The ‘C’ word is starting to loom over Trump’s presidency

Author of How They Broke Britain. His radio show is on LBC weekdays from 10am It feels wrong to call them “favourites”, but the catalogue of conduct that should have derailed the Trump train before it even left the station, let alone chuffed into the Oval Office twice, is devilishly hard to rank. For me, an unholy trinity of outbursts that preceded his first election victory still provoke feelings of confusion and great sadness at the apparent indifference of so many towards principles I naively believed to be baked into both British and American concepts of civilisation and decency. In chronological order, Trump’s physical mocking in November 2015 of the disability of Serge F Kovaleski, a New York Times journalist Trump had fallaciously cited in defence of his lie that thousands of Muslim Americans had celebrated the September 11 terror attacks. The following July, Pakistani Americans Khizr and Ghazala Khan responded to his plan to ban migration of Muslims. The couple, whose son Humayun was a captain in the US Army killed in the Iraq War, took to the stage at the Democratic National Convention where Khizr challenged the constitutionality of Trump’s plan and pointed out that he had “sacrificed nothing – and no one” for his country. Trump responded by suggesting that Ghazala, who has explained that she elected not to speak for fear of breaking down when a picture of her dead son was displayed, had stayed silent because she “wasn’t allowed” to speak. And finally, the infamous boast about how he could “grab” women by the “p*ssy” that I, sweet summer child that I am, honestly believed would scupper his Presidential campaign. It didn’t, of course, and it is often Trump supporters on both sides of the Atlantic who have subsequently claimed most vociferously to be dedicated to protecting “our women and girls”.I cite these three early examples of his moral turpitude not because they are necessarily the most egregious but because so many more have followed that it is now, literally, impossible to keep track. The Washington Post, for example, catalogued 30,573 false or misleading statements he made during his first term. Nobody has kept count in his second, during which the question of what he would have to do to lose support on a significant scale has become ever harder to answer. But this week, finally, an answer has begun to emerge. And while it is not exactly flattering to the American political psyche or remotely comforting to the Ukrainian people so vilely betrayed by Trump, it is grounds for some optimism as the midterms approach. The most notable shift in opinion polls in recent months, published on Sunday in a Washington Post-ABC-Ipsos survey, has seen a major uptick in the number of Republican and Republican-leaning voters who believe that Trump is using the Presidency to enrich himself. In September last year, just 22 per cent of this group held the view – today, it is 34. (Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters are nearly unanimous on the issue.) Tempting though it is to despair at the apparent idiocy of the majority who reject the conclusion, these are the sort of numbers that terrify candidates and campaigners alike. And it gets worse, or better, depending on whether you despise or, like far too many members of our media and political classes, welcome the President’s moral bankruptcy and attempted dismantling of Western democratic norms. In another poll of voter concerns over at Fox News, not exactly a traditional conveyor of bad tidings for Trump, the percentage across the whole political spectrum who describe themselves as “extremely or very concerned” about “corruption in government” stands at a whopping 88 per cent. In second place, “inflation and high prices” scores 85 per cent with “gas prices” in third on 83 per cent. “Immigration”, his signature campaigning theme, trails in ninth place on 66 per cent. It is, obviously, too early to start popping champagne corks, but Trump’s infernal ability to persuade people to vote against their own interests or use immigration myths to distract them from observable reality appears to be deserting him for one very simple reason: the more a voter feels the pinch, the more outrageous their leader’s self-enrichment will appear. Trump’s greed, with a side order of contempt for his own supporters, ultimately seems set to prove his undoing. Not his depravity, his crimes, his incitements, his betrayals, his lies, his abuses or even his historic closeness to the paedophile sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Ultimately, the men and women who unforgivably propelled him back into the White House after the 6 January protests appear to be deserting their hero because the spoils of his perceived corruption haven’t trickled down to them.