Trump’s appeal is slipping – but don’t expect the Democratic suicide squad to seal the deal

A year before Donald Trump’s second presidential election (assuming he survives), he is in a world of pain.

So what else is new? Every time his political death has been announced, the report has proved exaggerated.

The bulbous Houdini’s knack for slipping the deathly shackles has inculcated a sense of defeatism that is harder to escape.

That in mind, the latest national opinion poll wants seasoning with a mine’s worth of Siberia’s finest from the east of Trump’s adopted homeland.

Despite presiding over an economy too resilient for his doolally trade wars to implode, the president is losing by miles to every declared potential opponent in a field hardly stuffed with the conventionally electable.

Trump trails a young gay man (Pete Buttigieg) by 11 points, and a woman of colour with a moribund campaign (Kamala Harris) by nine.

The match-ups against fellow septuagenarians are worse. He is 14 points behind an ancient firebrand (Bernie Sanders) whose recent coronary suggests that a defibrillator paddle might debut as a running mate feature on the ticket; and 15 behind a didactic professorial leftie (Elizabeth Warren) who churns out uncosted multi-trillion spending plans.

As for Joe Biden, whose argument for the White House begins and ends with “I have the energy of a cauliflower... But hey, I was there with Obama!” – Trump is losing to him by 17.

There might be opponents whose leads he may restrict to single figures. But until Harvey Weinstein or the Son of Sam declares, there’s no way of knowing.

Another poll finds that almost half the US population (49 per cent, up 6 in a fortnight) want him impeached. For all the Febreze he and his cohort of drones are spraying, the stink of the mafia shake-down in Ukraine is sticking.

Independent voters who broke late and decisively for him in 2016 are fleeing. With his numbers more dismal than ever and corrosive testimony flooding from the impeachment hearing, his Twitter feed leaves no doubt how seriously he is taking the threat.

He is taking it as seriously, to be precise, as climate change. Small wonder about the latter. With the one exception of Jacob Rees-Mogg, no one knows as much about dealing with fires as Trump.

Having already given California’s governor the solution to the wildfires – clean the forest floor – he didn’t need to tweet more there. Nor, on the day the White House confirmed the US’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, was there a dickie bird about that.

Of all the qualities the free world demands from its leader, none outranks the ability to prioritise the paramount over the banal. “Vote for Sean Spicer on Dancing with the Stars,” ran one early hours offering. Not that it was all about plugging his loyalists.

“My son, @DonaldJTrumpJnr, is coming out with a new book,” went another. “‘Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us’ – Go order it today!”

Whether Biff sincerely believes that, or whether projection is a genetic gift, the US left doesn’t thrive on hate. If it did, if it demonised half as effectively as Trump, this election might be in the bag.

What the American left, in fact, thrives on is finding cosmically awful candidates to take on galactically atrocious Republic presidents. I appreciate how hard to compute that concept will be for British readers during this electoral cycle, with Jeremy Corbyn trailing Boris Johnson on the NHS.

But the party that matched cartoon patrician John Kerry, who looked like he dreamed in medieval French, against good ol’ boy George W Bush, is working overtime to blow it again.

Every Democrat runner has some appeal, but each, for differing reasons, is intensely vulnerable to Trump.

It shouldn’t be this way. VAR has examined the last election from every imaginable angle, and found a clear and obvious error. The ball is on the spot, the keeper is behind the goal stuffing his face with Filets-O-Fish – and still there isn’t a penalty taker you’d trust to bulge the net.

So it is that Democrats, mistrustful of the polls and aware Trump outperforms his national figures in the swing states, dream of their princess across the water.

If Michelle Obama wanted it, both the nomination process and the election would be over in 0.03 seconds.

But the Democrat willing to do a Hillary, and try to follow a spouse’s career trajectory, isn’t Michelle. It’s Hillary Clinton herself.

One appreciates the desire for payback. And given who she has in mind, you have to love the inherent irony in the headline “Hillary Clinton urges Democrats to pick a candidate who can win the Electoral College”.

But even the Democrats aren’t dumb enough to confuse that candidate with the one who never campaigned in the Rust Belt last time. Hillary’s lingering appetite is a sign of more than Olympian self-delusion. It speaks to the gigantic, dead cert-shaped gap in this market.

Biden’s blue-collar credentials make him best placed to win the decisive swing states, but he looks embalmed. He can barely move his mouth at all, and never without finding room for a foot.

Unless he is placed in cryogenic stasis (though how you’d tell…) until the nomination was secured, Warren will be the favourite to get it.

Whether the United States is ready for a big government redistributive socialist is a deeply intriguing question, but one you’d prefer saved for another election.

Unless Michelle is overwhelmed by a sense of duty, start preparing now for another night of nauseating tension in 363 days.

Trump may be in a world of pain, but we’ve been there too often to take comfort from that. The world is in a Trump-load of pain, and that isn’t new either. Whether it ends in 2020 or 2024 seems destined to turn less on the quid pro quo in Ukraine than a few thousand votes in Michigan and Pennsylvania.

If so, don’t blame the tangerine Nero who fiddled with tweets about his former press secretary’s sequinned hoofing while California burnt. Blame the Democrats for dancing on melting ice with another suicide squad of presidential candidates.