Artur Dziambor examined the image of Donald Trump. He pointed out something crucial. Photo. TOMASZ RADZIK/AGENCJA SE/East News
Jakub Noch: Should Donald Trump win the presidential election in the United States?
Dr. Artur Dziambor: Are you asking whether he should win because I’m keeping my fingers crossed for him? Or is it because I think that everything points to Donald Trump’s victory because this is what political marketing is like?
Are you keeping your fingers crossed for him?
On this matter, I have a different opinion from the current main government line and I believe that from the point of view of Polish politics and our interests, it will be much better if Trump becomes president.
But where is the Polish interest in this? For NATO to fall apart and Trump to let Putin do whatever he wants?
Well, you say completely different things to high-ranking members of your party at closed meetings, and completely different things when you go on TV programs and rallies, where you try to attract voters with strong slogans… Trump knows exactly what he’s talking about in this matter .
He is focused on winning the presidential election in the United States and is completely uninterested in what world public opinion thinks about him. Because she is not the one who will vote on November 5, nor is she voting anymore, because let’s remember that in the USA they have this early vote formula.
The game is on and Trump is telling his voters what they want to hear. After all, he is the king of populism and knows exactly how to behave to attract crowds of Americans.
From our perspective, the slogans coming from his mouth obviously sound dangerous or, as some say, “anti-Ukrainian”, “pro-Russian”, “anti-NATO”, but let’s be clear – these are not messages from diplomatic summits, but from a rally somewhere in the American countryside. Where Americans have been complaining loudly for years that their country is playing guardian of the entire world at its own expense, which is why their lives are worse.
What about the voices of Donald Trump’s former associates who now warn against him? What about the growing list of Republican bigwigs who officially support Kamala Haris?
On the other hand, we have Democrats who sided with Trump. It’s all a matter of optics. I imagine that a guy who is a billionaire among the 100 richest Americans is just playing politics.
I believe that Trump also played a similar game with many of his former colleagues, and even more so with his party rivals. His extreme rhetoric has gone so far that today many people are confused about what Trump really is.
So, after getting a PhD in Trump, can you tell when this man is telling the truth and when he’s acting?
In a sense you can. You just need to understand that he drew his own character – a politician who is a product for sale. And as the following years show, the demand among American “customers” is really great. I am convinced that he will win this election thanks to this.
It is not a matter of his sincerity or insincerity, but of the image he adopts. This also means that Trump externally functions as a madman with a red button. But doesn’t this opinion help him effectively discuss American interests with other leaders? Many of them are really afraid of him.
Let’s accept this ultimately optimistic scenario for the world, but would Trump’s victory be good… for Americans? Won’t a common man from Alabama or other Kentucky be disappointed because Trump’s promises will become difficult to implement?
It is certain that he is cheating his voters on many issues. What particularly comes to mind here is Donald Trump’s promises regarding what he intends to do with the so-called the wealth of Americans. He may be a great businessman or salesman, but he is certainly not a miracle worker, so over time, some of the electorate will be disappointed in this matter.
The United States has its serious problems and the level of prosperity is completely different than the still common ideas about this country. There is also a colossal problem with immigration, for which Trump – as it turned out during his first term – has no magic spell. As he promised, he built a little wall on the border with Mexico, but people had a slightly different idea of the effectiveness of this construction.
Contrary to grandiose announcements, he never started to hold his predecessors accountable, he did not find any additional money that was allegedly “swindled” by those “bad people” who were in power before him, etc. Here we can mention many populist stories that we know very well from Vistula politics.
Trump never wanted to be substantive, because he is aware that the absolute majority of his electorate is not substantive. He simply uses mechanisms that give him a chance to take power and is completely unaware of the fact that some of his demands amount to voter fraud. This is what populism is all about.
If Trump is expected to win, how fooled are we by the polls? The latest ones indicate a result of 49 to 46 percent. in favor of Harris.
The only problem with the American presidential elections is that “popular vote” polls, i.e. showing general support for candidates on a national scale, do not reflect the competition at all. In fact, no one in the Republican and Democratic headquarters cares about national polls because that’s not what voting looks like.
In the USA, the results in individual states are decisive, and let us remember that states are unequal – depending on their population and historical position, they have a different number of electoral votes. It is not the person who has the greater support of all Americans who moves into the White House, but the person who wins the most electoral votes. And at the state level, it looks like this: even if Trump has just one vote, he still takes the entire electoral pool.
I would like to remind you that in the 2016 elections, Donald Trump also lost to Hillary Clinton in terms of the “popular vote”, but he had much more electoral votes than her.
This is true, and we also have the important concept of “swing states”, i.e. those few states that Democrats and Republicans cannot blindly assign to themselves. Which one will be crucial in these elections?
When it comes to “swing states”, the fiercest fight is undoubtedly going on for Pennsylvania, where there are twenty very valuable electoral votes up for grabs. Moreover, I expect that the minimal difference in Trump’s favor – in the order of 51-49 – will be in many more states than the mainstream media overseas expects today.
