SARAH FERGUSON, PRESENTER:  The consequential US presidential election is now only five and a half weeks away, and it could be the closest in history. 

One of the sharpest views on the dynamics of American politics comes from Fintan O’Toole, writer for the Irish Times and the New York review of books. He’s one of the world’s most influential columnists. 

O’Toole is in Australia to deliver a lecture on Democracy and Identity in the Age of Trump. I spoke to him earlier. 

Fintan O’Toole, it’s great not just to have you in the program but actually in the studio. Welcome.

FINTAN O’TOOLE, IRISH TIMES JOURNALIST:  It’s a real pleasure to be here, thank you.

SARAH FERGUSON:  Now, I want to start in the United States. You were at the Democratic convention, obviously the VP debate coming up next week. Is America ready to vote for Kamala Harris, do you think?

FINTAN O’TOOLE:  Well, nobody knows. This is why it’s on edge. There’s no question the Democrats would not have nominated a black woman to be their presidential candidate other than in these extraordinary circumstances.

SARAH FERGUSON:  How can you be so sure of that?

FINTAN O’TOOLE:  Well, I think we kind of know because she did incredibly badly in the primaries when she ran, when Biden won.

SARAH FERGUSON:  To be fair, in a different set of circumstances, in the middle of Black Lives Matter as a prosecutor, so a very different story.

FINTAN O’TOOLE:  Yes, indeed but that term was around, and it was still around in 2024, early ’24, which was electability. So, the way they were thinking, the conventional way of thinking was that America is not ready for this. 

And of course, on that logic it will never be ready. So, this extraordinary set of circumstances forced them into a recognition and an honesty, that half of Americans are women, and a lot of Americans are people of colour. And she looks as much like an American, certainly, as Donald Trump does, maybe more so. 

But I don’t think they would have got there if it were not for this sort of very strange chain of circumstances. And I think then they’ve got to go all in. 

So, they have been pushed further into embracing a kind of breach of the norms of American politics than they would have liked to go. And my instinct is that’s exactly the right thing to do. Trump breaches norms. 

You don’t really fight Trump by staying within the old norms. You’ve got to do something new, and it makes her the candidate of change, which Joe Biden of course could not have been.

SARAH FERGUSON:  There is an irony, of course, or there’s a point of interest in you being at that convention in Chicago, because of course, it was a city dominated by Irish migrants. They were very powerful in the Democratic Party. But you can see in that convention that it’s a new party, isn’t it?

FINTAN O’TOOLE:  Completely. It was interesting for me as an Irish person that the name Daley wasn’t mentioned.

SARAH FERGUSON:  A great Democrat. 

FINTAN O’TOOLE:  If you know anything about the history of Chicago, the Daleys, father and son, I think about 45 years they governed Chicago as almost kind of sole dictators. 

This was the machine, the Democratic Party machine and the first real moment in the Democratic Party convention on the first day, the person who was wheeled out was Jesse Jackson who was kept outside by that machine. 

Literally, when Jesse Jackson arrived in Chicago, Daley offered him a job collecting the fares on the public transport system and that was a “black job”. This phrase “black jobs” kept coming up. What’s a black job now? 

And it was fascinating that all that history, 1968 wasn’t mentioned, Daley wasn’t mentioned. 

The racism of the Democratic Party wasn’t mentioned, and it was, again it was part of this thing of them being kind of forced to embrace their African-American heritage, forced to say actually the civil rights movement is really what has kind of created this moment for us. 

It was a very black convention in a lot of ways and a lot of its energy, and a lot of its optimism and its joy was really coming out of that culture and that history. 

SARAH FERGUSON:  Let’s move to the Trump side, where there is less evident joy, but of course, he’s, you know, it’s a race that is, as I’ve just said, is way too close to call. Now, Trump’s team has been trying to get him to focus on policy. They wanted more policy in the debate. They want him to talk about policy. But his instincts go elsewhere, don’t they?

