If Donald Trump loses to Kamala Harris

Donald Trump appears to have mellowed a little, very little. If he loses the election in November, he has told a journalist, he will not be seeking the White House again in 2028. He has not said why, but given that he will be eighty-two in 2028, he will be too exhausted to run for President again. Indeed, fatigue has already begun to be etched on his features in his current campaign to beat Kamala Harris at the forthcoming election.

So why is Trump's acknowledgement that he might lose in November of any importance? The response ought to be obvious: never before in any of his earlier presidential campaigns has he told people that he could lose the elections he took part in. In 2016, asked if he would concede the election if Hillary Clinton won, he was unwilling to respond to the question. And in November 2020, while the votes were being counted to determine who between him and Joe Biden had won the election, Trump appeared at his campaign office and confidently told his staff that he had won.

But, of course, despite losing all the legal battles he engaged in to have the courts certify that he had beaten Biden, he would not rest until he could find a way to make sure that the White House remained in his hands. He simply could not believe that in both the popular and electoral votes, Biden had beaten him decisively. Trump went to the extent of asking election officials to arrange for him the votes that would make him surge past Biden and so come by a second term. His strategy did not work.

The scandal of the insurrection Trump provoked and presided over on 6 January 2021 will forever be a blot on the history of American presidential politics. Here was a President who had been denied a second term by the electorate and yet was unwilling to walk away into the sunset in grace. When his rabid followers stormed the Capitol and went around looking for Vice President Mike Pence to hang, Trump did nothing to put a stop to the riot. When the law enforcers cleared the place of Trump's vigilantes, Pence did what the constitution empowered him to do: he certified the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, formally sealing his and Trump's defeat.

It has always been Trump's behaviour pattern that has left observers perplexed. At his inauguration in January 2017, he did not have the courtesy to say hello to Hillary Clinton, his defeated rival who was present on the occasion with Bill Clinton. He cared little for the tradition which all victorious presidential candidates had consistently upheld at the time of their inauguration, which was to pay tribute to their beaten rivals in their inaugural speeches. That an incoming President thanks an outgoing President, the latter in this case being Barack Obama, was civility which did not matter to him. And once the bizarre ceremony was over, he began peddling the false narrative that the crowds at his inauguration were larger than those at Obama's in 2009.

Trump's pettiness was demonstrated when he made it a point not to be present at Biden's inauguration in January 2021. In a country home to a tradition that had Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George HW Bush and Al Gore be part of the crowd to welcome their triumphant rivals into presidential office, Trump petulantly flew off to Florida, where his sulking over losing would not end. He and his supporters, having taken control of the Republican Party, went on questioning Biden's election victory. And that was not all. A man whose vocabulary has always been limited --- his speeches employed such epithets as 'stupid', 'Sleeping Joe', 'Crooked Hillary' and many others --- Trump has consistently hurled verbal abuse at people he did not like. He did not like the respected John McCain because McCain had been caught and detained by the enemy during the Vietnam War.

In the current election campaign, voters appear to be slowly coming round to supporting Harris, who will however need to do a whole lot more to convince Americans that she has a workable economic plan in place. In these past many days, though, opinion polls have shown her edging past Trump which, if the trend is sustained, could well see the former President defeated in an election for a second time. If he loses, will he abjure his old attitude of pretending he has won and seriously offer congratulations to Harris? It is hard to believe that a refined and gracious Trump will be there, if he loses in November, to not only acknowledge his rival's victory but also be in attendance at her inauguration as President in January next year.

The plain reality is that many around the world --- and we speak of leaders and intellectuals everywhere --- will breathe loud sighs of relief if Kamala Harris becomes President-elect in November. That will be because in all these years where Trump has grabbed the headlines, he has had politics in America turned on its head. His diatribes against what he calls millions of illegal immigrants, against China and against the 'Marxists' he sees among the Democrats have made people wonder how a man like him could ever have become President and then try to win the job again. He and his vice presidential running mate J.D. Vance have been spreading the outlandish idea that illegal immigrants have been eating Americans' pets, including their dogs, and thereby polluting the American societal scene.

And let's not forget Trump's conviction for felony as well as the innumerable other cases pending against him. It is of course for American voters to decide who will lead them in the next four years. But if they have Trump come back to the White House, it will be a sign once again of the decline which the Biden-Harris administration has been trying to roll back in the past four years. A Kamala Harris victory is therefore of critical importance. But then, the same was said about Hillary Clinton in 2016.

A note of caution, therefore: opinion polls and exit polls are often illusory and no guarantee that they will be proved right.

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