It is an election year in the United States of America, and former president Donald Trump has been back in action on the campaign trail post-presidential debate. He held a characteristically high-energy rally in Florida, where, in a wholesome turn of events, his youngest son Barron Trump received a rousing reception from the adoring crowd.
This return to campaigning was, needless to say, sullied beyond measure by the assassination attempt he endured at his Saturday rally in Pennsylvania. Nevertheless, Trump managed to turn an appalling, violent occurrence into a rallying cry for his base; he stood tall, raised his fist, and uttered a rallying cry of, “Fight! Fight! Fight!”
There should be no doubt in Trump’s enemies’ minds that nothing, not even an assassination attempt, can stop him.
Meanwhile, current president Joe Biden had a less admirable week, telling a gathering of Democratic governors that he needed more sleep, wanted to work fewer hours, and would like to avoid events after 8pm. While calling a lid at 8pm is, for lack of a better term, the dream, that kind of night-night time is impractical if you're leader of the free world.
However, Joe Biden perhaps proved at a recent NATO press conference that a ‘senior’ bedtime like 8pm might be just the ticket, considering he mistook Ukrainian president Volodimir Zelenski for Russian president Vladimir Putin, and referred to Vice President Kamala Harris as “Vice President Trump”.
While it’s morbidly fascinating as a media personality to focus on the week’s latest Biden-ism, the American public is not going to give two hoots about Biden’s public missteps when the election rolls around in November. The election will likely hinge on one issue; immigration. Specifically, illegal immigration, given the notoriously porous state of the US southern border.
In fact, the issue of illegal immigration is an election issue globally. It was arguably the deciding element of two recent major elections; the UK and French elections, albeit with different results. In the UK, the Conservative ‘Tory’ Party copped a well-deserved thumping, losing a total of 244 seats, winning 121 in total. UK Labour won 411 seats, granting them a fantastically impressive majority. It was not just a landslide, it was a seismic victory for the new Prime Minister Sir Kier Starmer, and a gargantuan indictment on the state of Tory rule.
Not long prior to the UK general election, France had its first round of parliamentary elections, which yielded quite a different result. The right wing populist party National Rally, headed up by long-time leader Marine Le Pen, won a plurality of the vote, shocking and enraging the establishment.
Unfortunately for National Rally, a hastily formed far left coalition called New Popular Front (consisting of greens, socialists, communists, and Trotskyists) reversed the first round support for National Rally, leaving the French parliament gridlocked between the NPF, National Rally, and the Macron bloc. However, the appetite for National Rally remains, in large part because of immigration.
France has been flooded with illegal immigrants for decades, and much of the public have had enough; hence the positive result for the anti-immigration National Rally. As for the UK election; while UK Labour did not run on an anti-immigration platform, the Tories' seemingly wilful inability to properly manage the nation's borders for what felt like aeons led to great public dissatisfaction. Hence the fact the newly formed Reform Party, headed up by the father of Brexit Nigel Farage, managed to snag five seats with zero prep time. Why? They ran on a platform of strong borders and enhanced national sovereignty.
As such, in the French election and the UK election, we have two different results borne of the same issue; immigration. The US election will likely be won and/or lost on the same issue. In fact, immigration, especially illegal immigration, is coming back into vogue as the issue upon which right wing parties can stake their claim on the electoral landscape. This is true even in Australia, regardless of our emphatically strong borders.
The Coalition should take this issue and run with it at our next federal election, and not just because under the current Labor government, illegal immigrants have arrived by boat for the first time in over a decade. The Coalition should hammer the immigration issue because of the Labor federal government's obsession with artificially propping up the nation's economy by taking in vast numbers of permanent arrivals has created an unsustainable housing market. There are too many people, and not enough places for them to live.
If the Coalition is smart, they will harness this sentiment and drill it home on the campaign trail. As to whether they are, in fact, that smart, remains to be seen.
