Sunday marked 100 days until November 3, representing the start of the final phase in the most surreal US presidential election campaign since, well, the previous one.

To cut a long story short – and to somewhat stretch an historical analogy – the Cent Jours of 1815 culminated in the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo before his forced abdication and exile to St Helena. As that dramatic dénouement unfolded, however, the forces opposing the totalitarian dictator bickered among themselves and almost allowed him to regain the initiative despite appearing to have been already soundly defeated.

As the dust settled after the battle of Waterloo, the victorious commander, Dublin’s own Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, commented that it had been “a damned close-run thing.”

Regardless of any euphoria Democrats might currently feel over polls showing Joe Biden well ahead of Donald Trump, particularly in key battleground states, or making inroads in Red State bastions like Arizona or Texas, it’s worth remembering that the president’s approval rating remains around 40% – hovering, as it has done throughout his presidency, in that 37-45 range, dismissive of the apparent chaos into which the nation he purports to lead is slipping with each day that passes.

And even if, like in 2016, some of the president’s supporters may not be quick to tell pollsters they will vote for him, that hardcore, committed base – which he has done little to expand since taking office – will still almost certainly turn out to make their mark next to his name whatever he does between now and election day.

That’s why it’s imperative for Biden in these final weeks not just to galvanize his own coalition, but appeal to wavering or disillusioned Republicans as well as Democrats who may feel buyer’s remorse after crossing over to Trump in 2016 and – importantly – the almost-half of the country that didn’t vote at all last time. 

As Ezra Klein writes, part of Biden’s strategy is that “mobilization is often the flip side of polarization: When party activists are sharply divided by ideology and demography, what excites your side will be the very thing that unnerves the other side… Ideologically extreme candidates perform worse than moderates because they drive up turnout on the other side.”

Conversely, more than an electoral strategy or even a policy platform, what Donald Trump needs more than anything are enemies. 

His us-and-them political identity requires confrontation: a way of defining himself not in terms of what he stands for, but rather emphasizing that he is against someone or something; whether that is a loosely-articulated, feeling-over-fact concept like terrorism, crime, socialism, disloyalty, otherness; or a very real, if invisible, threat like a deadly virus. 

Especially useful to a simplifier like Trump is a cutely-nicknamed opponent that he can use to embody all of the above. He has to be able to point to something he can define as representing “evil” and which might paint him as “good” only by comparison. That approach served him well when he was running against Hillary Clinton. But it’s not working against Biden.

Molly Jong-Fast writes at The Bulwark that “everything Trump accuses Biden of doing, he does himself, only worse. So when Trump World tried to shop the idea that Biden was creepy with women, all it really did was remind people that Trump has more than two dozen sexual assault allegations on his rap sheet.

“When Trump World pushed the idea that Hunter Biden was somehow corrupt, you couldn’t help but think about Jivanka and DJTJ and all the ways the Trump family has been siphoning cash out of the public coffers...

“This is the problem with projection: Once people get wise to the pathology, then every boomerang you throw at your opponent comes back and pops you in the nose.”

There’s no new “tone”

But the people around Trump are nothing if not pragmatic, and faced with those sagging poll numbers they’ve realized belatedly that citizens need their president to at least appear remotely serious about a pandemic that has killed nearly 150,000 of their neighbors.

So Trump returned to fronting his Coronavirus briefings, which he still sees as a substitute for campaign rallies – which, ironically, are in doubt partly because of his administration’s disastrous handling of the pandemic. But if you believed the resumption represented any kind of pivot or change in “tone” you only had to look at the simultaneous attacks on Dr Anthony Fauci and the continued assault on science by a president who now, perhaps, understands only that the disease’s rapid spread in Red States might come back to bite him politically.

As the New York Times reports, in an effort “to cast himself as putting safety first” – even though there was, as always, much more to it than that – the president used one of these briefings to abruptly announce that he was cancelling the Republican National Convention set for Jacksonville, Florida next month; an event which had already been moved from Charlotte, North Carolina. Meanwhile, costs continue to mount.

It’s now unclear whether there will actually be any kind of in-person gathering for the RNC, even though Trump has insisted all along that he wants a huge triumphal event to signify his re-nomination, and had even mocked his Democratic opponents for moving their convention to a virtual platform.

