These two have been sizing each other up, fighting and despising each other for years. Two white men who have in common an age that is objectively too advanced to bear the burden of the presidency of the United States, but not much else. Ideologically and humanly, a gulf separates them, but never have the destinies of Joe Biden and Donald Trump given the impression of diverging as much as during the past three weeks. The craziest, to date, of a campaign that was announced as boring, remake obsolete and yet so crucial to the duel won in 2020 by the Democrat. Thursday evening alone reflected these two reversed trajectories in a way that was as cruel as it was glaring. While in Milwaukee, Donald Trump paraded in front of his followers at the closing of the Republican convention, Joe Biden, covid, isolated in his house in Delaware and slowly abandoned by theestablishment Democrat, saw the American press dripping with articles and “breaking news” predicting his imminent withdrawal. He announced this Friday that he would resume his campaign next week.
A withdrawal this weekend? That’s what the site suggested Axiosfounded by three pillars of Politico with one of the most extensive address books in Washington and the first media outlet to put a coin into the anti-Biden machine after a few days of uncertainty following the attempted assassination of Donald Trump on Saturday, July 13 in Pennsylvania. In the space of a few hours on Thursday, the entire media ecosystem of rather Democratic obedience, from New York Times au Washington Post via CNN and MSNBC, has given the floor, most often anonymously, to leading Democrats urging the 81-year-old president, weighed down by his disastrous televised debate at the end of June, to give up. “This cannot go on any longer. People see and feel that the walls are getting closer.”a high-ranking elected official told CNN.
Reached by telephone by a Democratic Party official directly involved in the campaign, does not hide her weariness. “For three weeks, we have heard much less from Donald Trump than usual. And you know why? Because he enjoys watching the Democrats tear each other apart. Let’s not lose sight of the fact that the supreme danger is him and clearly not Joe Biden,” she says angrily, accusing the media of attacking the wrong person. The mounting pressure on the president’s moribund campaign, however, is not a media invention. It comes, above all, from elected officials in the party, candidates who fear a Republican landslide in November, worried donors and, quite simply, voters. According to an Associated Press poll released Wednesday, which has stoked concerns, two-thirds of Democrats believe Joe Biden should pass the torch.
A few hours before Donald Trump was to speak at the closing of the Republican convention, his first public address since the attack from which he survived, observers were naively wondering. Given his rival’s weaknesses and his new label as a “survivor,” would the former president present his supporters and the country with a more peaceful face? Keep the promise made in recent days by his camp to present himself to the world as a man suddenly struck with humility and spirituality? The opportunity was there, clear and immense, for candidate Trump to tap into the emotion and stupor of the country, to turn the vertigo experienced on Saturday into a dynamic and a momentum.
The time of the first third of an interminable inauguration speech (the longest in the history of national party conventions in the United States, by far), he only altered his tone to relate in detail, in churchlike silence, how the “The assassin’s bullet missed by two fingers to take his life” : “A lot of people have asked me what happened, so I’m going to tell you, and you’ll never hear it from me again – because it’s too painful…” he sold, in a sweet and plaintive voice, his soul transfigured by the brush of death, and his ear bandaged with his Holy Shroud. The billionaire portrayed himself as a survivor, who “shouldn’t be there”, was not “the grace of almighty God.” And he adopted the poses and mien of a new man and candidate, determined to unify the country, “repair his fractures”, to become again “the president of all Americans, not just half.”
Same sauce cooked again
Then the naturalness or comfort of habit quickly took over. For the better part of an hour and forty minutes of atonal grumbling, to the point of seeming to bore an audience made up of thousands of faithful among the faithful, he will have replayed in a quickly disjointed, even incoherent, mode, his greatest hits on “the worst inflation in history”, l’«invasion» migratory based on “murderers” dumped since “the prisons” from Venezuela, America “in decline” of the’«administration en place» (he hardly ever mentions Joe Biden’s name anymore, as if he already belonged to a bygone campaign.
From this opportunity to reinvent himself, or at least to soften up, Trump will therefore not have been able to do anything other than the dumping ground for his old obsessions and grudges, the exact same re-cooked sauce of xenophobic obsessions and populist prophecies that he has been stirring ad libitum, from meeting to meeting, since his triumphant entry into politics in 2015. His fanatic base loves him for that, blind and deaf to the emptiness of the various variations of his promise of “restore the American dream”Now officially invested, for the third consecutive time, as the conservative champion in the conquest of the White House, the miraculous Trump has really not changed.
