsters, one of the most influential trade unions in America, declined to endorse Harris and, for a Republican, Trump attracts a disproportionately high share of working-class votes. But Maga’s appeal is visceral, not economic.

In Milwaukee, the two dominant themes of the night were immigration and isolationism. The attendees were petit-bourgeois conservatives whose ­businesses would suffer if the southern border was suddenly closed, choking off their supply of cheap Latin ­American ­labour, and China-imposed retaliatory tariffs on US products. Low-income Americans, too, have nothing to gain from Trump – his main economic idea is lower taxes for the super-rich.

In reality, what Trump offers is a transgressive thrill, the punitive pleasure of state power being used against social groups incapable of defending themselves.

Consider the central points of his governing programme: Mass deportations aimed at sweeping millions of undocumented migrants off the streets; a nationwide assault on abortion rights; historic cuts to education, health, and welfare; beefed-up military provisions for the police; federal troops on American soil, in American cities; prohibitions on the teaching of “critical race theory” and “gender ideology” in schools; the ­stripping away of historic civil rights law.

These policies come packaged in the language of paranoid anti-communism.

The Democrats, Trump keeps telling us, are “Marxists” hell-bent on ­destroying American democracy. Harris, ­meanwhile, is a racial interloper, neither fully black nor fully South Asian – and certainly not fully American. If he wins on ­Tuesday, Trump 2.0 will be a far more alarming version of what the world witnessed ­between 2016 and 2020. It will be Maga unleashed, America First on steroids.

On October 27, I arrived in ­Washington DC, bleary-eyed off the overnight Amtrak from Chicago. Just 48 hours later, I was standing in a sprawling queue on 15th Street, waiting to enter the Ellipse, a 52-acre park that stretches from the White House’s south lawn towards the Washington Monument. Hawkers huddled by the curb, selling badges, hats, and iced beverages. At 4pm, the queue was funnelled through a set of security barriers into the park. At 7:30pm, Harris appeared, smiling and waving to a crowd of 65,000 – predominantly young and black – supporters as a Beyoncé track boomed into the dusk sky from the speakers overhead.

Harris’s address, broadcast live on TV and billed as a final plea to voters before election day, had none of the energy of the Madison event, none of Obama’s voltage. To me, Harris even looked slightly nervous – a diminutive 5’4” figure at the podium, flanked by plates of bulletproof ballistic glass and two massive, static American flags. From this patch of DC grass, almost four years ago, Trump incited the Capitol riots. If re-elected, he says, he will pardon the “absolute patriots” and “warriors” convicted of participating in those riots.

The vice president worked carefully through her core arguments. Trump, she said, was a “petty tyrant” who held American constitutional norms in contempt. Only the Democrats could heal the country’s partisan divides. It was time to “turn the page” on a generation of failed Washington leaders. The audience applauded, but the sense of exhaustion – from everyone, everywhere – was palpable.

“We are not going back,” Harris said at one stage. “We are not going back.”

A Democratic prayer to counter the ­Republican one, I thought, and to close out this cold campaign.