US presidential election: If Donald Trump wins, the 'year of elections' may bring the fall of American democracy – Scotsman comment

Hillary Clinton has warned that victory for Donald Trump in the US presidential election ‘would be the end of our country as we know it’

Donald Trump is widely expected to win the Republican party nomination for US President (Picture: Scott Olson/Getty Images)

In the forthcoming “year of elections”, more than two billion people are expected to cast their vote, not least in the expected UK general election. This could produce a dramatic shift in the country’s political direction with the Conservatives, in power since 2010, on track for defeat to Labour.

However, for all the importance of this vote to the UK, the US election in November is shaping up to be, by far, the world’s most important in modern history. Donald Trump’s blatant attempts to overturn the result of the 2020 election that saw him ousted from the White House should have been taken as a warning of how unfit he is to hold the most important elected position on the planet. And yet, many recent polls have put him ahead of Joe Biden.

Given he has demonstrated his willingness to subvert democracy for his own ends, it seems obvious that, on re-entering the White House, he would want to make sure that he will not fail again. Trump has ‘joked' about being a “dictator” and about serving more than the two-term limit. In March 2018, Trump told Republican donors that China’s Xi Jinping was “president for life”, adding: “I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot someday.”

The fall of American democracy is an almost inconceivable prospect, but the risk is frighteningly real. In November, Hillary Clinton warned that Trump’s election “would be the end of our country as we know it, and I don’t say that lightly”. “Hitler was duly elected,” she said, following reports that Trump is considering Justice Department investigations of political opponents if re-elected. “All of a sudden somebody with those tendencies, dictatorial, authoritarian tendencies, would be like ‘OK we’re gonna shut this down, we’re gonna throw these people in jail’... Trump is telling us what he intends to do.”

US aid to Ukraine might well be stopped, potentially enabling Vladimir Putin to win and start eyeing his next targets, possibly the Baltic states. A world run by dictators in China, Russia and the US, all power-hungry and willing to use violence, would be a terrifying place.