It will not be Joe Biden that will beat Trump: Donald Trump is the cause of his own demise.

His unmistakable “authenticity”, an asset that distinguished him from his political competitors in the past, is now a liability. His notorious claim of invincibility – that he could “shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and still get elected” – no longer holds weight today.

In 2016, Trump received a sizeable vote from Americans who voted for him not so much because they believed in him, but because they did not like Hilary Clinton. That dynamic will no longer be at work this coming November.

I cannot give you a fancy formula, but I do know this from American history: US voters have a habit of being punitive to leaders who govern when the country is in distress. I was a high school student in MacLean, Virginia, in the late 1970s and I remember, like many Americans then, admiring the incumbent president Jimmy Carter. He projected an aura of decency, humility and goodwill — much more so than Trump does today.

But America back then was in a big mess: the energy crisis, the Iran hostage debacle, the so-called “national malaise”. President Carter failed to get a second term; the American voters decided to give his opponent – Ronald Reagan – a chance.

This happened again to another one-term president who succeeded Reagan: the decent person of George HW Bush. He led a glorious international coalition to oust Saddam Hussein’s army from Kuwait, and for a while he looked sure to win a second term. But domestically the US economy was not in good shape and the unhappy American voters, again, punished President George HW Bush by denying him a second term.

Carter’s America or Bush’s America were certainly hurting, but nothing like what we see in Trump’s America. America in 2020 is a divided, angry, unhappy, insecure nation.

The accumulated impacts of COVID-19 (over 3 million cases and 130,000+ deaths), the unprecedented job losses, impending economic recession, George Floyd protests, revelations from the Bolton book and the rapid loss of the “feel good” factor; all have tilted the electoral margin to Biden’s favor. It is hard for Trump to make a case to “Keep America Great” when the key indicators are running in the opposite direction. Blaming liberals, immigrants, Muslims, China, Barack Obama and CNN will no longer work. 

While the US elections and inauguration are still months away, it is time to prepare for a post-Trump America and post-Trump world order.

A post-Trump America will still be a divided country. This, I suppose, will never change. Trump, as he already said he would, might make a futile attempt to challenge the November election results. But even after the Trump presidency ends, Trump-ism will not go away, his core “political base” (around 24 percent of voters) will remain a loud force, and Trump will certainly continue to bully his successor (because that is his character) and will probably try to run for president again in 2024.

But for the majority of mainstream Americans who will vote him out, a post-Trump America will be – and surely feels like – a different America than the one of the last four years. There will be a sense that America has been reclaimed, and returned to what it used to be – decent, open, moderate, progressive, compassionate – and moving in the right direction, wherever that may be.

Whether or not Joe Biden will be able to resolve America’s problems is of course a totally different matter. If anything, given the enormous economic, social and health challenges wrought by the pandemic, a Biden presidency would most probably reinstate a greater role for the government in the economy, enact more social safety nets and bring policies more to the left of the center.

A world without President Trump in power will be a better and hopeful one.

In the last four years, Trump’s America ceased to inspire the world. Instead, President Trump brought out the image of the “ugly America”. American professor John Delury recently lamented that the US has now become “the sick man of democracies”.

US foreign policy suffered from a glaring confusion – indeed, contradiction – between Trump’s personal interests and US national interests. This, and Trump’s endless diplomatic gaffes, have caused considerable demoralization in the State Department and to American diplomats abroad — some of them indeed chose to leave the diplomatic service.

Under President Trump, US foreign policy lost interest in leading the world (after all, it’s all about “America First”), retreated from global leadership, bullied and embarrassed US allies, alienated the Islamic world and unassembled everything Obama did, despite the possible merit of such policies.

In that process, the US stopped leading: on climate, democracy, human rights, governance, trade,

America took a back seat. American exceptionalism, and respectability, had lost currency worldwide. While the US remains the world’s only superpower, its status as the world’s most consequential power has seriously eroded. As one American foreign policy wonk told me, “For many years, the US used to be either loved or hated. We were used to that. Now, for the first time, the US is pitied. We are not used to that.”

In a post-Trump world, the question is whether a Joe Biden presidency will be Obama 2.0. Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Gerald Ford, Bush 41 had all faced this same question upon assuming power, and each (with the exception of Ford) managed to craft their own distinctive path of US foreign policy. The same goes for a future president Biden.

But unlike Obama, Clinton, Bush or Carter before him, Biden will assume presidency as the most “foreign policy prepared” president — serving eight years as Obama’s vice president, and prior to that many years in the Senate foreign affairs committee. This long track-record means that, as one American friend pointed out to me, “There is not one important international issue that Biden is not familiar with.” Many of the talented policy wonks who boycotted Trump in 2016 will return to Washington, DC, to serve under Biden.

 ***

The writer is founder of Foreign Policy Community of Indonesia (FPCI) and former Indonesian ambassador to the United States. This is part one of the commentary.

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