Revenge now, payback later

Kamala Harris needed a Democratic wave to lift her to the White House with no room for delegitimization. Any other result would not do. Very early on election night, with the first results in North Carolina and Georgia coming in, it became clear that the tsunami was not going to arrive. In the end, only the blue wall of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan remained, and more specifically their dense urban areas, the last trench against the Trumpist advance, pending the different types of deferred votes. It was not enough to either proclaim victory or concede defeat, as will be the case on Wednesday once it is definitively confirmed that Donald Trump has obtained the 270 delegates he needs to return to the White House.

The coalition that was supposed to put an end to Trumpism has failed to take shape. With Harris, hope and joy had returned to the campaign after the doom and depression that grew around Joe Biden’s candidacy. The mobilization that her nomination was supposed to raise seems to have instead energized the adversary: young men, including Latinos and African Americans, against feminism; workers in the Rust Belt, worried about inflation and the protection of national industry; the deep, rural and evangelical country, in favor of the prohibition of abortion throughout the country; and the usual wealthy people and libertarians, in favor of greater deregulation and tax cuts. To the Trumpist sum is added Harris’ subtraction: the votes taken away by the Gaza war among citizens of Muslim origin or religion, and the inevitable punishment vote for the outgoing government of which Harris is part as vice president, without being able to exhibit a particularly outstanding or even brilliant personal record.

These were too many problems for the Democratic candidate to resolve in four months of a hasty election campaign, since Biden renounced his bid for re-election, compared to the four years that Trump has spent without being out of the political spotlight for a single day. The former president is a perverse alchemist who turns scandals and judicial charges into political propaganda and campaign financing. It is the same alchemy that allows him to insult and even call for violence, to shoot his adversaries for example, or to indulge in all kinds of racist and misogynist language without any of his voters allowing themselves even a mild protest. These are just metaphors in the mouth of the boss, even if they are then translated into actions, as happened on January 6, 2021 with the assault on the Capitol.

It has been an election of revenge for 2020, when Trump was defeated by Biden. He already has the Supreme Court, the Senate, almost certainly the House, and perhaps the popular vote for the first time, since he obtained three million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton in 2016 when he won the delegates. Trumpism will be in the majority. The hoax of electoral fraud that expelled him from the White House will be consecrated as the official history of the Trumpist United States. His crimes will be absolved, self-amnestied, as will those of his accomplices. And the long game that began in 2016 after the historic presidency of Barack Obama was broken, with Clinton defeated by the unexpected and disruptive Republican candidate, now continues, allowing Trump to become a two-term president despite Biden’s interval in power. It will not be a parenthesis for him: the parenthesis will be the others, Obama and Biden. He will even have shaken off the biggest stigma that has tormented him since childhood, that of the loser. In the absence of defeat, the elections are perfectly fair. The female vote, demanded of Republican women by Julia Roberts in her spot for Harris, has not succeeded in knocking him off course. On the contrary, it is Trump who has defeated the first two women who made a bid to reach the White House.

We know what is coming next. What awaits the internal enemy already alluded to, and what he will draw from the presidential immunity recognized by the Supreme Court, which he will now use more freely. The unbridled end of his campaign sets the tone for the world to come. After the electoral revenge and subsequent payback, there will be a disengagement and consequently a decline. Champagne is flowing in Moscow, Budapest, and Jerusalem. Also in the headquarters of the far right. In Beijing, prudence and sobriety reign, as in Paris, Berlin, Brussels, and London, circumspection and concern. The White House will have to be dealt with in either case. China knows that Trump can hit its economy with tariffs, but that the long term of a Trump presidency will leave a very interesting geopolitical vacuum for Xi Jinping’s ambitions. We will have to wait for the final count. We must not lose the hope and joy that Harris recovered in her campaign. They should not be lost even when she concedes defeat.

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