He’s beaten his Republican rivals and is ahead in the polls. But Trump is vulnerable

You’d think a week spent in the snow and ice of New Hampshire, watching Donald Trump stroll to a double-digit victory over his last remaining Republican rival, would have left me filled with angst about the presidential election in November. Sure enough, given that a second Trump presidency would have a truly disastrous impact on the US and the world, the fact that the now near-certain rematch of Trump and Joe Biden remains a “coin flip”, in the private assessment of one of America’s foremost electoral analysts, still makes my palms go clammy.

But to my surprise, I left the frozen American north-east not hopeful, exactly, but lifted by the thought that Trump is weaker, and Biden stronger, than this week’s headlines – or the latest polls showing the current president six points behind the previous one – might suggest. Now when I hear the words “coin flip”, I react like Jim Carrey’s character in Dumb and Dumber, when told that the odds of him winning over the woman of his dreams are one in a million: “So you’re telling me there’s a chance.”

Of course, the causes for gloom have not gone away. Biden’s age remains the biggest single obstacle to his re-election: even Democrats worry that he might just be too old to serve a second term, which would see him leave his Oval Office desk at the age of 86. Inflation has hurt him: a pair of 18-year-olds at Bedford High School told me they had cast their first vote for “Donald J Trump”, as they reverentially put it, in part because of high petrol prices. And too many voters blame Biden for the fact that “the world is on fire”, to quote Trump’s challenger, Nikki Haley. They see wars in Ukraine and in Gaza, hear Trump boast that there was no such trouble when he was in charge, and blame