We risk underestimating Trump’s capacity to bounce back – again

You would think that the Niagara of condemnation rightly poured onto President Trump for inciting the deadly riot by his supporters on Capitol Hill last Wednesday would finish him for good in American politics. He has been deserted by hitherto key allies inside the Republican party, including his two most loyal supporters and enablers, Mike Pence, his vice-president, and Mitch McConnell, the senate majority leader.

It remains to be seen whether Pence will resist intense pressure to invoke the 25th amendment to the US constitution, by which the vice-president and a majority of the cabinet can remove the president if he is considered unfit to continue in office. It would be the ultimate humiliation for Trump. His sharp change in public tone last night, condemning the rioters and calling for calm, was surely designed to ward off such a threat.

No adjective, it seems, has been strong enough to express the outrage and shame felt by those who cherish parliamentary democracy both in America and the wider world. The damage to America’s image has been incalculable. “The shining city on the hill” is no more. Foreign leaders, including our own prime minister, have queued up to condemn Trump. The media are filled with accounts of Trump’s last days. Some of them suggest a detachment from reality akin to that of Hitler in his Berlin bunker.

Surely nobody could come back from a drubbing like this. But hold on a minute. Trump received the second highest popular vote in a presidential election in the history of the United States. Millions of his supporters are still out there. Most of them, like Trump himself - despite his assurance of an orderly transition - have not yielded an inch in the belief that the election was stolen from them. They, like their leader, see the with a sense of grievance and resentment.

So, if anyone thinks that Trump will ride off peacefully into the sunset after Inauguration Day on 20 January, they need to think again. He has a large, unforgiving political base. For as long as his health holds up, Trump will be a force in American politics. The world has repeatedly underestimated him. We risk doing so again. In 2016 we thought it inconceivable that he could win the presidential election. But he did. With every scandal, incompetence and lie, we thought his presidency was destroyed. It wasn’t. It took us a while to work out that each outrage energised his supporters, because outrage is the essence of Trumpism. A snap poll taken just after the sacking of the Capitol showed that it was supported by 45% of Republicans. Not all Republican senators voted to certify Biden’s victory in the Electoral College.

There is something else at work as well. Trump is not just a 21st century aberration, a flash in the pan, to be followed by business as usual under good, old Joe Biden. Since the 19th century there has been a populist, nativist, grievance-driven stream running through American society and politics. It sometimes rises to the surface and sometimes goes underground. But it is always there and it is deep-rooted. There were the Know-Nothings in the 19th century, the People’s Party and Ross Perot in the last and the Tea Party a mere ten years ago. They were by no means identical but they sprung from the same fertile soil as Trumpism.

There are several ways now of asking the same big question of the moment. How will Trump play his political hand over the next four years? Will the Republican Party welcome Trump as its leader or will it split into pro- and anti-Trump factions? Will Trump run again in 2024 or will he lay hands on someone else, like a member of his family? We do not yet know the answers. All we can say is that President Biden can thank his lucky stars that the Democratics control both houses of Congress. The last thing he needed was a Republican controlled Senate in which a vengeful Trump would have influence.

But there will be no escaping that 800-lb gorilla in the American political arena, a deranged narcissist who has been tipped over the edge by failure, called Donald J Trump.

Sir Christopher Meyer is a former British ambassador to the US and Germany.