The 2020 US election is looking like a replay of 2016. Will Democrats fail to beat Donald Trump again?

Once again, two questionable candidates are vying for the Democratic presidential nomination. One has been named in a scandal, and the other likes Fidel Castro. Worryingly, Democrats don’t seem to have figured out how to beat Trump

Robert Boxwell

Published: 2:00am, 14 Mar 2020

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I watched Hillary over the weekend, a new four-part documentary about you-know-who. As the show got on to her 2016 campaign for United States president, it became hard not to look at the Democrats’ current efforts to beat Donald Trump in November and see a repeat of 2016.

Two tainted candidates are vying for the presidential nomination. One is tainted by scandal, the other by being a socialist in hyper-capitalist America. Both claim to be the best bet to beat Trump. We know how it turned out the last time.

While it is impossible to boil down Hillary Clinton’s loss to one factor, questions about whether she violated national security regulations by using a private email server when she was secretary of state hung over her entire campaign. Her emails drew a 12-month criminal investigation by the FBI, which was closed in July 2016, then reopened and closed again just days before the election in November.

While no charges were filed against Clinton, she couldn’t shake the taint of the investigation. Indeed, she has repeatedly blamed her loss on then Federal Bureau of Investigation director James Comey.

Her Democratic primary challenger was Senator Bernie Sanders, a self-declared socialist. He gave her a pass on the email scandal, but called her “corrupt” for taking Wall Street money. Party leaders, along with much of the US media, eventually rounded on him. Clinton was always going to be their candidate.

Sanders’ supporters, the often rabid “Bernie Bros”, took great umbrage at the party’s treatment of their guy; many were believed to have stayed home on election day rather than vote for Clinton. Trump won.

Many Democrats and much of the liberal US media still haven’t recovered. Clinton certainly hasn’t.

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There is a derisory name for the condition some Democrats are suffering from, “Trump Derangement Syndrome”: they hate Trump so much that they seemingly spend all of their time fighting against him on every possible front, instead of reaching compromises that might better serve the country. Indeed, not only won’t they work with Trump, they want him ejected from the White House.

To this end, their efforts in the months following his January 2017 inauguration led to the Mueller investigation into alleged collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia in the 2016 election.

While plenty of Americans like Trump’s policies and economy, many fewer actually like the man, which means the right Democrat should have a reasonable shot at evicting him from the White House

With this cloud darkening Trump’s first year and a half in office, Democrats won control of the House of Representatives in the midterm elections in November 2018. Within a year, House committees were conducting a dozen investigations related to Trump.

When special counsel Robert Mueller finished the Russia investigation in March 2019 and Trump was still standing, Democrats took matters into their own hands.

In a political brawl that stretched from September to February, House Democrats worked to impeach Trump for asking the newly elected president of Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden and his son Hunter (who served on the board of a Ukrainian gas company at a time when his father, as vice-president, was making decisions about the aid flow to Kiev).

Democrats charged that Trump asked Kiev to announce the investigation to hurt Biden politically, and help Trump’s own re-election bid.

Then US president Barack Obama, vice-president Joe Biden and his son Hunter at a college basketball game in Washington in 2010. Photo: Reuters

Democrats don’t seem to have thought this one through. The fact of Hunter, who seemed to have little relevant experience, being paid tens of thousands of dollars per month in Ukraine while his father was playing a role in Ukraine policy, smelled bad. So Democrats going after Trump also meant keeping headlines about Biden in front of American voters for months.

Incidentally, more than a few voters were quite OK with anyone in their government asking the Ukrainian government to look into why a Ukrainian company was paying the vice-president’s son a lot of money for what looked like very little work.

The Democratic-majority House impeached Trump in December. The Republican-majority Senate acquitted him in February. By the time the Iowa and Nevada caucuses and the New Hampshire primary were over, Sanders the socialist was ahead of the pack and Biden the scandalist looked like a goner.

Democratic Party leaders were frantic. Few think a socialist can win in America. So, when Biden miraculously took the next primary in South Carolina, they rounded on Sanders again. Within days, all the other viable candidates found cameras, dropped out of the race, and said nice things about Biden.

Which means the Democrats are back where they were four years ago, pushing a candidate who will be hounded by investigations and trashing the socialist. In the Nevada debate, Michael Bloomberg went so far as to say of Sanders’ ideas: “Other countries tried that. It was called communism and it just didn’t work.”

The Republican-controlled Senate has already started an investigation into young Biden’s Ukraine adventures, which Trump and his surrogates bring up incessantly, often adding Hunter’s messy personal life to the mix.

Joe Biden may also have to answer questions about his brother, James, who Politico recently reported is linked to a health care business in Pennsylvania that was raided by the FBI in January.

Where were the Democratic leaders who should have taken Biden aside and said, “The Ukraine shenanigans look bad, we know how this will end, you’ve got to stand down”? What does it say about American politics today that campaign strategies include having a candidate who is less corrupt than the other guy?

So here we go again. While plenty of Americans like Trump’s policies and economy, many fewer actually like the man, which means the right Democrat should have a reasonable shot at evicting him from the White House.

But the Democrats don’t seem to have learned much in the last four years. It’s hard to win with a candidate who is a subject of a serious investigation or another who praises guys named Fidel Castro. You don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Beating Trump seems like a low bar to clear, yet the Democrats are tripping on it again.

Robert Boxwell is director of the consultancy Opera Advisors

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