The Danger of Trump

The United States will enter the race for the presidential election on November 5 with the Iowa caucuses, which will be held on January 15 and are the first milestone of the primaries. He does so in a very worrying situation, with two frontrunners for the nomination who are disliked by most voters and who accuse each other of being a threat to democracy. However, while the current president, Joe Biden, attacks his predecessor with obvious arguments and examples, Donald Trump does so with hoaxes and lies such as those he has been spreading since he was defeated at the polls in 2020.

Trump is objectively a danger to democracy or, at the very least, to the democratic health of the United States. He has promised a presidency of "revenge" and "revenge" if he wins the elections and has even dared to claim that if he returns to office he will be a "dictator" on the first day to take some measures. The former president has employed rhetoric in which he calls his rivals "vermin" and says immigrants "poison" the blood of Americans. As historians have highlighted and Biden himself denounced, it is language with echoes of Nazi Germany.

Added to this are his attempts to whitewash the assault on the Capitol, calling the insurrectionists "patriots," promising them pardon, and using in his rallies chants and images that glorify this attack on democracy, a consequence of the fact that for the first time a sitting U.S. president resisted the peaceful and orderly transfer of power.

As if that were not enough, Trump's four criminal indictments for a total of 91 alleged crimes, which the former president has used to present himself as a martyr, and the litigation in the Supreme Court over whether he should be disqualified for insurrection, add a unique factor to an election campaign that is presented as the most tense in recent U.S. history.

On the other hand, Biden has the lowest levels of popularity of a sitting president in recent decades. Voters believe he is too old for re-election (he would end his second term at 86), he has fallen out of favor with young people, Arab Americans and other minorities over his support for Israel in the Gaza war, and the high inflation of the first part of his term continues to take its toll.

Biden is aware that he does not excite voters. He has come to recognize that, if Trump were not in front of him, he might not have even run for re-election. Now, he presents himself as a bulwark in defense of democracy and aspires to mobilize a coalition of Democratic voters, independents and even moderate Republicans who reject Trump's return to the White House.

The paradox of the Republican Party is that its most loyal voters, those who participate in the primaries, prefer Trump even though other candidates in their party without the heavy backpack of the former president, such as Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis, would be much more likely to defeat Biden.

The latest polls show that Americans are less satisfied than ever with the way democracy works. The political crisis in the United States is a risk not only for the country, but for the entire world.