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ANGE:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ange McCormack. This is 7am.

This week, Donald Trump took one step closer in his bid to return to the White House.

The former president convincingly won the Republican caucuses in Iowa, and is now increasingly likely to become the Republican presidential nominee.

So, what does Trump’s victory say about America - and democracy?

Today, Dr Emma Shortis, senior researcher at the Australia Institute, on the risks of Trump’s enduring and growing popularity in the United States.

It’s Thursday, January 18.

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ANGE:

Emma. We've just seen the very first contest in the race to see who will take on Joe Biden later this year in the presidential election. You're someone who watches this all extremely closely as an expert in American politics. Can you tell us what happened?

EMMA:

Sure. So all eyes really have been on Iowa for a while because, as you said, it's the first primary contest for the Republican nomination for president. And Donald Trump, of course, has been the frontrunner for a long time. But this was the first real test of that assumption. You know, about how much he captured the party and it had come down in the weeks before, really, to three candidates to Trump, of course, but also to his former UN ambassador and governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley.

Audio excerpt – Nikki Haley:

“And take it from me. The first minority female governor in history, America is not a racist country.”

EMMA:

And the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis.

Audio excerpt – Ron DeSantis:

“As the next president of the United States. I am going to get the job done for this country.”

EMMA:

So it's essentially down to these three candidates. And really, it was a race for second place. They are quite interesting characters, I think, if that's the right word to use in this context. DeSantis has pitched himself as a kind of more competent Trump.

Audio excerpt – Ron DeSantis:

“We refuse to surrender to the woke mob. This state is where woke goes to die.”

EMMA:

He pitched himself as someone who understands the levers of power. And Haley had a similar message, I suppose, but she pitched herself as a generational change.

Audio excerpt – Nikki Haley:

“It is time for a new generational leader. It is time that we leave the negativity behind, the drama behind, and we focus on real solutions. We've got serious issues. We need new answers on this.”

EMMA:

So Trump has had his time and she's kind of lightly described him as chaotic. That's about as close as she got to criticising him, saying, you know that he was a good president, but it's time for a new generation of conservative leadership.

And so all of this was kind of coalescing in Iowa amidst a record breaking snowstorm.

Audio excerpt – Reporter of CBS News:

“We start in Iowa, which is under a blizzard warning today. It is freezing there. Now, I'm sure you're thinking, duh, it's January. Obviously it's cold in Iowa, but this is different. It is brutally cold, historically cold…”

EMMA:

And in the end, turnout was quite a bit lower, mostly because of, we think, because of weather conditions.

Audio excerpt – Donald Trump:

“You can’t sit home, If you're sick as a dog, you save time even if you vote and then pass away.”

EMMA:

But in the end, it didn't really matter. The results were pretty much exactly what we expected.

Audio excerpt – Reporter of ABC News:

“Iowa Republican voters have made their choice clear for the presidential nominee. They voted resoundingly in favour of Donald Trump at last night's caucuses, launching the former president's march to a rematch with Joe Biden in November.”

EMMA:

He won by the largest margin in the history of Iowa's Republican caucuses. So it's a pretty big win for Trump.

Audio excerpt – Donald Trump:

“Well I want to thank everybody, this has been some period of time, and most importantly we want to thank the great people of Iowa! Thank you, we love you all!”

ANGE:

So this is only the first state in what's going to be quite a long process from here. There's plenty more votes like this ahead. How big of a moment was this win for Donald Trump?

EMMA:

I think that's a really interesting question. And they're certainly different takes on it. Iowa shows that the nomination is Trump's to lose, which is what we thought all along. But this fight in Iowa really confirms that with some pretty solid numbers.

And Trump himself in his victory speech, kind of, very characteristically said it was the biggest win he'd had, in Iowa.

Audio excerpt – Donald Trump:

“They said, well, if you win by 12%, that's a big win. That's going to be very hard to do. Well, I think we're more than double that. I guess a triple that maybe, he said you'll never get over 50.”

EMMA:

And so he's treating it as a big victory. Certainly his supporters are treating it as a big victory of confirmation, I suppose, of their ascendancy and their capturing of the Republican Party. And he has been for some time, but particularly in his victory speech after Iowa, he was talking like the nominee.

