By Mark Kenny

A version of this article was originally published by The Canberra Times.

Despite the menacing negativity emanating from Donald Trump, we should not lose sight of the very real possibility that the country will elect its first female president.

This would be a big deal at any time, let alone when the widely tipped alternative is a bullish alpha-male felon (pre-sentencing) who, when last in office, went about strongarming electoral officials and installing vassal judges.

Trump's tame Supreme Court would pay off big-time by rescinding women's constitutional right to abortion and by cloaking him in sweeping new immunities.

Dissenting Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor branded the judicial adventurism of her colleagues a mockery, which elevated a president to the status "a king above the law".

Dare to imagine then that in becalming this cruel sea, Americans remember the defeated president's plainly criminal phone call to Georgia's Secretary of State two months after polling day to "find" him 11,780 votes. And they remember too, the deadly insurrection four days later.

Consider the possibility that enough Americans put country and constitution before the fleeting emotional satisfaction of venting at the government for obscene wealth disparities, a largely absent social safety net, flat wages, or a porous Southern border that Congressional Republicans refused to fix.

A victory for Vice President Kamala Harris would be a clear repudiation of Trump's hyper-masculine project of victim politics. It would preference diversity over disunity and country over cult.

It would recognise that patriots waving flags are not patriots at all if their allegiance is to a godless egomaniacal swindler who thinks nothing of breaking electoral laws, shredding the constitution and politicising the judiciary.

Trump's abiding achievement is to infantilise the electorate in his own image, turning policy debate into a raucous ad hominem theatre of insults in which no boast is too ridiculous, no insult too low.

This has been a depressingly asymmetric campaign in which media have struggled to perform. Misogyny and racism have coursed openly.

Harris has been described as "stupid", "low-IQ", and "unable to string words together" while her running mate has been pilloried as "tampon Tim".

The theme through all this is the unmistakeable dog whistle that women are weak, unfit for high office and that their advance has emaciated manhood.

Just weeks ago, Trump became misty-eyed in a clammy shower-room soliloquy about the late Arnold Palmer's penis size. Palmer, Trump declared, had been "all man". Palmer's family let it be known that the golfing great had loathed the man.

The embarrassing ramble followed months of stump speeches in which Trump had regularly praised "the late great Hannibal Lecter" - an obviously fictional character in all but the TV-addled brain of Trump himself.

'Trumpularity'

Trump's homilies are merely the rhetorical bridges linking an archipelago of bombast so constant it has become normalised.

This is what I've previously termed the "Trumpularity" - the exception in which the deceit and vulgarity of the man warps political space-time, allowing him to defy universal laws of decency and propriety that constrain other careers.

As CNN contributor Van Jones has noted pithily, "he gets to be lawless, she has to be flawless".

In a shortened pre-election period, Harris has performed exceptionally, if not always perfectly.

At the end of last week, she held a rally at The Ellipse, a 21-hectare park just south of the White House, attracting a crowd estimated at 100,000 people.

For Trump, who seems obsessed with 'size", it must have been humiliating.

Billed as her "closing argument" to emphasise that her familiarity with courtrooms comes from being a criminal prosecutor rather than a defendant, the rally filled the same place from which Trump had urged his thuggish supporters to storm the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Her message leverages America's unique, if unfulfilled promise - its rule of law, its congressional limits and its constitutionality. His, by contrast, animates pain and resentment and fear. It relies on a dark truth that no one hates Americans more than other Americans.

Trump is both populist and nativist. He promises to end inflation, clean out a "corrupt" and "woke" DC by sacking 40,000 (i.e. independent) civil servants to be replaced with sycophants. He threatens to go after his enemies, including media. Already, billionaires like Jeff Bezos are pre-emptively kow-towing.

He promises the greatest economy the world has ever seen by imposing punishing tariffs on Chinese and other imports and by the expulsion of up to 20 million migrants.

These are dangerous illusions. Hard-bitten American consumers will pay those higher prices, not the Chinese.

The potential for a US recession, a trade war and global economic mayhem is very real.

He also intends to "drill, drill, drill" and to immediately pull out of the Paris Agreement, setting net zero by 2050 further behind.

Those closest to the man warn he is more dangerous in his second tilt. Long-time Iraq war hawk and Republican true-believer, John Bolton believes Trump would abandon Ukraine and could well follow through on his previous desire to pull out of NATO.

In one of the best summations, the outstanding American historian Timothy Snyder has described Trump as "a Putinous character" - Putinous, simply because the Russian tyrant got there first.

Harris, on the other hand, offers a new generation of leadership.

Ultimately, I expect it is why she will win.

Mark Kenny is the Director of the ANU Australian Studies Institute and host of the Democracy Sausage podcast.