So should we expect a “narrow win” or a “big win”?
I absolutely expect a “big win”, i.e. that most – if not all – swing states will fall to Trump, and additionally Harris may unexpectedly lose some of her “certain” states. In this way, the Republican candidate’s account should receive even more than 300 electoral votes.
And this would be devastating not only for Kamala Harris’ further career, but also for the Democratic Party as a whole. If this defeat actually happens, it will take many years for Democrats to rally. A thorough reconstruction will then be ordered there and work will be done to promote several promising stars for the future.
The current problem of the Democratic Party is that their stars are disproportionately less powerful than the Republican stars, because the GOP has drawn up a contingency plan in the event of Donald Trump’s defeat a long time ago. The Republican bench of candidates for secretaries of state, vice presidents and, someday, presidents is now very long. Democrats only have a few universally liked names.
In general, if you look more closely at today’s situation in the US, it looks like the vast majority of Democrats… are not liked by society. They often owe their support, even victories in elections at various levels, to the fact that they are simply not Republicans, because the right wing is traditionally out of reach in a given state.
Americans often support Democratic candidates only because they hate them slightly less than the Republican ones. This is again somewhat identical to what is happening in our country, where people vote for the Civic Platform not because they love Donald Tusk so much, but because they are very disgusted with Jarosław Kaczyński.
This is the mode from which the Democratic Party must finally escape in the US, because it is becoming more and more destructive for it.
What about the Polish community? Have the times really come when several hundred thousand Polish immigrants will elect a president in America?
There is a lot of talk about the role of Polonia today, but of course it will not have that much of an impact. This is primarily because the Polish diaspora is not concentrated in one specific state, as is the case with the Irish in Massachusetts, for example.
If there was at least one strictly “Polish” state, then maybe the number of its electoral votes could really decide in favor of Harris or Trump. People with Polish roots, however, are widely scattered across various states, in none of them clearly dominating other communities.
This, of course, does not mean that US presidential candidates do not have to worry about the Polish diaspora. Kamala Harris mentioned Poland in the debate, Donald Trump appears in “Polish” areas in Pennsylvania, because the white and red support will obviously be useful. However, it will not be decisive.
We are constantly thinking about the scenario of Donald Trump’s victory, and what should we expect if a Democrat triumphed? Replay of January 6, 2021…?
As we know, Donald Trump announced that if he loses, he will admit defeat and withdraw from politics completely. And that was quite a harsh statement for him to make.
Yes – for one simple reason: we are talking about a man who is simply old and clearly tired. If you look at the debates from four years ago, Trump has aged a lot since then. OK, Biden has aged enormously, but time hasn’t spared his opponent either. I’m actually afraid that the end of Trump’s presidency may unfortunately be similar to Biden’s…
Today, for a 78-year-old, he is doing well, but a huge difference in his form was visible after what happened in July in Butler. Trump didn’t look like himself at his first rallies after leaving the hospital. He lost all energy for several weeks.
Let’s go back to considerations about Trump’s possible defeat – what would the position of the Republicans look like after it?
As I have already mentioned, Republicans have been preparing for the end of the Trump era for a very long time. They know that his children do not want to go into politics – they keep their fingers crossed for their father, they cooperate with him in the campaign, but for now they have no political plans of their own.
In the relatively near future, we can expect the rise of such figures as the one elected vice president JD Vance, the popular Florida governor Ron DeSantis or Vivek Ramaswamy, whose star has dimmed a bit recently, but he is a charismatic speaker and is improving day by day. . At Great Old Party someone has to pull the cart.
However, the situation is different with the Democrats, who invested heavily in Gavin Newsom, who, however, as the governor of California, unfortunately reveals himself as a man who is burying this wonderful state under the ground. Californians’ lives are getting worse and they started “voting with their feet” a long time ago. When you look at the population flow in recent years, it is obvious that most Americans moved to Florida, while most residents fled California.
You mentioned Trump’s children, and what role does his wife, Melania, play in the campaign and the politician’s entire image?
First of all, she has to look very nice and act as a decoration for him. We know how this works in practice – there are more and more recordings showing Melania Trump making various affronts to her husband.
In addition, there is her recent statement about abortion, in which it turns out that she has completely different views than her husband. After her behavior, many people began to speculate that Melania Trump was preparing for a major breakup at the end of the campaign. Is it real?
However, ostentatiously pushing away Donald Trump’s hand and other similar behavior is not the same as a compromising breakup in front of the cameras. If I were the opponents of the Republican candidate, I wouldn’t have too much hope for such a show.
You can see that their relationship has been the same for years, but Melania Trump has never done anything against her husband. Here again I see some similarity to the situation in Poland, where we have the Duda couple and many speculations about them, but the First Lady focuses on silence.
