—Syed Badrul Ahsan—

Americans trek to polling stations all over the United States tomorrow, Tuesday, to elect their forty-seventh President. In normal circumstances, there would hardly have been any reason to write about it. But the election this year promises to be consequential, fraught as it is with the prospect of Donald Trump regaining the office he lost to Joe Biden four years ago.

There are genuine fears that Trump will refuse to accept the result of the vote should it go in favour of Kamala Harris. In 2016, while campaigning against Hillary Clinton, he would not say if he would accept a defeat if his Democratic rival won. He won that election and then went on to preside over a chaotic administration for the four years he was in the White House. In 2020, even as the votes were being counted, he told his staff that he had won against Biden.

The rest of the story is known. It is encapsulated in the insurrection Trump provoked on 6 January 2021 to prevent Congress from certifying Biden’s victory. The moment was one of shame for America. It was because a defeated candidate for presidential office was unwilling to acknowledge that he had lost the election, that he ought to congratulate his victorious rival and prepare to walk away into the twilight. Trump was unconcerned when his rabid supporters went looking for his Vice President, Mike Pence, to hang because Pence was preparing to inform America officially that he and Trump had lost to the Biden-Harris ticket.

What happens on 5 November remains to be seen. More than 60 million Americans have already cast their ballots in early voting. The rest of the voters, evenly divided between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, if the opinion polls are anything to go by, will make their preferences known on Tuesday. If a few weeks ago the feeling was that Harris would win, given the bounce she received soon after being anointed as the Democratic Party nominee following the withdrawal of President Biden from the race, today it is becoming clearer that it will be a nail-biting finish between the Republican and Democratic nominees on Election Day.

The possibility of Trump rejecting the results if Harris wins looks harrowing. He has a battery of lawyers, together with loyalists across the country, ready to file cases of election fraud once a Harris victory, however narrow, is proclaimed. For the Democrats, there is a readiness for Kamala Harris to accept defeat if Trump wins. But if Trump loyalists go for a repeat of their 2020-21 post-election behaviour, Harris’ legal team remains prepared to dent Republican arguments supportive of Trump. If the elections are too close or if Trump loses narrowly, expect his party and his lawyers to indulge in an ugly battle to discredit the electoral commission over the results and accuse Democrats of cheating. Trump has been warning the crowds at his rallies that Harris’ team will cheat at the polling stations on Tuesday.

As of now, Kamala Harris holds a precarious lead, within the margin of error, in opinion polls in the battleground states that will eventually decide the outcome of the election. Her task in getting out the vote has not been made easier by her association with Biden as Vice President. The economy is one area where she remains vulnerable, another being illegal immigration. Besides, President Biden has not made things easy for her with his gaffes, the most recent being his statement, in response to a comedian’s remark on Puerto Ricans at a Trump rally, that Trump supporters are garbage. It quickly reminded people of Hillary Clinton’s insensitive description of Trump loyalists as deplorables in 2016. Harris has therefore a tough fight on her hands, but given the feelings of large numbers of Americans that Trump should not make his way back to power should enable her to squeak through to victory.

But with no guarantee as to which of the two candidates will win, there are all the valid concerns and questions arising among America watchers abroad. A Harris victory will be a major step in restoring political decency in the United States, decency that has been under assault since Trump emerged on the scene in 2016. Foreign policy under Harris will be aligned with America’s allies in Europe and elsewhere. Besides, a Harris triumph will finally lead to the Republican Party, so long in the grip of Trump supporters, rediscovering itself as the party of Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan. If Trump loses on Tuesday, it will be the end of his era and his hold on his party. The Trump story will likely be remembered as an aberration in American political history, noted for the disruption it caused to the fabric of democracy in the United States.

The danger lies, though, in a Trump return to the White House. He will only be the second man, after Grover Cleveland in the late 19th century, to regain presidential office after a gap of four years out of power. Once back in office, Trump will go after everyone who did not do his bidding when he lost to Biden in 2020. That will include election officials and judges who threw out his complaints between his defeat and Biden’s inauguration. He has already threatened to punish Republicans like Liz Cheney, who as a Congresswoman was instrumental in investigating his doings. He will go after Jack Smith, the counsel who has been seeking to establish his criminality both as President and later.

In office, Trump will restore his links with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, which will worry Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky to no end. In his presidential years, Trump gave Nato much to worry about. His return will revive the old fears. Trump’s victory will make North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un happy, but Trump will also be worried about Pyongyang’s troops travelling to Moscow and linking up with the Russian military. Mercurial as he has always been, Trump will be a headache for powerful nations like China as well as for the Third World. He will clamp down on Mexicans at the border and could well terrify immigrants with various threats. Iran will be in his sights as he renews his friendship with Benjamin Netanyahu. Palestinian rights will go out the window.

The presidential election will paint a picture of what America will be in the years ahead. For Kamala Harris, if she wins, it will be a long, hard and focused job she and her administration will have to do in cleaning up the mess accumulated as a result of Trump-Republican politics. The job will take years to complete. If Trump returns to the White House, it will simply be a repeat of his earlier term, with America becoming unpredictable in internal politics and external policy. America will remain split right down the middle under Trump.

On Tuesday, the battle will be fought for America’s soul.

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Syed Badrul Ahsan writes on politics, diplomacy and history