Even for someone as comfortable with shock as Donald Trump, his last few weeks have felt a lot like a roller coaster ride. He has been compared to Adolf Hitler for some xenophobic statements; He has threatened with retaliation those who now hold him accountable for his actions in the previous exercise of power; he has said that he will be “dictator for a day” if he resumes command; and he ends the year in the center of an unprecedented legal battle to prevent him from running in the presidential elections next November, which has opened an interesting debate about democracy in the United States.
It is a discussion about who should decide, whether the judges or the voters, whether the candidate best positioned to obtain the Republican Party's nomination and, according to the latest polls, even to win should be president—given his precedents. to his more than likely opponent, a Joe Biden whose popularity is not rising due, among other reasons, to his advanced age or the war in Gaza.
The idea of a second round of Trumpism in the White House has managed, at least, to bring the two Americas into agreement in invoking the dangers that loom over democracy in 2024, a year that – like 1776, 1861, 1968 , 2001 or 2020― asks for passage to figure the annals of its history. For one side, four more years of Trump would push the country toward autocracy. For the other, the real risk is in the attempts to stop him in the courts, which would respond to an illiberal political persecution with the entire arsenal of the State apparatus: a dirty trick to defeat him in the face of the inability of a rival in trouble to do so. at the polls.
The tycoon closes the year of his problems with justice with more legal attacks; four cases so far, in which he is accused of 91 criminal offenses, for electoral subversion, for his responsibility in the attack on the Capitol, for his handling of classified material and for black payments to a porn actress. The last ones have to do with the disqualification clause contained in the fourteenth amendment. The third section of it, written after the Civil War with the rebels of the Confederacy in mind, prevents anyone from running for public office who, after swearing allegiance to the Constitution, has participated in an insurrection.
It is a legal fight that is similar to that of presidential elections: it is fought State by State. For now, Maine and Colorado have given two good interpretations. On the one hand, what Trump did (and still does) by refusing to accept the result at the polls in 2020 and his promotion of the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021 count as an act of insurrection and are not protected For freedom of expression. On the other hand, what that obscure paragraph of the rarely invoked fundamental text says can be applied to the office of the president, although he does not expressly cite it among the pile of elected positions that he does mention.
Join EL PAÍS to follow all the news and read without limits.
Subscribe
Half a dozen States (the last one, California) have already rejected this legal theory and there are at least 32 in which cases have been initiated based on this interpretation of the Constitution. The ball is now in the court of a Supreme Court with a conservative supermajority that has three judges appointed by Trump. If they accept the case, they can decide on both questions (that of the insurrection and whether the clause affects presidents), or stay only on the practical side and return the candidate's name to the ballots. What those nine justices decide will have an effect throughout the country and will pave or cut off Trump's path to the White House. There is some urgency: The primary process begins in mid-January with the Iowa caucuses.
Those who defend removing him from those primaries put the idea that no one is above the law before the certainty that these attacks can end up having the opposite effect to the desired one: making him win votes. No one like the Secretary of State of Maine — Democrat Shenna Bellows, in whose argument she wrote that “democracy is sacred” — has embodied that fight during these days.
Betrayal and protection
The same recourse to the sacred ideal of democracy serves those who think otherwise, who abound, and not only from the side of the magnate's supporters. It would be better to let the voters speak, they say, than for a handful of judges to remove him from the electoral race. And, of course, it would be easier, they add, if there was already a sentence that proved that he committed the crime of insurrection.
For the professor of Jurisprudence at Yale University, Samuel Moyn, there is a danger in resorting to the disqualification clause: “turning what should be a national referendum on the future of the country into a spectacle in which judges will interpret a text legal of the past.” “It may favor Democrats in the short term,” Moyn believes, but in reality it would only be “postponing the need to govern by legitimate means, rather than legal subterfuge.”
Some, like conservative analyst David Frum, Trump's longtime antagonist, also point out the irony that “the president who betrayed democracy is now asking for its protection.” “Perhaps prudence would recommend leaving Trump's disgraced name on the primary and general election ballots. But remember that old joke about the man who murdered his parents and then asked for mercy because he was an orphan? Another could be told, about a former president who destroyed democracy when he had power and then demanded the protection of democracy so he could have another opportunity to destroy it,” Frum wrote on the magazine's website. Atlantic after knowing Maine's decision.
The latest issue of the publication is a monograph on all the ways and areas in which a Trump back in the White House could cause this damage. To highlight the drama of the alarm signals contained within, the creative director decided to place the index on the red cover, in homage to another solemn occasion in which the editors resorted to that idea: August 1939, a month before the start of World War II.
The list is long: electing him president would represent a threat to, among other issues, immigration, the climate, journalism, science, the relationship with China, the rise of extremism on both sides, disinformation, the Department of Justice… “In his first term, Trump's corruption and brutality were mitigated by his ignorance and laziness. In a second round, he could arrive with much more refined knowledge about the system's vulnerabilities and an agenda of retaliation against his adversaries and impunity for himself,” Frum writes in the special issue.
For Trump, who said goodbye to 2022 looking into the abyss of political irrelevance and heads into 2024 sitting on his pending accounts with justice and inflated with popularity, victimist rhetoric has served to connect with a loyal base of followers who consider him little less than a martyr. In recent weeks, he has raised the tone with an already openly revanchist speech.
The climax came last Tuesday, when he boasted of his rhetoric by sharing on his social network account, Truth, a cloud of concepts published by the British newspaper Daily Mail, that put into the blender the words used by a thousand potential voters, to whom a pollster asked for a concept that summarizes what they expect from a second term of the two candidates who aspire to repeat in the White House. “Revenge”, “power”, “economy” and “dictatorship” were the terms highlighted in large print in the Trump swarm. In Biden's?: “Nothing”, “economy”, “democracy” and “peace”.
That the former president appropriated a list that anyone else would have preferred to forget is a new demonstration that if Trump is anything, it is not “any other” politician, but someone capable of emerging unscathed from statements like those he recently made in FoxNews. He said he would be “dictator for a day” to “close the border with Mexico” and to resume “oil extraction.” And then he would return to democracy. That democracy that he has put, as a candidate, as president and as former president, on the ropes several times since his emergence onto the political scene in 2016.
Follow all the international information on Facebook and xor in our weekly newsletter.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
_
#Donald #Trump #puts #system #United #States #ropes