At the same time as hinting at some new-found realism on the Coronavirus, Trump and his Attorney-General William Barr have been instigating a fear-inducing image of Democrat-run cities in disarray, arguing that violence on the streets requires a “surge” of federal troops across the country, mirroring the escalating deployment in Portland, Oregon.

The administration’s determination to impose a “law and order” push on numerous American cities follows years of threats from Trump to do exactly that, but this “made for TV” strategy might end up backfiring.

The Guardian’s Tom McCarthy writes: “talking about crime in big cities “can be dog whistles for racial divisions” to Trump supporters, especially in the midwest, who as a group are older, more white and more rural than the average US voter, Julia Azari, a professor of political science at Marquette University, said.

“But emphasizing chaos in the streets is a questionable strategy for an incumbent president, she said. “For most swing voters, the question comes down to, ‘Are things good, are things not good?’ And I don’t see this story as being a really compelling way to reframe the situation as like, ‘things are good’.”

AG Barr is scheduled to testify before the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday. If it actually happens, that will be must-see television.

“Good Trouble”

In the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests which brought waves of people – black and white – onto the streets, the passing of Civil Rights icon John Lewis focused attention on the history of citizen actions demanding racial justice, and emphasized the connections between those who came before and those who struggle in the same cause today.

Congressman Lewis will lie in state in the Rotunda at the US Capitol on Monday and Tuesday, then at the Georgia State Capitol in Atlanta on Wednesday, before he is laid to rest on Thursday.

Yet even as the nation honors Lewis, this could prove to be another embarrassing few days for the president, should he pander to his supporters by  following through on a threat to veto a military appropriations bill over the issue of renaming bases named after Confederate generals. The Washington Post‘s Eugene Robinson wrote recently that Trump “might go down in history as the last president of the Confederacy.”

“If it turns out that the Lost Cause is finally, truly lost, then so is the president who made himself its champion.”

Cognitively “there”

Even among people who don’t closely follow the campaign, television and social media has been dominated recently by three significant interviews: two featuring the president and one about him. First, Rachel Maddow set audience records for her interview with the president’s niece Mary Trump, who subsequently sold almost a million copies of her book on its first day of publication.

Hearing a member of the president’s own family say with a straight face that were he to be re-elected it would be “the end of the American experiment” was chilling, and sent the White House scrambling for damage control. There was even a section marked “Mary” in Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany’s ever-expanding folder of topic notes.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, Trump himself sat for an interview with Chris Wallace of Fox News which basically sent the news cycle spinning on a high setting for days. The president appeared flustered and unprepared, perhaps expecting greater deference from the veteran newsman, and ended up being widely mocked for inexplicably bragging about a cognitive assessment he had taken. (It’s worth acknowledging that alongside the broad praise for Wallace’s interview, he and other reporters were called out by CNN‘s Jake Tapper for not pressing Trump on the unresolved story about Russian bounties on US soldiers.)

Trump then insisted on doubling down on his “test” in a subsequent interview with Fox’s Dr Marc Siegel, achieving little more than the unleashing of a torrent of mocking memes and, crucially for Team Trump, completely undercutting any campaign tactic they may have had to question Joe Biden’s mental acuity.

An exasperated Susan Glasser in the New Yorker wrote that the president’s mental health is “now a test for America.”

“The fact that Trump is so manifestly, obviously unfit for office may be one of the most striking aspects of his Presidency, but it is one of the hardest things for journalists to write about – or would be, except that he himself keeps bringing it up. 

“That Trump even took the cognitive test suggests that he, or his doctor, was concerned about his mental decline,” she writes. “It’s hard to imagine a candidate in full command of his faculties who would make a point of publicly inviting comment on his mental capacity to do the job.”

Given the president’s track record, this episode will likely turn out to be just one more of those self-inflicted media moments that will haunt him through the remainder of the campaign, but ultimately changes few minds.

The strange trail ahead

So, from here on, short of any kind of “October Surprise” – and, honestly, given what we’ve already gone through in this presidency, exactly how surprising could it be? A vaccine? A cyber-attack? War with Iran? Trump dropping out? Leaving those scenarios aside, what might we expect as this unprecedented campaign makes its way to November?

