Joe Biden – Donald Trump (Lapresse)
USA, Biden At the fork Towards the Democratic Convention. And Trump is thinking about his return with nuclear power
“Sleepy Joe” has come to a crossroads: in the next 7 days, between interviews, rallies and the NATO summit, it will be decided whether he will still be the anti-Trump candidate. Biden’s campaign responds that the changes in the polls after the disastrous Atlanta debate are not huge, and it also happened to Obama to go down in the first challenge and recover afterwards. The problem is that Biden was at a disadvantage and had proposed the confrontation on June 27 to recover, thinking that Trump would remind viewers of the character and political reasons why they had fired him in 2020, preferring the reassuring competence of Joe.
The Biden’s attempt at recovery, to avoid these scenarios, has begun with Wednesday night’s meeting with governors, where he revealed that he had undergone a medical check-up after Atlanta: “All good, touch wood. My health is fine. The problem – he joked – is the brain …”. To relaunch the image of a leader in control of the situation, Biden then spoke on the phone with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, to discuss options for the implementation of his three-point plan on the ceasefire in Gaza and the reconstruction of the region, after Hamas’ response. Then in the evening he took part in the celebrations for Independence Day. Next week he will host the NATO summit in Washington: showing himself as the leader of the free world should help him. In this time frame everything will be played out.
What kind of convention will the Democratic convention that begins on August 19 in Chicago be like if Joe Biden ultimately decides to withdraw? We are talking – explains the Corriere della Sera – of “open convention” when no candidate arrives at their destination having won the majority of delegates. But Biden won 99 percent of the nearly 4,000 Democratic delegates. The “brokered convention” model is closer to the current case: you arrive in Chicago without a predefined candidate and it’s up to the party’s most influential figures to choose, after exhausting nightly negotiations, who to propose to the Americans as their presidential candidate. But it is a top-down model conceived when it was the party leaders, not the voters, who decided. It is no coincidence that the last “brokered convention” dates back to 1952, when the primary system had no weight.
Those who want to have a free hand in choosing Biden’s successor argue that his withdrawal would be equivalent to wiping out the primaries: everything would then go back into the hands of the party. If no candidate were to obtain an absolute majority of 1,976 votes in the first round, from the second round onwards 700 superdelegates (parliamentarians, governors and party leaders) would be added to the 3,937 delegates. And we would go ahead indefinitely. This is also why, continues the Corriere della Sera, that the candidacy of Kamala Harris, so far little considered due to her low popularity, is difficult to avoid. Biden has already said he considers her the future of America: if he withdraws, he will indicate her.
Rejecting her would mean giving a slap in the face to everything that the former senator from California embodies: the government she shared with Biden, now out of the game for reasons of age but author of important reforms that are the flagship with which the Democratic Party presents itself to the vote; and then the first woman to arrive in the White House, even if as vice; and the first black person with Asian roots.
And if the president doesn’t withdraw, is a convention riot possible? Technically, a mass rebellion of delegates is a possibility, but it would be political suicide for the Democratic front. But those who want to reopen the game and hope that a real confrontation on the left will attract attention and revitalize a progressive electorate that has been apathetic to Biden’s candidacy so far are even thinking about organizing a cycle of “mini primaries”: politicians, like the governors of California and Michigan, who are running for president present their programs and confront each other in events organized in five or six large American cities and broadcast on television: voters involved, new polls, delegates who have new elements to decide.
While “Sleepy Joe” is struggling, on the other side Donald Trump’s allies are pushing for the resumption of nuclear weapons tests with underground detonations in case the former president is elected. The New York Times reports, citing the intervention of Trump’s former national security adviser Robert O’Brien. The United States must “test the reliability and safety of new nuclear weapons in the real world for the first time since 1992,” O’Brien wrote in the magazine Foreign Affairs, explaining that the tests would help the US maintain “technical and numerical superiority” over Chinese and Russian weapons. Many experts believe that resuming the tests is unnecessary because it would jeopardize the moratorium honored for decades by the major powers.
#USA #Biden #Democratic #Convention #Trump #thinks #returning #nuclear #power