In early 2020, Donald Trump seemed to have laid the groundwork for perpetuating himself in the White House for four more years: the economy was growing, markets were at their highest, external conflicts abated, and only internal tensions overshadowed the Republican’s mandate.
The pandemic and a disastrous government that denied it upset that agenda, put Democrat Joe Biden in the presidency, and left half the country with undemocratic rancor.
In January, the country was exhausted after four years as the presidency of a polarizing, unyielding leader who downgraded the role of the United States in the world to that of a trader angry at the previous manager’s affairs. But after overcoming a “impeachment” and with the Conservative movement more energetic than ever, Trump seemed destined to win again against all odds.
At the end of the year and after more than a decade of hard pandemic, the picture is very different: There are nearly 300,000 deaths that could have largely been avoided, Trump remains entrenched in the Oval Office and denies the victory of President-elect Joe. Biden. and it raises dangerous doubts as to whether democracy is the most appropriate system for peacefully imposing the will of a majority. Every day, many think guns are their last resort.
The November 3 general election was a referendum on United States sentiment. “Without the pandemic, Trump would probably have won,” explains Tom Nichols, a professor at Harvard University and member of the “resistance” behind the “Lincoln Project,” a group of Republicans and moderates who have opposed steadfastness to what Trump was for. state.
POLARIZATION
Despite the loss of that election, Trump and his followers have succeeded like no other in getting tens of millions of Americans into a parallel reality.
“ Trump has positioned the Republican Party as the Workers’ Party, even though it has not served their interests (…) he has launched all of this through the algorithms of social networks to create a reality that is not what they show the facts, ”said Kenneth Baer, political adviser and member of the White House during former President Barack Obama’s first term.
“There was a time when there were Republican liberals from the Northeast and Midwest. They don’t exist anymore. The country lives in absolute polarization because of Trump,” he adds.
According to Nichols, who recently published “Our Own Worst Enemy,” polarization is the product of another effect that came with the fall of the Soviet Union, the end of external enemies and the complacency of capitalism. American.
‘Somehow we became the decadent society that the Soviets criticized’ and the enemy of the United States is the American people themselves, sick of a ‘childish individualism’ that ignores the civic duties demanded by a democracy and has even channeled it . now his frustration by Trump.
Many Democrats have now come to terms with the inability to build bridges with the “Trump Nation”. The United States had become accustomed to the president’s outbursts, his nationalism, and his strongman pretensions, which he revealed through his harmony with leaders of authoritarian taste like the Russian Vládimir Putin or the Egyptian Abdelfatah al Sisi, and his scarce chemistry with the most classic democracy of that of Canada, France or Germany.
Since coming to power, Trump’s popularity has neither increased nor decreased, thanks to a loyal, sometimes fanatical electorate that continues to confuse the most illustrious sociologists and analysts, for whom ‘Trumpism’ is almost as exotic . as a Guinean tribe.
The president, seen by the Republican Party as a charlatan in June 2015, accompanied by the conservative movement’s biggest losers and eccentrics, has taken control of the Grand Old Party and has had time to judge three of the nine judges. of the Supreme Court, who impose their signature based on tweets, disdain and a little luck in the history of the United States.
“The Trump voter will not go away. Maybe in a decade, with the generational change. But right now you have a Republican party that has lost touch with reality and is afraid of its own voters. The Republican politician knows the difference between reality and fantasy, but they want to be elected and they don’t want to confront their voters with the truth, ”Nichols said.
PANDEMY
In the spring everything started to go wrong. In February, Trump assured that the new coronavirus raging in China was nothing more than a “flu” and that the roughly 15 cases discovered in the country would soon become “zero cases.”
As the epidemic started to recede in the Northeast, it raged in the South and Midwest, and today it is devastating everything in a country with more deaths than any other country on the planet. The covid poses an economic crisis that threatens to settle in the United States for years and especially in populations that have hitherto benefited from an increasingly threatened middle class.
In the spring, there were so many dead that they piled up in trucks outside the hospitals, and the pungent smell of death was hard to hide. In December, corpses are re-accumulating in hospitals in El Paso, Texas or Wisconsin, further evidence of Trump’s White House mismanagement of the pandemic.
The sparse action – through denial – by the U.S. government, despite noisy masks, vaccines, and the virus not being seen, has affected families across the country, put the economy on the verge of collapse and led to many of the Trump loyalists to the hunger frontiers or intensive care units. It inevitably took its toll on the polls.
The pandemic – which is in the third wave, the worst – in the United States has prompted even the poorest whites to reconsider their love for Donald Trump, and if we analyze the demographics and only the richest have increased their support, it shows. data collected during the election for the Edison Research consultancy.
“I believe many educated, liberal and moderate voters came to the polls thinking, the president’s mismanagement is affecting my life, and I cannot allow this man to remain my president, even if they were in another situation on him, ”says Baer.
THE END OF THE “DREAM”
Probably one of Trump’s great contributions to the world beyond 2020 is that he has lifted the veil of many Americans on the existence of the American Dream, the myth of the indispensable and exceptional nation that divides the hardworking, the righteous, and the justice around the world in the name of democracy.
That discontent was seen on the streets across the country after George Floyd’s death at the hands of the police in May and the cruelty shown to so many other poor blacks, Hispanics, or whites. It has also been seen in the anti-eviction movement and for a more inclusive America.
The unrest, mixed with the crisis caused by the pandemic, was so exacerbated that many feared an armed confrontation between far-right movements and radical left groups.
While the blood did not reach the river and the identity crisis of the ‘two Americas’ did not become widespread, it revealed the discontent of ever-increasing populations demanding an end to the police state in the country and providing alienated opportunities for Blacks and Hispanics, women too, for the past 400 years.
The Democratic Party machinery went behind Joe Biden, a politician short of charisma and an inordinate number of years who has pledged to heal the country’s wounds and restore the illusion of an ‘American dream’ absent for the tens of thousands waiting in the “hunger lines,” the ten million who lost their jobs due to the pandemic and the many others who have no hope of building a family in an increasingly unequal economy.
The United States is closing a turbulent 2020, to forget, facing an uncertain future with millions of hopeless people and many others sharpening the knives of civil conflict, using the disinformation Trump has created and received in response on the moderate Biden administration, a return to Obama’s “status quo”.
The future will reveal whether “the American experiment” will further what writer EJ Dionne described as a new “desperate democracy” or simply a desperation with even darker ways of expression than those represented by Trump.