Seite 2 – Despite the defeat in the US elections: Trumpism is still alive

These gains were, psychologically, the background to Trump’s ghostly appearance Thursday night in the White House press room, in which he again claimed he was ahead of “legal” votes in the disputed states and that he could only be defeated by fraud. On the election campaign, he said: Democrats are the party of “big money”, “big media” and “big technology” – they have all conspired against him, including opinion polls, who have deliberately published fake polls to win. your electorate. demobilize. But he showed it to everyone and turned the Republicans into a party of American workers. Republicans are also more ethnically “inclusive” than ever.

Ambivalent sentiments gripped some Republicans after November 3. They suspected that the White House was lost and that the ghost was over. There was no massacre in Congress. And in the Senate, Republicans could even defend their majority in the end. The decision can be made in Georgia’s runoff elections in early January. These Republicans believe that if Trump leaves, the party could purge itself and go back to being a serious conservative party.

Republicans keep a low profile

That will probably remain an illusion. Should Trump have to leave the White House on January 20 after a lengthy election battle with Biden, others will try to seize the political inheritance. Aside from the question of what role Trump himself would play as former president and what plans he has for his children, especially Ivanka and Don Junior, there are people in Congress who want to practice a kind of Trumpism with a friendly face: Josh Hawley. , the young senator from Missouri, is one of them. And Tom Cotton, also a young senator from Arkansas. They are both smarter and more intellectual than Trump. They have already shown that they are ready for populist oversimplification and have received praise from the president for it.

The old establishment is currently in operation. After Trump claimed electoral victory early on Election Night, Mitch McConnell, the Republican Majority Leader in the Senate, cautiously distanced himself: “We still don’t know who won the presidential race,” he said in Kentucky. , where he stood he turned to his followers after his own electoral victory. Going to court is the way to resolve uncertainties. He left it like that.

Lindsey Graham, the senator from South Carolina and Trump’s top supporter in the Senate, was initially even more dovish. When it went public after his re-election, he made a brief comment that he believed Trump would win in the end. For the rest, however, he spoke at length about the fact that he was ready for nonpartisan cooperation. He also turned to Democrats and said he was ready to meet in the middle. Then he went to a dive station. When a Republican pointed out on Twitter that Graham did not publicly endorse Trump in his fight for the White House, Don Jr., the president’s son, wrote: “This comes as no surprise.”