Joe Biden points to the enemy

Less than two months before the legislative elections on November 8, the president of the United States, Joe Biden, has put himself at the head of the Democratic electoral machinery with a message that tries to present the appointment as a fight for the whole country, and not only from the Democrats, against the danger that the followers of former President Donald Trump represent for democracy.

The lines of the campaign were already defined at the beginning of the month, in the speech that Biden gave in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

With a solemn staging, Biden affirmed that Trump and the Trumpist Republicans (which he distinguished from the party in general and from its voters) “represent an extremism that threatens the foundations of our republic.”

In that speech he did not repeat the term that he had previously used in a party act.

Trumpism, he said there, is "semi-fascism."

Biden is risking the continuity of his presidency and will use the media power and the official agenda of the White House to ask for the vote in the key states on which the majorities depend.

Pennsylvania, for example, is where Democrats have the easiest time winning a Senate seat.

Biden has used official acts to ask for the vote also in Wisconsin, Ohio and Michigan, risking criticism for the partisan use of the position.

The president seems to have decided that the seriousness of the challenge is worth it.

Legislative elections serve as a plebiscite of the action of presidents, and they do not usually go well.

In a normal election cycle, voters would think to choose runaway inflation, the substantial downgrading of the most progressive promises, and the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan;

or, on the positive side, the recovery of a certain institutional normality, the ambitious law of action against climate change or the cancellation of student debt.

However, 2022 will be a new referendum on Trump and his toxic influence on American democracy.

The last line of battle is nothing less than cleaning up the elections, the organization of which at the local level may be left in the hands of fanatics sponsored by Trump.

Biden legitimately aspires

to stir up the objective danger that Trump embodies to repeat the same coalition of leftists and moderates that defeated the Republicans, frightened by the illiberal drift in 2018 and 2020. At this time, Trump and his followers, with the systematic attack on institutions ( the last one, the FBI, for the search in the house of the former president), they have only added reasons for this to be the case.

The United States returns for the fourth time in six years to an election with the same protagonist: Trump.