Can a diminished Trump still govern from his gaudy, gilded bunker?

Last week, I wrote here in hope rather than confidence that the American people would seize their last chance to confound Donald Trump and his Maga cult and to reassert the democratic values of the American Revolution embodied in the US constitution.

My hopes were far more than exceeded by the results. They are an emphatic rejection of the dangerous and deceitful strategies deployed by Trump to pervert the democratic system.

We should not forget his unsuccessful efforts to propagate wholesale gerrymandering by red states. Nor should we forget his unsuccessful attempts to limit postal voting and to demand proof of citizenship when registering to vote.

On top of that came his nauseating insult to the American people in the dodgy pledge of a $5,000 cheque to every adult citizen in the event of a Republican majority in both houses.

Imagine in your own case what the effect would be of demanding that you prove your Irish citizenship as a precondition for voting. Random identity checks we can live with; requiring proof of citizenship at the polling booth, however, was intended to disfranchise poor and marginalised American citizens.

Trump is what he has always been – mad, bad and dangerous. I use the term “mad” in the American sense of angry. JD Vance, his vice-president, who typically put his personal ambitions ahead of any principles he has, and ahead of his doubts about making war on Iran, now says the cause of the Republican disaster at the polls was the US-Israeli war against Iran. That analysis ignores completely why America went to war in the Gulf.

It ignores the rotten relationship between Trump and Binyamin Netanyahu’s regime. It ignores Trump’s quiet encouragement of Zionist expansionism as exemplified by the appointment of Mike Huckabee as US ambassador to Israel.

The US-Israel relationship will not dissolve completely in the aftermath of the Republican defeat at the polls. But the unquestioning intensity of that relationship has suffered a very severe setback.

Anyone who has seen recent footage of flood-ravaged tent cities in the debris of Gaza – and can imagine the hypothermia, disease and hunger-induced despondency of the people existing rather than living there – needs no reminder of the unforgivable and barbarous horrors perpetrated by the Netanyahu regime, in response to the unforgivable and barbarous actions of Hamas on October 7th, 2023.

Trump’s ludicrous Board of Peace has now apparently become concerned for the plight of innocent Gazans. What is happening now in Gaza is an ongoing atrocity and a war crime. Likewise, the unwritten and unspoken encouragement that the US has given to intensified Zionist annexation by stealth on the West Bank has come into sharp focus.

Europe and America cannot wash their hands of the creeping expulsion of Palestinian Arabs from their lands. The UK has, very late in the day, woken up to the consequences of tacit British support for Israel’s policies. Andy Burnham’s succession to No 10 has enabled significant policy change compared with that of the Tories and, indeed, Keir Starmer.

Those, including myself, who have always supported Israel’s right to exist within secure and recognised boundaries, as recognised by UN Resolution 242, must also acknowledge that there are other people with rights both in Israel and in the Palestinian lands.

Perhaps a new government without the likes of Netanyahu, Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich offers a narrow window of hope for peaceful coexistence between Jews and Arabs. The coalition led by Gadi Eisenkot may form Israel’s next government. It remains a Zionist coalition and faces difficult choices. It can seek to detach elements of the right-wing Netanyahu coalition.

Or it can come to some form of accommodation with the Arab members of the Knesset, who are seen as political untouchables by the majority of Israeli voters. The tension between Israel’s raison d’être as a Jewish homeland and its asserted status as a democracy is underlined by the refusal to permit Arab participation in its government. Perhaps prospects of Middle Eastern peace will be determined by internal debate.

Another internal debate is surely coming among Democrats forming the majority in the US House of Representatives and Senate.

Never has there been a deeper gulf between the US presidency and its elected Congress. Even with a sympathetic, verging on supine, Supreme Court, the next two years will demonstrate whether the US constitution is built on a viable balance of powers between the executive and the legislature.

Can Trump still govern from his gaudy, gilded bunker? Is this what the founding fathers intended? Does he really believe in the art of the deal with political opponents? Or is he so addicted to personal power that he intends to spend the next two years locked in internal political wrangling with a hostile Congress?

The appointment of Stephen Miller as White House chief of staff suggests a willingness to hunker in the bunker. But the presidential veto on legislation is not an infinite political resource. Trump is down but not out.