Donald Trump may be about to take the art of political flip-flopping to a whole new level

The system for electing presidents in America invites candidates to slither

Trump and Farage and their joint act in Mississippi on Wednesday (Getty)

The people of America would like to apologise for their presidential candidates this year. Well, I imagine they would, since polls show their level of enthusiasm for either of them hovering somewhere south of Tierra del Fuego. A pox on both their campaigns, they cry.

It’s not just the nastiness of it all, though last week pretty much took the biscuit in that department. “Bigot!” cried Donald Trump, dismissing Hillary Clinton’s long history of support among African Americans as a great big fraud. “Racist!” she shot back in a speech in Nevada, suggesting that Mr Trump is trying to turn the Republican Party into a chapter of the KKK.

No, the disgust voters feel is more about the cynicism of it all. Clinton hasn’t been saying quite so much about income inequality of late as she carouses through the homes of the one per cent raising cartloads of cash for her party. She smiles through it all, quite likely loathing half of her hosts. She smiled too when she attended Mr Trump’s wedding in 1995.

Conviction politics isn’t a phrase Trump has ever heard of, either. What does he believe in, beyond his own brilliance? He believes in the wall he is going to build along the almost-2,000 miles of border between Mexico and the US. And he believes Mexico will pay for it.

Or does he?

Not to make excuses for them, but it’s worth noting that the system for electing presidents in America is such that policy consistency is discouraged; it’s designed to make flip-floppers of them.

At its simplest, US elections go on too long. In Britain political candidates have to stand by their policy positions without too much obvious deviation for only a month or so. That’s not so hard. Here, they must stick to their various guns, without wavering, for near-on two years.

But more than that, there is the two-stage nature of it all. As Trump is now finding out to his great cost, competing in the primaries for your party’s presidential nomination is a very different proposition from running a general election campaign, which is where we are now.

In the last days of summer, Clinton is hopscotching between private parties (AP)

Clinton is experiencing something of this. Fending off Bernie Sanders in the primaries meant tacking hard to the left, for instance abandoning President Barack Obama on approving a new mega-trade treaty with 11 nations in Asia and the Pacific. Today she is swinging back to the right, trying to reel in moderate Republicans while hoping the liberal wing of her party won’t notice.

Trump’s contortions are more painful to watch. On Wednesday he appeared on a stage in Mississippi with Nigel Farage. The message, presumably (though most in the room wondered what the odd British fellow was doing there), had to do with their shared affection for reinforcing borders. But appearing the same day on Fox News, Trump confirmed what many of his supporters were already fearing, that he was no longer sure that his pledge to deport the 11 million people living in the country illegally was deliverable (or, more to the point, politically wise). Maybe some could stay if they paid their back-taxes and didn’t have any sort of criminal record, he mused.

“They have to pay taxes. There's no amnesty as such. There's no amnesty... But we work with them,” Trump said, making clear that amnesty – erasing the fact of their having crossed the border illegally – is exactly what he is now considering.

Four years ago, Mitt Romney fell into something of the same trap. Ingratiating himself with conservatives in primary season he took also took a harsh stance on immigration, rambling about illegal Hispanics “self-deporting”, only to find he had row back when he had secured the nomination. It reinforced his already well-established flip-flopper reputation.

Flip-flop doesn't adequately describe what Trump is now contemplating on immigration. Apparently he will tell us what he really thinks in a speech soon, though he has twice postponed delivering it, presumably because he is still in a muddle himself. Indeed, his entire campaign appears this weekend to be split down the middle about it.

But if he moderates his stance in the way he hinted at last week, he will have moved himself firmly into the Democrat column on the issue. Indeed, immigration policy under Trump would be much the same as it is now under Obama – deport the baddest apples and find a way for the rest to stay. Presumably at that point the wall will become redundant too. His supporters won’t have anything left to chant at his rallies. Well, except for “Lock her Up”.

Trump’s strategy in the primaries was effective. He presented his deportation plan, while also promising to enforce a “total ban” on Muslims entering the country, and demolished each of his rivals one by one principally by dismissing them as weak on immigration. He eviscerated Jeb Bush in particular, who had made the tactical error early on of suggesting that many of those entering the country illegally do so “out of love” for the families they must feed.

Now that he is flirting with abandoning his hardline approach, reasoning correctly that only by doing so will he have any hope of getting Hispanic support in November, plenty of people are feeling a bit disgusted, including many of those who made him the nominee with their primary votes. So too is Bush. “I don't know what to believe about a guy who doesn't believe in things,” the former Florida governor said of Trump last week. “His views will change based on the feedback he gets from a crowd or what he thinks he has to do. Life is too complex.”

By now a few Sanders fans will be raising their hands. His challenge to Clinton arguably went as far as it did precisely because most voters think she is not to be trusted on anything while he seemed genuine. That was his power. But it didn’t pay off. And in a disappointing coda to his campaign, he has just founded a political action committee called Our Revolution that is set up in a way that will allow it to take in large amounts of “dark money” from where ever it may come. Even Bernie will betray his own principles when it suits him, it seems.

The voters are not naive. They know that politicians are a slippery lot. And the way candidates in this country are forced to pander first to their own party base to win the nomination, before they turn to winning over moderates and independents in the general election, demands slipperiness. But the voters are entitled to expect a modicum of integrity and consistency in that process. Arguably Clinton attains that standard. Trump may be about to prove he does not.