Donald Trump has closed the gap on Hillary Clinton to a percentage point — 44.9 to 44.0, to be precise — according to RealClearPolitics’ averaging of the latest credible polls.
He leads a wee bit in the latest polls in Ohio and Florida.
Hillary Clinton is such a weak candidate — unable to connect personally or deliver a clear message — that the race is solely between Trump the wild and Trump the normalized.
Hillary’s job is to hope Trump the wild prevails and to advance that characterization whenever she sees the opportunity. She also needs to remain well.
But Trump the normalized is on a bit of a roll.
So today’s column is a defense mechanism. It is the first step in the contemplation of an actual President Trump.
It helps to deal with the horror of that prospect — and it will make a doomful Election Night more endurable — if you begin now taking stock of the potential reality, then seek to come to terms with it.
For today’s purposes let’s consider three elements of an actual Trump presidency.
The first is the general mood, tenor and theme of such a presidency.
The second is whether Trump actually could undo NAFTA and thereby restore jobs to the Rust Belt.
The third is what becomes of Obamacare with a President Trump and, presumably, a Republican Congress.
The mood, tenor and theme of a Trump presidency would be, in a word, testosterone, the hormone of which, the candidate assures, his blood tests show a manly abundance.
The main Trump objection to the Obama presidency, indeed the main conservative one, is that Obama almost seems to apologize for America’s might and dominance, when, in fact, Trump and conservatives believe it is past time for the United States to use that might and dominance militarily, economically and politically.
Obama’s ideal is of an America so strong and so good and so great that it is self-assured. It’s of an America that need not flex might, but seeks instead to flex goodness of heart and greatness of essence. It’s of an America that stoops to be a sensitive friend to allies and a patient rival to foes, one preferring to talk and negotiate in the interest of world stability rather than beats its chest.
Presumably Trump will tell some of our lower-level NATO allies that, sure, America will help them if Putin invades, but only after they’ve made a dent into their arrears on their payments to the alliance.
Whether that means Trump would actually have America fold its arms and let nominal NATO allies be overrun … that’s unclear, and perhaps not his point.
His point would be that it’s not a free ride and that the good and great United States has a new top dog and will not be a pliant sugar daddy any longer.
Would such an American attitude disturb and endanger alliances and make the world more dangerous? Might it embolden Vladimir Putin, whose testosterone Trump so admires?
Alas, and alarmingly, those are answers for which we’d probably merely have to wait and see.
The risk itself — that’s the issue. Is it one to take? I say not. The latest poll averaging has 44 percent saying yes, or probably.
NAFTA, the free-trade agreement with Canada and Mexico, poses similar questions in an economic context. Trump promises to cancel it and either renegotiate it on more America-centric terms, or, failing that, live without it and impose stiff tariffs or other economic reprisals if Mexico takes American jobs.
NAFTA itself has a provision saying any of the countries could give six months’ notice of pulling out, then do so. It’s a harder question whether an American president could give that notice unilaterally.
A chance exists that a President Trump could give such notice and use the six months either to redo the agreement or get America out of it altogether. If America pulled out, then, presumably, Trump would propose that Ford, for example — if it closed a plant in Ohio and moved it to Mexico — would pay a stiff tariff if it tried to get that assembled vehicle back into the United States for sale.
Ford says it would only move existing domestic operations to Mexico as part of a plan to retrofit the abandoned American plants for new lines, but that its entire expansion master plan would be negated by such stiff tariffs, leaving a general dearth of jobs and new products.
I suspect Ford is right, that free trade is better overall than penalized trade, and that trade wars will be as bad or worse for American jobs than plant relocations. But the latest poll averaging suggests 44 percent of American voters think or hope otherwise. Many in that 44 percent, we may assume, have lost jobs.
Finally, there is the great lost issue in this presidential race, meaning Obamacare. It was all anyone talked about three years ago. Now it’s scarcely mentioned.
On this issue there is some intrigue.
At times Trump has seemed more open-minded toward universal health care than other Republicans. Indeed, his Arkansas chairman, Bud Cummins, tells me he finds Obamacare less offensive than other Obama transgressions, and at least a good try, though one that is unaffordable unless changed fundamentally.
Cummins thinks he’s picked up signals from Trump that Trump feels much the same way, though he admits he’s guessing.
Here we might actually get the best of both worlds: Obamacare retained, but changed with the cooperation of Republican congressional votes to make it somehow — and I can’t say how, because there’s little to no discussion of policy detail — more workable.
So that’s merely a beginning in a coming to terms with a Trump presidency.
It goes without saying, of course, that all of that would take place while millions of Mexicans and Muslims were being rounded up and a great wall erected.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.