Ashley Parker and Philip Rucker at the Washington Post pose a basic but inescapable question: “Why doesn’t Trump try harder to solve the Coronavirus crisis?” They conclude that he simply can’t, for two reasons. First, to do so would require admitting he was wrong – and he has an “almost pathological unwillingness to admit error; a positive feedback loop of overly rosy assessments and data from advisers and Fox News; and a penchant for magical thinking that prevented him from fully engaging with the pandemic.”

The second reason, however, is altogether more sinister, yet totally in keeping with the character of a man who was only ever going to be the president of the people who voted for him.

“In the past couple of weeks, senior advisers began presenting Trump with maps and data showing spikes in coronavirus cases among “our people” in Republican states, a senior administration official said. They also shared projections predicting that virus surges could soon hit politically important states in the Midwest — including Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin, the official said.

“This new approach seemed to resonate, as he hewed closely to pre-scripted remarks in a trio of coronavirus briefings last week”.

So with big-picture management of the pandemic and stewardship of a wounded economy largely out of his hands, entirely by virtue of his own previous actions, Trump will likely continue trying to exploit division and capitalize on “culture wars” – playing on the  fears of white suburban voters as he attempts to shore up key demographics. All the while, he will fall back on his well-worn roadmap of distraction.

We can probably also expect him to continue his assault on the “corruption” of mail-in voting, despite growing opposition from his own party. Many have taken his comments as laying the ground work for claiming that the election will be somehow “rigged” and de-legitimizing the result if he fails to win. After all, he did the same thing in 2016, blaming “illegal” votes for Clinton’s victory in the popular vote.

For Biden, as the old adage goes, when your opponent is digging a hole for themselves, stand back and let them; and the low profile of his “Basement Tapes” campaign has paid off so far, but he is expected to get out more and campaign in person more actively in coming weeks. It was thought that adjusting to the new virtual world would to be a challenge for Biden, given his effectiveness at one-to-one interaction and well-honed ability to show empathy and compassion, qualities particularly resonant in the current pandemic, but his online fundraisers have proved hugely successful, outraising Trump in both May and June.

Biden’s VP appointment is due very soon, and while it could prove to be historically significant, it probably now only matters to the overall race if the Trump campaign can attack whoever the nominee is in a way that hasn’t worked so far against their main opponent.

As things stand right now, there are scheduled to be three Presidential Debates in September and October; but of course anything can yet happen to that pillar of political establishment culture in a year where the unusual has become commonplace.

It seems pointless to restate, but this year’s campaign is not 2016. Or any other year, for that matter.

It’s hard to imagine a world in which politicians don’t kiss babies, and maybe that’s not a bad thing. But the uncertainty surrounding every aspect of regular human activity, not just in the US but across the world, means the nature of political campaigns as we previously understood them is up for grabs. 

I mean, who would have thought a politician would seek to trademark the word “TeleRally”? (although you could probably guess which politician).

One thing that hasn’t changed is the obscene amount of money hoovered up by a political campaign: Trump has spent a record amount of money so far – almost a billion dollars since 2017, while Biden’s fundraising efforts have been rapidly closing the gap.

Finally, although foreign policy, somewhat shamefully, still won’t score highly in the minds of many voters – beyond Trump’s strategy of blaming China for the pandemic – what does the direction the US takes in November mean for relations with the rest of the world?

Simon Kuper wrote recently at the FT that, in a post-Trump world, the US would need to learn – or re-learn – how democracy works. It could be helped in that crucial endeavor, he argues, by lessons from the post-WW2 reconstruction of Europe and Japan.

“In the language of Alcoholics Anonymous, the first step to change is admitting you have a problem,” he writes. “The US seems close to hitting rock bottom.”

And much as those nations opposing Napoleon in 1815 had to adapt to a post-Napoleonic world, it’s maybe sobering as we contemplate November’s outcome and what it might mean for Republican politics heading into the next cycle, to recall that when the French Emperor finally left the stage, he abdicated – albeit briefly – in favour of his son.

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For other Northern Slant articles trying to make sense of US politics, see:

Stranger Than Fiction – July 4

Looking Back in Anger – June 19

‘We Hold These Truths’ – June 4

None of Us Can Be Silent – June 1

Biden’s Choice – May 10

Tipping Point for the Bully Pulpit? – Apr 28

L’Etat, C’est Moi – Apr 16