Donald Trump in the White House press room this Thursday.CARLOS BARRIA / Reuters
Donald Trump locks himself into the White House as the scrutiny progress puts Democrat Joe Biden one step away from victory in the presidential election.
The vote counts in recent hours have yielded such eloquent signals that the Obama-era vice president is already beginning to receive congratulations from his supporters.
With 95% scrutinized, he has taken the lead in Pennsylvania, and, if he ties this state, he is already the winner.
His latest public appearances, focused on appealing to concord, give him a presidential profile.
The Republican president reacted with a forward flight: he has generalized his baseless accusations of fraud to the point of calling into question the entire system of the world's first democracy.
“My style when negotiating is quite simple and direct.
I go really high up and just push and push and push until I get what I'm looking for.
Sometimes I stand for less than what I wanted, but in most cases I get what I want.
More than anything, I think the skill of negotiation is something you are born with, it is in your genes.
I am not saying this from an egotistical point of view.
It is not about being brilliant.
It requires some intelligence, but it's mostly about instinct. "
In
1987's
The art of the deal
, a thirty-something Donald Trump, already a well-known Manhattan real estate shark, draws a stark portrait of himself, not so much because of the rigorous veracity of each of the episodes that he tells, but because that is the story that he wants to give of himself to the world, the aspect with which he wants to be seen.
More than policy manuals, presidential history books or theories about populism in the West, to understand what has happened in the last four years in the United States there is no better text than those memoirs, in which the current president explains that he hit his music teacher in elementary school because he considered that the teacher "did not know anything" about the subject.
"He was a very assertive kid," he says, he was "a leader in my neighborhood."
The leader of Jamaica Estates, an affluent area of the multicultural borough of Queens, in New York, is perfectly recognized these days.
The son of a Delaware State Chevrolet salesman, a 77-year-old quintessential to the Washington establishment, is winning the race in the presidential election and Trump pushes and pushes and pushes until he gets what he wants.
Joe Biden cherishes victory and walks towards the White House, a goal for which he has been fighting all his life, after taking the lead in the four key states that finalize the vote counting: Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and Pennsylvania.
Only the latter would already give him the presidency.
Another still pending to be declared the winner, North Carolina, places Trump ahead, but does not compensate for the possible defeat in the rest.
With this still photograph, the Obama-era vice president would not only regain the three industrial belt territories that condemned Hillary Clinton to defeat four years ago (Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania), but he would win for Democrats Arizona and such a stronghold. Conservative like southern Georgia, which hasn't elected a Democratic president since 1992.
The authorities of this State announced this Friday that they will proceed to a recount, given the narrow differences between Trump and Biden, something that many territories do automatically to ensure the result when the advantage is minimal.
“It is too close to declare a winner.
Of about five million votes, we will have a margin of a few thousand, "said Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
The president then wrote on his Twitter account: “Where are the missing military ballots in Georgia?
What has happened to them?
Thus, he agitated again, without basis, a supposed irregularity in the electoral process, this time, on account of the votes of the members of the Army, who are supposed to be more favorable to the Republican.
The New York magnate won there with a difference of five percentage points over Clinton, but in a year with the largest mobilizations against racism in half a century, the rise of the black vote has been able to sign its sentence.
As the scrutiny progresses, Biden comes closer and closer to victory and Trump, to the grotesque.
The president appeared Thursday afternoon in the press room of the White House and dropped a cluster bomb on the legitimacy of the United States electoral system, on the authorities of the territories that give the victory to Biden and on the candidate himself. rival.
The president accused Biden of wanting to "steal" the presidential election thanks to "illegal votes."
It did not provide evidence or cite any incident or explain why it has reached this grave conclusion.
In short, he questioned the legitimacy of American democracy itself.
Scrutiny
Trump criticizes the counting of votes after election day - something completely common - because as the ballots are processed, he loses steam.
The reason is that several states — including Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin — process face-to-face votes first, then advance and mail-in votes.
And this type of suffrage has broken a record in these atypical elections of the pandemic.
More than 100 million Americans had already voted the day the polls opened.
Since those anticipated are mostly Democrats, the image of the vote on election night was more favorable for the president, who was at the top in Wisconsin and Michigan, but then Biden was improving and ended up pocketing those two key territories.
The same trend continues this Friday in Pennsylvania.
The Republican Party, which has closed ranks around Trump for four years, keeps its distance to the chagrin of the president and those around him.
"Where is the Republican Party?
Our voters will never forget it, ”wrote one of his sons, Eric Trump, on his Twitter account, although he promptly deleted it.
His older brother, Donald Trump Júnior, also criticized the "lack of action."
This Friday, the leader of the Republicans in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, avoided joining the accusations of fraud, although he assumed the language of Trump when defending the recount of "legal votes."
Meanwhile, Biden continues to stage a victory attitude.
The Democrat is scheduled to deliver a "speech to the nation" this Friday accompanied by the vice presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, in a sign that he hopes to be formally declared the winner very soon.
At a press conference, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, veteran Democrat Nancy Pelosi, referred to Biden as "president-elect."
The counts remain slow and impassive as the president cries out for their arrest and the pressure continues in the streets.
Data updates at polling stations in Arizona or Pennsylvania are tracked as the score for the Super Bowl, the great sporting event of the year.
One of the two teams, however, has already advanced that it will contest the result.
It is the last forward flight of the leader of the Jamaica-Queens neighborhood.
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