WASHINGTON DC – Watching President Trump’s erratic behavior this weekend, it was easy to wonder whether the world was seeing fresh evidence that the US leader has lost his mind.
But it was also reasonable to consider another possibility: that last week’s insufficiently noted Supreme Court decision on elections in the United States has given him added confidence that even if he loses the November midterms, he can still win.
Let’s start with the President’s campaign appearance at “The Villages”, a storied retirement community in central Florida that is home to over 150,000 elderly voters spread across 57 sun-drenched square miles.
For politicians from both parties, residents from “The Villages” are considered must-win in any election. Yet Trump treated his Friday audience to a profanity-littered speech that put them through more than 90 minutes of his rambling, extemporised and entirely unfocused routine.
Speaking beneath banners that promised a “Golden Age for your Golden Years”, the White House Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles, conceived the event as an opportunity for the President to promote his tax cuts on social security benefits – an obvious boon for the pensioners in the room.
But departing regularly from his prepared remarks, Trump meandered into areas that resulted in him calling one unnamed Democratic Party lawmaker “a sleazebag”, dismissing his opponents’ claims about unaffordability at the petrol pumps and supermarkets –as “one good line of bullshit”, performing an impression of a transgender weightlifter, and grousing about the sound system in the hall that left him “screaming my ass off” to make himself heard.
Even the most optimistic Trump backers would be hard pressed to claim it constituted an effective effort to mobilise the Republican vote in November.
Trump delivered a meandering speech to pensioners in The Villages, Florida over the weekend (Photo: Phelan M Ebenhack/ AP)But the last few days suggest an emboldened President, seemingly immune to a bruising two months of war in Iran. Trump declared on Saturday that he was unlikely to accept an Iranian peace proposal because they had not yet “paid a big enough price”. Asked if he might restart strikes on Iran, he said: “If they misbehave, if they do something bad, right now we’ll see. But it’s a possibility that could happen.”
He is also performing an end-run around the War Powers Resolution that requires him to seek congressional authorisation for any war that endures longer than 60 days (a deadline that, in the case of Iran, expired on Friday).
The White House now claims that America’s hostilities against Iran ended on 7 April when the current ceasefire came into force, and so the 60-day clock no longer applies. Asked on Saturday how he could therefore explain the ongoing US naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, Trump – with a straight face – claimed “it’s a very friendly blockade”.
Again, many Republican lawmakers are fuming, saying Trump must truly wind the war down or secure congressional authorisation to continue prosecuting it.
However, Trump appears to feeling renewed and brushing off pressure, even as polls show his disapproval rating hitting a new high. Some 62 per cent of US voters now disapprove of the President, a rise of two percentage points from February, according to an ABC News /Washington Post/ Ipsos poll, with respondents citing concern around the cost of living and inflation, both being driven up by the war.
If Trump appeared this weekend to be entirely carefree about the consequences of his actions, it may be due to an extraordinary win last week. On Wednesday the Supreme Court issued a landmark decision that gutted a central pillar of the historic 1965 Voting Rights Act, in a major upheaval in US civil rights law.
The key piece of legislation to emerge from the Civil Rights era, the law – pushed through Congress by President Lyndon Johnson – not only provided African Americans and other minorities with the vote, it also ensured that where they lived in the majority, constituency boundaries would reflect the concentrated power of their vote.
Sixty-one years later, in a major victory for Republicans, the Supreme Court eviscerated that aspect of the law. The decision by the six Republican-appointed justices on the nine-member bench has sparked an immediate rush to redraw congressional maps across the South where the party enjoys considerable power.
Supreme Court Chief Justice Elena Kagan, centre, called the ruling a ‘demolition’ of the Voting Rights Act (Photo: Mandel Ngan/ AFP via Getty Images)The ruling could have enormous repercussions for the representation of minorities in government and for the balance of power in Congress. The vast majority of black voters in the US vote Democrat. The court’s decision could eliminate Democrat-represented districts with minority-majorities entirely and create new districts that would hand the GOP extra seats in the House.
By some estimates, Trump may soon be able to count on at least 13 newly created, reliably Republican congressional districts by redrawing maps in Tennessee, Alabama, South Carolina, Louisiana and points beyond. The Governor of Louisiana, Jeff Landry, has now postponed primary elections that were due to take place in a fortnight, as he seeks to eliminate black-majority districts that have traditionally sent Democrats to Washington.
Trump called the decision “a BIG WIN for Equal Protection under the Law”, adding: “That’s the kind of ruling I like.”
Civil rights groups and opposition politicians, however, fear for minority rights and representation in government. Dissenting Supreme Court justice Elena Kagan called the ruling a “demolition” of the Voting Rights Act that would leave states free to dilute the voting power of minorities with no legal consequences.
Former president Barack Obama warned that the decision freed “state legislatures to gerrymander legislative districts to systematically dilute and weaken the voting power of racial minorities – so long as they do it under the guise of ‘partisanship’ rather than explicit ‘racial bias’”.
The ruling takes on even more significance as the midterms approach. The Republicans are expected to lose the House in November, so Republican-controlled legislatures could aim to target Democrat-held seats in order to keep hold of the House.
Considering the time necessary to redraw boundaries, the effect on the midterms is likely to be limited. “When the dust settles on all this manoeuvring, the total of majority-minority districts is likely to shrink this year,” according to the Brookings Institution in Washington DC.
However, even in states where there is insufficient time to redraw boundaries before November, Trump knows the court decision provides him with powerful ammunition to litigate the outcome of the midterm elections. If, as polls currently project, the Republicans lose in November, he now has fresh capacity to tie up the country in post-election legal knots for months after the final vote is counted.
Furthermore, the ruling will help Republicans in elections in years to come. “The states where redistricting in time for the midterms is impractical can take up the issue next year, with additional effects in 2028,” Brookings said.
Republican justices on the Supreme Court have delivered Trump a much-coveted gift. His footloose, fancy-free weekend suggests that he fully intends to use it.
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