Waste and Disaster
It is hard to imagine how such a performance, inevitably Trump’s most widely followed since the presidential debate against Biden – where he was not much better, but quickly eclipsed by the wreckage of his opponent – could allow the most divisive figure in modern American history to rally new voters to his candidacy beyond his base. The waste and the defeat are not insignificant for the man who had seemed almost able to bend the election to his advantage a few days ago, by finding the incredible physical, mental and political resources to get back on his feet within a minute of a machine-gun attack. When his rival, barely three years his senior, was still struggling to recover from a bad debate evening two weeks earlier.
Joe Biden wouldn’t be in such a bad situation, suffering and lonely, that he would probably have had a great evening. According to the New York Timesthe Democrat’s determination to stay in the race has reportedly been shaken in recent days by three factors in particular: pressure from former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, new polls in some states, and a boycott by major party donors. According to the New York daily, discussions have reportedly begun within the president’s entourage on the best time to make an announcement if he decides to withdraw.
For whose benefit? His Vice President Kamala Harris, as a matter of course? Another big name in the party, designated during an impromptu primary at the Democratic convention scheduled for August, at the risk of seeing the party fracture even further two and a half months before the election? According to several media outlets, Biden could give his support to Kamala Harris, followed by the Obama and Clinton couples, in order to stifle any rebellion. Trump’s inner circle spent its fair trumpeting that this would change nothing at all in his attempt to reconquer the White House, whatever, in the end, “the radical left democrat” retained, according to Trump adviser Stephen Miller.
As the Republican shindig in Milwaukee progressed, however, there was a noticeable shift in attacks from Joe Biden’s speakers to Kamala Harris, often with an additional dose of implicit sexist or racist remarks. The talking points are ready. Biden’s likely replacement at the top of the Democratic presidential ticket? “It’s literally a putsch. Everything they accuse Republicans of, they do it live on television every day,” Chris LaCivita, the brains behind the Trump 2024 campaign, reveled on Thursday on the sidelines of the convention.
“God’s hand”
Under the veneer of incessant calls for unity, and despite the rallying of his former primary challengers, converts all already eyeing the horizon of 2028 (Haley, DeSantis, Cruz, Rubio…), the shrinking of the Republican Party to a Trump-compatible spectrum will have been glaring throughout the week. The old neoconservative world of Mike Pence, Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney or Paul Ryan, all absent, was pushed out of the family photo. Leader of the conservative senators, and indestructible gargoyle of the old right on Capitol Hill, Mitch McConnell appeared only to boos.
The aura of the miracle worker, saved by “God’s hand” as has been said and repeated incessantly since Monday, has completed his messianic stature and hold on the base. From the fetishization by his flock of the bandage worn since Saturday by Trump to his «Fight, fight, fight» post-attack, fist thrown in the air, now erected as the absolute mantra of the Maga people (“Make America Great Again”), the image of the party mirrored by the convention will have appeared repainted from the ground to the hangers in the colors of the Trumpist cult. Its liturgy has the sole purpose of exalting the genius and the sense of sacrifice of the leader, and its canon is revealed to be calibrated to the millimeter on his ideas, his campaign software, his interests.
The total obscuring, during four days of speeches, of the fight against access to abortion, which is nevertheless very anchored on the right, because Trump thinks (rightly) that this historic and unpopular cause of the party is a losing machine, was one of the striking symptoms. Just like the hegemony, from the base to the top of the party, of the denial of any legitimacy to the election won by Biden in 2020, or of the reality of the Trumpist insurrection that followed on January 6, 2021. This conspiracy theory has already been updated at all levels, from speeches to clips broadcast every day to the crowd of delegates in Milwaukee, to announce the 2024 election as rigged in advance by “democrats who are only good for that.” A pure conspiracy fantasy, powerfully relayed by the owner of X (ex-Twitter), Elon Musk. And which certainly does not bode well in this campaign which has probably not yet delivered all its twists and turns.
Source: www.liberation.fr