Audio excerpt – Donald Trump:

“We were a great nation three years ago, and now we're a nation in decline. We are going to turn it around so fast. It's going to happen so fast. We're going to drill. We're going to make great. We have great wealth. We're going to drill. We're going to use that money to lower your taxes even further. We will give you the biggest tax cut in history…”

EMMA:

And in fact, his supporters characterise him as the incumbent. You know, the big lie is that he had the election stolen from him in 2020. And so he's acting not just as the presumptive nominee, but in fact, the incumbent president and his supporters love that. And he loves the kind of feedback loop that that creates with his supporters. So I think that's why he was framing this kind of speech as a unifying moment. I suppose. You know, he talked about everybody coming together.

Audio excerpt – Donald Trump:

“What a turnout, what a crowd. And I really think this is time now for everybody, our country, to come together. We want to come together, uh, whether it's Republican or Democrat or liberal or conservative. It would be so nice if we could come together and straighten out the world and straighten out the problems and straighten out all of the debt.”

EMMA:

And straightening out the world, which is an interesting turn of phrase that I don't actually think he's used before, but he bookended that, of course, with, you know, his favourite themes around death and destruction and violence, of course, and hit all the same talking points. He's been hitting really since he kind of came down that golden escalator in 2015 around the border, around insisting that he's going to close the border around this language about immigrants and terrorists flooding the United States.

Audio excerpt – Donald Trump:

“We don't want people in our country that are going to blow up our shopping centres, thank you very much. And we want a country of law and order.”

EMMA:

Hitting those lines about Joe Biden being the worst president ever.

Audio excerpt – Donald Trump:

“So I don't want to be overly, uh, rough on the president, but I have to say that he is the worst president that we've had in the history of our country. He's destroying our country.”

EMMA:

The things that play really well with his supporters. So in that sense, it was kind of a standard stump speech by Trump.

And really, I think Iowa and his numbers in Iowa confirm that the nomination his his to lose. You know, it's not impossible that he does lose it. American politics is full of surprises. But as it stands at the moment with those kind of numbers, it's absolutely his to lose.

Audio excerpt – Donald Trump:

“This is the first because the big night is going to be in November, when we take back our country and truly we do make our country great again. Thank you very much everybody. A great honour. Thank you very much, thank you.”

ANGE:

After the break - what does Donald Trump’s continuing popularity mean for the future of America?

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ANGE:

Emma. As Donald Trump was delivering this victory speech in Iowa, I imagine you had a sense of Déjà vu and all of those kind of feelings. But what did you think of that moment and how he's pitching his candidacy and connecting with voters?

EMMA:

It is always really striking when you actually watch Trump. You know, so much of the news we consume is on social media, or, you know, for me, it's text between when you actually sit down and watch him, it never stops being shocking, just how even in a relatively coherent short speech for Trump, you know how unhinged he is and how violent his language often is.

For me, I think the striking thing with Trump always really is how he's the kind of hideous, obscene, but entirely logical result of the what we might call the contradictions of American history. He's the kind of embodiment of a number of strands of American history. American exceptionalism is one, this idea that, you know, the United States is and always has been and always will be the best country in the world. That's his, you know, make America Great Again pitch is a call, a clarion call to that idea of American exceptionalism.

And you combine that with the United States's original sin, really, of slavery and the failures of the Civil War and the unresolved contradictions of race in American history. You combine that exceptionalism with the history of structural racism and white supremacy in the United States, and you get this kind of obscene conspiracy theory embodied in Trump's white supremacist conspiracy theories, you know, when he's talking about immigrants flooding the country. That really is what he represents. And that's that's what strikes me every time he speaks.

And the fact that he's speaking to a significant number of Americans who are receptive to that message, who celebrate it. You know, 51% of Republicans in Iowa embraced that this week and continue to embrace it.

It never stops being shocking, really, and it never stops being terrifying. But that doesn't mean we can't understand who he is and what he represents and where he came from.

