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In the Manichean world of Donald Trump, there is a more pathetic epithet than any other: loser. He has used the term when describing fellow Republicans Mitt Romney and John McCain, critics like Cher, his friend Roger Stone, and even the fallen American heroes who died fighting for their country in France in 1918. Now he joins their ranks. He will always wear the yoke of the president of a mandate around his neck, a burden that only two other men have assumed in the last 40 years: George HW Bush and Jimmy Carter.
To complete his humiliation, Trump lost to someone whom he denigrated as “the worst candidate in the history of presidential politics.” But in the end, after a nail-biting vote count, Joe Biden proved to be a more worthy opponent than that, albeit by a slim margin than the polls predicted.
In 2016, Trump was a curiosity: the outsider who promised to take Washington by storm, the real estate mogul who said he would drain the swamp, the self-proclaimed billionaire who would not disclose his tax returns but who would be the champion of the “forgotten.” Americans ”.
Four years later, that unconventional mix of qualities had fallen apart to some degree. He could no longer claim the stranger’s mantle: he was the holder of the most powerful office on Earth; the swamp seemed more toxic than ever; and forgotten Americans suffered like never before while Trump himself paid a measly $ 750 a year in federal income taxes.
Then there was the coronavirus. From the beginning of the pandemic, Trump set out to take a contrary stance. Rather than heed the warning of his own scientific advisers, he falsely bragged that the disease would miraculously “disappear”, even though Bob Woodward later exposed that he knew all along that the virus was “a deadly substance.” .
Sitting back
Rather than unleash the full power of the most powerful government on the planet in a comprehensive federal response to contagion, Trump sat back and let the states compete with each other for scarce resources. He then politicized the crisis, turning the masks into a symbol of partisan love and hate and emboldening far-right protests against the Democratic shutdowns.
A provocative approach similar to the government characterized Trump’s handling of the other major upheaval to hit America in 2020: the wave of Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality sparked by the brutal murder of George Floyd. An event that required healing words and unifying actions from the president was met with Trump’s virulent attacks on “antifa” and the lawlessness allegedly unleashed by crime-loving Democratic governors.
Trump’s law-and-order strategy, which he put at the center of his campaign, claimed to be addressing the “American carnage” he had invoked at his inauguration.
It will take time for political scientists to digest how Trump’s totally contradictory strategies played out with millions of Americans. The perceived wisdom was that your refusal to involve the federal government in a robust attempt to contain the coronavirus could only hurt you. But among his base, especially white voters with no college education, he seems to have intensified, for many, their adoration for him.
By Election Day, more than 230,000 Americans had lost their lives to Covid-19. Yet when those who voted for Trump were asked in exit polls if they thought the virus was a cause for concern, a staggeringly low 5% said yes – they had drunk their Kool-Aid.
Similarly, Trump’s unexpectedly competitive performance in the election suggests that many Americans did not find his aggressive stance, and some would say racist, as a deal breaker. Meanwhile, for millions more, the American carnage occurred under his command, prompted in large part by his divisive leadership.
Amid the mounting turmoil, Trump sought to project himself as a strongman, the American equivalent of Jair Bolsonaro from Brazil or Rodrigo Duterte from the Philippines, whom he called his friends. But the pattern was repeated: Photographs like Trump holding a Bible in St. John’s Church, which required a peaceful crowd outside the White House to be tear-gassed away, threw red meat at Trump’s base, but also alienated the voters whose support he needed to woo.
Crumbled stand
As political strategists pore over the election results, among the demographic groups they are likely to focus on are African-American and other minority voters. In 2016, Hillary Clinton failed to gain support among the Black and Latino communities, even in key states like Wisconsin, and that cost her dearly.
By 2020, Trump had almost secured an overwhelming turnout for Biden from these sectors of the electorate with his constant stream of racist dog whistles and far-right courtship. However, here too the panorama that emerges from the night of the elections is complex.
While minority voters generally spoke out strongly for the Democratic candidate, Trump managed to make his way between Cuban Americans in Miami-Dade, a key to his victory in Florida, and Latino voters in Ohio and Georgia. His promise of a “platinum plan” to boost black businesses also appeared to have won him the support of black celebrities like Ice Cube and Lil Wayne, and perhaps leverage with some African-American voters who turned out for him in greater numbers than in 2016 in some states. .
All of these strategies helped propel Trump’s re-election bid to a level that for the second time astonished many seasoned analysts and pollsters. The downside was that they were distracted from the one area of public policy where their ratings were promising: the economy.
For much of his presidency, Trump had put a soaring stock market and misleading comments about job creation, along with appointing conservative judges, front and center of his alleged accomplishments. Even in May, he had a huge advantage over Biden in the economy.
But Trump proved incapable of sticking to the economic message. The impeachment trial earlier this year sucked much of the oxygen out of the Oval Office, and from there it went almost straight to the pandemic and its devastating economic impact.
By Election Day, his lead over Biden in the economy had shrunk to just a couple of percentage points.
Threats
As Biden is hailed as the next head of the nation, Trump has already begun trying to disrupt the peaceful transition of power that has been a hallmark of American democracy since its founding. That’s no wonder, even when he won the 2016 election he was so upset about losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton while prevailing in the electoral college that he concocted a whole conspiracy theory to explain the dichotomy.
This time his resistance to the electoral events is even more malicious. On election night, he falsely claimed he had won the race at an event televised from the East Room of the White House, insisting without the truth that the election was being stolen from him. The next day, Trump and his cronies insisted that Pennsylvania had won, even though millions of votes had yet to be counted.
Yell as loud as you can, though, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to prevent the inevitable: the arrival of moving trucks at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue on January 20 of next year. It would be difficult to overstate the bitter shock of the images that will be broadcast around the world that day, of a man who has dedicated his life to creating the myth of his own invincibility, finally and definitely being exposed as a loser.
And so? One thing is for sure: Trump will not enjoy the ignominy of losing. Losing is never easy. Not for me, it’s not, ”he told his campaign staff on Election Day in a rare moment of vulnerability.
At least Trump, who has shown the world over the past four years that he thrives on chaos and disorder, can expect much more of those two challenges when he returns to normal life, if he settles in his Club Mar-a-Lago in Florida can be interpreted as normal. There are many vultures out and about, including entities that loaned you $ 421 million against your personal collateral and may now want the money back.
Legal birds of prey are also closing in, with several criminal investigations and civil lawsuits against them. Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance is conducting multiple investigations into the Trump Organization in connection with potential financial fraud and hush money paid in 2016 to Stormy Daniels, the adult film actor who claimed to have had an affair with Trump.
There are also several ongoing civil lawsuits, including the defamation case brought by Atlantic E writer Jean Carroll, who alleges she was raped by Trump at a New York department store in the 1990s.
Don’t show too much sympathy for Trump for his concerns about debt and legal dangers. He’s almost assured of a multi-million dollar book deal, and can be expected to fully exploit the image of the martyr on the right and the infinite money-minting potential that ex-president status brings.
This is also unlikely to be the last we know of him. His ability to confuse pollsters a second time, the fiery veneration he instilled in millions of Americans, the indelible and ominous stamp he has imprinted on the nation’s politics – all indicate that this is not the end of Donald Trump and his revolution. bitter.
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