By early 2020, Donald Trump seemed to have laid the groundwork to perpetuate four more years in the White House: the economy was growing, markets were at their peak, external conflicts were dwindling, and only internal tensions were obscuring the mandate of the Republican.
The pandemic and a disastrous management that denied it disrupted this agenda, put Democrat Joe Biden in the presidency and left half the country full of anti-democratic resentment.
In January, the country was exhausted after four years as president of a polarizing, uncompromising leader who relegated the role of the United States in the world to that of a trader angry with the former manager’s business. But after overcoming an “impeachment” and with the most vigorous conservative movement ever, Trump seemed destined to win back against all odds.
At the end of the year and after more than ten months of hard pandemic the picture is very different: there are about 300,000 deaths that could have been largely avoided, Trump is still entrenched in the Oval Office denying the victory of the president-elect, Joe Biden, and sows dangerous doubts as to whether democracy is the most apt system for imposing the will of a majority peacefully. Every day, many think guns are their last resort.
The November 3 general election was a referendum on U.S. sentiment. “Without the pandemic, Trump would probably have won,” explains in an interview with Efe Tom Nichols, a Harvard University professor and member of the “resistance” behind the “Lincoln Project,” a group of Republicans and moderates who have opposed firmly against what Trump stands for.
POLARIZATION
Despite losing these elections, Trump and his acolytes have managed better than anyone to move tens of millions of Americans to a parallel reality.
“Trump has positioned the Republican Party as the workers’ party, even though he has not represented his interests (…) he has thrown all this through social media algorithms to create a reality that is not what they show the facts, ”notes Kenneth Baer, a political consultant and member of the White House team in former President Barack Obama’s first term.
“There was a time when there were Republican liberals in the Northeast and the Midwest. These no longer exist. The country is living in absolute polarization because of Trump,” he adds.
According to Nichols, who recently published “Our Own Worst Enemy,” polarization is the product of another effect that came with the fall of the Soviet Union, the end of enemies. externalities and the complacency of American capitalism.
“Somehow we become the decadent society criticized by the Soviets” and the enemy of the US is the American people themselves, sick of a “childish individualism,” which ignores the civic duties demanded by a democracy and has channeled so far his frustration through Trump.
Many Democrats have now resigned themselves to the impossibility of building bridges with the “Trump Nation.” The United States had become accustomed to the outbursts of tone of the president, his nationalism and his strong man’s instincts, which he highlighted by his attunement with leaders of authoritarian tastes such as the Russian Vladimir Putin or the Egyptian Abdelfatah in the Sisi, and his scant chemistry with the most classical democracy of those of Canada, France, or Germany.
Since he came to power, Trump’s popularity has not risen, but neither has it fallen, thanks to a loyal, sometimes fanatical electorate that still confuses the most precarious sociologists and analysts, for whom “trumpism” is almost as exotic as a Guinean tribe.
The president, who in June 2015 was seen by the Republican Party as a charlatan accompanied by the biggest losers and eccentrics of the Conservative movement, has taken control of the “Grand Old Party” and has had time to appoint three of the nine judges of the Supreme Court, imposing its rubric on the basis of tweets, disdain and a bit of luck in the history of the United States.
“Trump’s voter will not disappear. Maybe in a decade, with generational change. But for now what you have is a Republican Party that has lost touch with reality and is afraid of its own voters. The Republican politician he knows the difference between reality and fantasy, but they want to be elected and they don’t want to confront their voters with the truth, ”Nichols considers.
PANDEMIC
It all started to twist in the spring. In February, Trump claimed that the new coronavirus, which was wreaking havoc in China, was nothing more than a “flu” and that the approximately 15 cases that had been detected in the country would soon become “zero cases.”
When the epidemic began to subside in the northeast, it was consolidating in the south and in the midwest, and today it is sweeping everything in a country with more deaths than any other nation on the planet. Covid brings with it an economic crisis that threatens to settle for years in the United States and especially in population groups that until now enjoyed the fruits of an increasingly threatened middle class.
In the spring the deaths of both fish, which piled up in trucks outside hospitals and the pungent smell of death was hard to disguise. This December, the bodies are piled up again in the hospitals of El Paso (Texas) or Wisconsin, further proof of the mismanagement of the pandemic by the White House of Trump.
The lack of action – by denial – of the US government, despite the noise of masks, vaccines and the virus that is not seen, has hit families across the country, has left the economy in the brink of collapse and has led many of Trump’s followers to the queues of famine or intensive care units. Inevitably, he passed bill at the polls.
The pandemic – which is in its third wave, the worst – in the United States has led even the poorest whites to rethink their love for Donald Trump, and if we look at the demographic groups only the richest increased their support, according to data collected during the election by consulting firm Edison Research.
“I think a lot of educators with high levels of education, liberals and moderates came to the polls thinking: the president’s mismanagement is affecting my life and I can’t afford this gentleman to remain my president, even though in another situation they would have voted for him, “Baer says.
THE END OF “DREAMS”
Probably one of Trump’s great contributions to the post-2020 world is to have lifted the veil of many Americans over the existence of the “American dream,” the myth of the indispensable and exceptional nation that rewards those who work hard, the just and that distributes justice around the world in the name of democracy.
This discontent was seen on the streets across the country after the death of George Floyd at the hands of the police in May and the brutality exhibited in front of so many other poor blacks, Hispanics or whites. It has also been seen in the movement against evictions and for a more inclusive United States.
The unrest, mixed with the crisis caused by the pandemic, was exacerbated to the point that many feared an armed confrontation between far-right movements and radical left groups.
Although the blood did not reach the river and the identity crisis of the “two Americas” did not become widespread, it highlighted the discontent of growing population groups calling for an end to the state. police in the country and give opportunities alienated to blacks and Hispanics, also women, for the past 400 years.
The Democratic Party machinery has been put behind Joe Biden, a politician with a shortage of charisma and excess of years who has promised to heal the country’s wounds and return the illusion of an “American dream” that is absent for dozens of thousands waiting in the “queues of hunger,” the ten million who have lost their jobs because of the pandemic, and the many more who have no hope of building a family in an increasingly unequal economy.
The United States closes a turbulent 2020, to forget, and faces an uncertain future with millions of hopeless people and the same number sharpening the knives of civil conflict, using the machinery of disinformation created by Trump and which has received in response to the moderate government of Biden, a return to the “status quo” of Obama.
The future will clarify whether the “American experiment” will promote what writer EJ Dionne described as a new “desperate democracy” or simply a despair with even darker avenues of expression than that which has represented Trump.