ANGE:

Trump's decisive victory means he's more and more likely to become the Republican candidate this year. And seeing that unfold all the way from Australia with that benefit of distance, it's kind of shocking to watch. I imagine in America it isn't shocking really to be back again with the Trump election, though. What does his popularity, despite everything that's happened since, say, about where America is heading?

EMMA:

Some really bad things. I think it's bad. It's really bad. I mean, I do think many Americans like us are continually shocked by Trump and his capturing of the party, the way he still kind of really has captured American politics in the way he shapes it. I think there's been that level of incredulity all along.

But especially recently, you know, in the last kind of a year or two, because in American history, one term presidents don't come back. You know, they lose the White House and they kind of disappear off into the never, never. They certainly don't recontest for a nomination. So that in itself is extraordinary.

But the fact that the person in this case who's coming back from a one term presidency is a person who incited a violent insurrection three years ago, who attempted to disrupt violently the peaceful transfer of power and essentially bring down American democracy.

A person who is charged with 91 separate felonies, ranging from the state level to the federal level around the Espionage Act, around inciting an insurrection, providing comfort to insurrectionists, to issues with his business dealings, and a person who uses now today, brazenly fascist language. You know, he used to hide a little bit, um, with his language, but more recently he's his language is coming straight out of the fascist playbook. You know, he said fairly recently that immigrants are and this is a direct quote, “poisoning the blood of our country”.

Audio excerpt – Donald Trump:

“They're poisoning the blood of our country. That's what they’ve done. They poison mental institutions and prisons all over the world, not just in South America, not just in three or four countries that we think about, but all over the world they’re coming into our country from Africa, from Asia, from all over the world, pouring into our country, no one is even looking at them they just come in.”

EMMA:

Which is straight out of the eugenicist, white supremacist playbook. He's called his opponents vermin, and he kind of revels in graphically describing violence against his opponents. So the fact that Trump commands the kind of support that we saw confirmed in Iowa, even with all of this happening, I think said some pretty bad things about where the United States is heading.

ANGE:

Emma, when Americans vote later this year, the presidency is at stake. Of course, that's essentially what they're voting on. But this time around, what else hangs in the balance?

EMMA:

Democracy itself. You know, it sounds it sounds hyperbolic. I know it sounds hyperbolic, like it's so dramatic. And I'm really conscious of that. American history is kind of full of these close calls and disasters. But I am convinced, and I think I'm not alone, that the United States sits at as dangerous a point as it ever has in its history.

And we know that because Donald Trump has told us, you know, polling suggests that in a head to head, he, you know, if it was held tomorrow in head to head, he might beat Biden. And he has said so clearly that he's not interested in upholding institutions of American democracy. You know, we know that from his history, from the history of the insurrection.

But he's also mused openly about terminating the Constitution. And he and his supporters have a really detailed brick of a plan of what they're going to do for a second Trump administration. And most of that involves catastrophically undermining the institutions of American democracy. So it's doing things like gutting an independent public service and replacing tens of thousands of federal employees with Trump acolytes.

You know, Trump supporters in his campaign actually have a kind of already a kind of conservative LinkedIn going where they're basically having, vetting candidates for their support of Trump and having ready to go lists of employees to install in places like the Pentagon.

So, you know, this is Trump 2.0 without any of the guardrails. And that is a catastrophic prospect to to consider. So when Joe Biden says democracy is on the ballot, he's campaigning. But he's also right.

ANGE:

Emma, thanks so much for your time today.

EMMA:

My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

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ANGE:

Also in the news today,

Donald Trump has attended a a New York courtroom to defend himself against defamation charges, filed by a woman who alleges the former president raped her.

Jurors in the trial do not have to consider whether the alleged assault took place; they will be considering how much the former president should pay in damages. Donald Trump denies the allegations.

And

The government has unveiled its vision of how it will begin to regulate artificial intelligence in Australia.

Yesterday, Industry and Science Minister Ed Husic revealed a 25-page plan to begin to create controls over the emerging technology, including a plan to clearly label content that is generated by AI to the public, and the establishment of a special advisory panel to government on further rules that will govern it.

I’m Ange McCormack, this is 7am. Tomorrow we’ll be back with an episode looking at allegations that have been brought against one of the top stars of the Australian Open, and why tennis doesn’t want to talk about it….

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