The danger posed by Trump

The United States will fully enter the race towards the November 5 presidential elections with the Iowa caucuses, to be held this January 15 and representing the first milestone of the primaries. It does so in a very worrying situation, with two favorites to win the nomination that the majority of voters do not like and who accuse each other of being a threat to democracy. However, while the current president Joe Biden attacks his predecessor with obvious arguments and examples, Donald Trump does so with hoaxes and lies like those he has been propagating since his defeat at the polls in 2020.

Trump is objectively a danger to democracy or, at the very least, to the democratic health of the United States. If he wins the election, he has promised a presidency of revenge and “retribution” and has even dared to assert that if he returns to office he will be a “dictator” on “Day 1″ to take some measures. The former president has used rhetoric in which he calls his rivals “vermin” and says that immigrants “poison” the blood of Americans. As historians have highlighted and Biden himself denounced, it is language with echoes of Nazi Germany.

Added to this are his attempts to whitewash the assault on the Capitol, calling the insurrectionists “patriots,” promising them a government pardon and using songs and images at his rallies that glorify this attack on democracy, which came about because for the first time a sitting American president resisted the peaceful and orderly transfer of power.

As if that were not enough, Trump’s four indictments for a total of 91 felony counts, which the former president has used to present himself as a martyr, and the litigation in the Supreme Court over whether he is an insurrectionist who should be barred from running, add a unique factor to a campaign that is gearing up to be the most tense in the recent history of the United States.

Meanwhile, Biden has the lowest popularity levels of a sitting president in recent decades. Voters believe he is too old for reelection (he would end his second term at the age of 86), and he has fallen out of favor with young people, Arab Americans and other minorities for his support of Israel in the Gaza war; additionally, high inflation during the first part of his term continues to take a toll.

Biden is aware that voters are not excited about him. He has acknowledged that if he were not likely running against Trump, he might not even run for reelection at all. Now Biden is presenting himself as a bulwark in defense of democracy and in that role hopes to mobilize a coalition of Democratic, independent and even moderate Republican voters who reject Trump’s return to the White House.

The paradox of the Republican Party is that its most loyal voters, those who participate in the primaries, prefer Trump even though other candidates without the former president’s heavy baggage, such as Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis, would be much more likely to defeat Biden.

The latest polls show that Americans are less satisfied than ever with the way their democracy works. The political crisis that the United States is experiencing poses a risk not only for the country, but for the entire world.

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