If Donald Trump reclaims the White House in the November 2024 election, there will be a temptation on the part of analysts and historians to identify the turning point of the contest. This is based on the assumption that until a month or so ago, the race was too close to call.

There will, quite understandably, be a very strong temptation to view the Trump-Jo Biden debate as the point of departure when Trump clearly established his lead. It will also mark the point when the notables of the Democratic Party decided that they would find it difficult to look voters in the eye and argue that the United States of America was safe in the hands of a man who wasn’t all there. If Biden’s shortcoming in 2024 was that he got names muddled — a familiar phenomenon associated with age — what would be the state of his mind in, say, two years? Would he become a puppet in the hands of his family, or would his deterioration become the occasion for a quiet palace coup that would facilitate the elevation of a vice-president who lacked the popular appeal to win a direct election?

Alternatively, there will be those who will see the assassination attempt on Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, last Saturday as the moment the former president demonstrated god’s hand in his White House bid. That it was plain good luck or divine intervention that prevented the assassin’s bullet from doing to Trump what Lee Harvey Oswald did to President John F. Kennedy in 1963 is undeniable. What is even worse for the Biden administration is the overwhelming evidence that Trump’s security detail was a bit too casual for comfort. The lone assassin also demonstrated that the belief that political violence in the US is the exclusive preserve of right-wing, white supremacists is an over-simplification. The American political hothouse, it would seem, produces dangerous loonies at both ends of the political firmament. This moral equivalence may actually work to the benefit of Trump who was at the receiving end of derision after his supporters tried to storm the Capitol building, protesting election fraud, on January 6, 2021.

Whatever the reality, the political mood in the US appears to have undergone a significant shift since Biden’s disastrous performance in the debate with Trump. It is important to remember that Biden was chosen by the Establishment of the Democratic Party in 2020 to take on Trump not because he was charismatic but because he — and only he — seemed to have a non-contentious appeal. In the face of a sustained claim to the nomination by Bernie Sanders, the Democratic Party notables rightly felt that only Biden had the ability to bring the different shades of the movement together in a grand alliance against Trump. The same calculations prevailed once it was apparent that Trump was going to have another shy at the presidency. The advantage that accrues in the primaries to an incumbent president came Biden’s way in his bid for a second term.

A considerable amount of the goodwill that accrued to Biden appears to have evaporated after his debate with Trump at the CNN studios in Atlanta on June 27. It is not that Democrats think he was outwitted by Trump. The feeling is that a senior citizen such as the president should not be exposed to situations that call for physical and intellectual stamina and, most important, the ability to think on your feet. That Biden was found to be wanting, compared to Trump, may not in hindsight be surprising but it came as a revelation to most Democrats who had discounted Biden’s age factor and whose only exposure to the president was carefully choreographed. Not only was it clear that Biden lacked the wherewithal to run the full punishing distance of a presidential race but that the voters would also direct their ire at the Democratic Establishment for trying to sell the unsaleable.

There is, as of today, considerable heartburn among loyal Democrats, not least those in positions of importance, that they were misled by a cabal around the president. The number of Democrats in crucial positions may not as yet have called for the president to step aside from the contest and make way for the vice- president, Kamala Harris. However, this restraint is more out of a sense of corporate loyalty and out of respect for a president who they think has served the country well. The moneyed contributors to the Democratic ticket are not similarly inhibited. They are looking to bankroll the future and not honouring past services. Consequently, it is entirely possible that in the coming days, once it is clear that the Biden-Harris combination will be repeated in 2024, the Democratic Party will face a resource crunch. The downbeat tone of The New York Times and The Washington Post, the advance guard against the Trump offensive, would even convey the impression that the Blue defeat in 2024 is a foregone conclusion.

This impression was reinforced at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington D.C. that I attended. The intellectual advance guard of the Republican Establishment has now been transformed almost entirely to a pro-Trump body. Even as late as 2023, during the early stage of the primaries, there were suggestions of some Republican challenge to the Trump blitzkrieg. However, with the primaries making mincemeat of Governor Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy, the Trump control of the Republican Party is complete. This was also apparent in the atmospherics of the party’s National Convention in Milwaukee and the jubilation that greeted the nomination (by acclaim) of the relatively inexperienced junior senator from Ohio, J.D. Vance, as Trump’s running mate.

What is significant isn’t that Senator Vance is not a heavyweight in terms of his experience in the legislatures. What has enthused the Trump base is that Vance talks their language of god, patriotism, family and American greatness and blends it with realism. There was a time, particularly in 2016, when the Trump approach to the voters was centred on the grievances of the White underclass, the people who felt completely left out of the political process. Today, not only has Trump personally become more wary of naked populism but his campaign has also incorporated the intellectual currents of today’s American conservatism. Which means that there are elements of Trump 2024 that draw sustenance from Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich even as they repudiate the moderate republicanism that was once associated with Nelson Rockefeller, the Bush family and others who lived in more gentle times.

America, it would seem, is preparing the stage for a Trump 2.0 that its middle ground may find more appetising.