US midterms: Battle over principle, not facts
There are some bets you don't really want to win.
After I had spent a year travelling around the US as a reporter, my prediction ahead of the country's 2016 presidential election deviated widely from prevailing opinion. It was clear to me that Donald Trump had a very good chance of moving into the White House. He did, and I won a bottle of bourbon.
Friend and foe
Two years later, the US faces elections again. This time, it's not about the president, but the members of both houses of the US Congress. But in Donald Trump's America, everything on the political stage is also about him. Accordingly, he got heavily involved in the election campaign, working even harder over the past weeks on his agenda of splitting the world into friend and foe — for instance by deploying more troops on the Mexican border than are stationed in Iraq.
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This president actually makes things easy for his opponents. His heavy-handed, aggressive manner, the exaggerations and lies are reliably provocative, and the people he targets rarely leave an attack unanswered. That in turn keeps him in business and it prevents the Democrats from focusing on themselves and revamping both personnel and program. Their obsession with Trump's tweets means they're neglecting to rally around a candidate who might in two years' time, with the right policies, be able to prevent another four years of Trump.
Polarizing political system
This is particularly dangerous in a two-party system that polarizes in the first place because it does not have to rely on coalitions that would need a certain degree of compromise. Basically, it is detrimental to democracies when camps are so split that people don't even listen to the other side any more let alone admitting at times that their political opponents may have a point.
No debate about the better argument
Trump's most enduring legacy for his country is likely to be how he has destroyed the capability to dispute arguments rather than tenets — not least through his Twitter obsession. People want to believe him. They want to believe that he is making America great again. And they want to believe that a strong leader will keep the challenges of this complex, globalized world at bay and solve its problems.
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Faith is not knowledge. Facts, and the clear distinction between lies and the truth, have become secondary. That is the bitter truth after Trump's year-long election campaign and two years' as president. There is barely a ripple when his own echo chambers on Facebook or Fox News blatantly get it wrong and even the biggest fan realizes that Trump has simply lied. Because facts no longer count. That is America's real problem.
When the truth and facts are ignored, when lies are dismissed as trivial offences, democracy and the freedom to form opinions go out of the window. In the end, that means no less than undermining the basis of our understanding of democracy and the state, and that autocrats not only take over power — they can hang on to it too.