FINTAN O’TOOLE:  Trump knows that if it’s policy, he loses. He doesn’t have policies. There was a moment in the debate with Harris when he started, you know, was being pushed a little bit about healthcare and he said he had the concept of a plan in his head. 

And of course, Trumpism is not about policy. It’s actually not about even about achieving anything. I mean, did Trump, you know, reopen the coal mines for the coalminers in West Virginia? No. Does he have any intention of doing so? No. Will they still vote for him? Yes. Even for his base there’s not a relation between the promise of Trumpism and tangible things that governments will do for you.

SARAH FERGUSON:  So what is it that he is understanding. When he pushes back, we know that he won’t do what anybody tells him to do. When they say talk about policy, he doesn’t. What is it that he understands about his appeal?

FINTAN O’TOOLE:  What he understands is that his appeal is about resentment. That it’s about punishing the other side, the other tribe. And the pleasure that Trumpism undoubtedly gives its followers is a source of sadistic pleasure. 

It’s a way of pleasure we’re putting it up to those other people and that includes really almost anybody who is not a white Christian man in that kind of nexus and Trump gets that. He understands that that is what it’s about and he’s going to keep doing the same thing. 

The question is, has he succeeded too much? So, what Trump has done, is he has normalised outrage. And that was very, very effective, that outrage in 2016, but it’s nearly 10 years now he’s on the road doing this stuff. And there’s a slight feeling, I think, that it’s getting boring. It’s not outrageous anymore. 

So even the sort of mad stuff about, you know, Haitian immigrants supposedly eating people’s cats and dogs, it’s absurd, it’s crazy, but is it really effective anymore? Does it actually stir that sense of transgression? Because the problem with transgression is, if you transgress and transgress and transgress, where do you keep going?

SARAH FERGUSON:  Unless this comes down to something more ordinary in the end, which it’s the economy, stupid as Jim Carvery would have said. That even if Trumpism is depleted, the economy is still really bad.

FINTAN O’TOOLE:  The personal economy is bad. I think this is the thing that the Democrats were very slow to understand. They keep saying but look at the economic figures, look at the unemployment and the stock market and growth all those sort of things but that doesn’t matter to us. Most people say what does my economy feel like and of course, inflation has really hurt people.

But Trump’s actually very bad at talking about inflation. Or about, you know, household costs. This is the downside. So not talking about policy allows him to do something else. That’s his shtick and he’s brilliant at it. But it also means he has no narrative about, you know, ordinary people’s lives in terms of those economic issues. 

Critical thing is whether Harris can create some kind of credible narrative about what she’s going to do about people’s daily circumstances.

SARAH FERGUSON:  We’re in the third electoral cycle for Trump and MAGA, the Trump base. You’ve already talked about the fact that it’s possible that some of that, its power, the transgressive power is declining. Is there MAGA, is there Trumpism after Trump?

FINTAN O’TOOLE:  I think this is the fascinating question. Trying to be slightly optimistic about it, if Trump loses, something is over. If you go back two years, what did thinking Republicans want? They wanted exactly Trumpism without Trump. Trump is an embarrassment. 

We’ve had January 6, he’s crazy, he’s uncontrollable, he does all this mad stuff. Let’s have a Trumpism without Trump, which was Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor and it bombed, and it bombed because whether those of us who are liberals like it or not, Trump is very entertaining. His followers find him really funny. They think of him as being somebody who is kind of on their side, they love the celebrity, they love all the transgression, they love all that stuff. 

And when you see the same kind of policies and the same kind of toxic messaging coming from someone like DeSantis, who is po faced…

SARAH FERGUSON:  Not funny.

FINTAN O’TOOLE:  Not funny, not charming. So, replacing Trump seems to me to be almost impossible for the Republicans in the short term, which is why, again, the stakes are just so high in November. 

It does feel like it’s a turning point one way or the other. And of course, what is so terrifying about it, the margins are just so tiny.

SARAH FERGUSON:  Deep breath for the entire world, Fintan O’Toole, I could of course talk to you all night but stop I must. Thank you for coming in.

FINTAN O’TOOLE:  A real pleasure.