Even for someone as comfortable with shock as Donald Trump, his last few weeks have felt a lot like a roller coaster ride. It has been compared to Adolf Hitler for the xenophobic statements he made; he threatened to retaliate against those who now hold him responsible for his actions in the White House; he declared that he would be “dictator from day one” if he took command again; and he ends the year at the center of an unprecedented legal battle to prevent him from running in next November’s presidential elections. This opened an interesting debate about democracy in the United States.
It’s a question of who should decide — judges or voters — whether the candidate best positioned to win the Republican Party nomination should be allowed to run for office, given his or her track record. In the presidential election, Trump could even beat his most likely opponent. The popularity of Joe Biden does not increase due, among other reasons, to his advanced age and the war in Gaza.
The idea of a second round of Trumpism in the White House has succeeded, at least, in bringing the two Americas together. He spoke of the dangers weighing on democracy in 2024. Like 1776, 1861, 1968, 2001 or 2020, this year will go down in the annals of American history. On the one hand, four more years of Trump would push the country toward autocracy. For the other, the real risk lies in the attempts to arrest him in court, which would respond to an illiberal political persecution with the whole arsenal of the state apparatus: a dirty trick to defeat him in the face of the inability of a rival to do so at the polls.
The tycoon closes his difficult year in court with new legal attacks; four cases so far, in which he is accused of 91 criminal indictment: for election subversion, for his role in the attack on the Capitol, for his manipulation of classified documents and for secret payments to a porn actress. The latter two triggered the disqualification clause contained in Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which was written after the Civil War with rebels of the Confederacy in mind and bars anyone who participated in an insurrection, having pledged allegiance to the Constitution, to run for public office.
This is a legal fight similar to that for the presidency: it is being fought state by state. So far, Maine and Colorado have given two good interpretations. On the one hand, what Trump did (and is still doing) in refusing to accept the outcome of the 2020 election and his encouragement of the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, is considered an act of insurrection and is not are not protected by law. freedom of expression. On the other hand, what this obscure paragraph of the founding text says, rarely invoked, can apply to the office of president, although it is not expressly cited among the cluster of elective positions that it mentions.
Half a dozen states (the latest being California) have already rejected this legal theory, and there are at least 32 others in which lawsuits have been filed based on this interpretation of the Constitution. The ball is now in the court of the Supreme Court, with its conservative supermajority, three of which were appointed by Trump. If they accept the case, they can decide both issues (the insurrection and whether the clause affects presidents), or stick only to the practical side and put the candidate’s name back on the ballot. What these nine judges decide will have an effect across the country and make or break Trump’s path to the White House. There is some urgency: the primary process begins in mid-January with the Iowa caucuses.
Those who defend his exclusion from these primaries argue that no one is above the law, but face the certainty that these attacks could end up having the opposite effect: helping Trump win votes. No one like Maine’s secretary of state — Democrat Shenna Bellows, who wrote in her argument that “democracy is sacred” — has embodied this fight more in recent days.
Betrayal and protection
The same recourse to the sacred ideal of democracy serves those who think otherwise – and there are many of them – and not only on the side of the tycoon’s supporters. They believe it would be better to let the voters speak and remove Trump from the electoral race rather than let a handful of judges do it. And of course it would be easier, they add, if there was already a conviction proving he committed the crime of insurrection.
For Samuel Moyn, professor of jurisprudence at Yale University, there is a danger in using the disqualification clause: “Transforming what should be a national referendum on the future of the country into a spectacle in which judges will interpret a legal text from the past. This might favor Democrats in the short term,” Moyn believes, but in reality it would only “delay the need to govern by legitimate means, rather than legal subterfuge.”
Some, like conservative analyst David Frum, a longtime Trump adversary, also point out the irony that “the president who betrayed democracy is now seeking protection.” “Prudence might advise leaving Trump’s disgraced name on the ballots for the primary and general elections. But remember that old joke about the man who murdered his parents and then begged for mercy because he was an orphan? Another could be said, that of a former president who destroyed democracy while in office and then demanded protection of democracy for another opportunity to destroy it,” Frum wrote on Atlantic the magazine’s website after Maine’s decision was made public.
The publication’s latest issue is a monograph on all the ways and areas in which Trump’s return to the White House could cause this damage. To emphasize the drama of the warning signs contained within, the creative director decided to place the index finger on the red cover. He paid tribute to another solemn occasion on which publishers resorted to this idea: in August 1939, a month before the start of The Second World War.
The list goes on: electing him president would pose a threat to immigration, the climate, journalism, science, the relationship with China, the rise of extremism on both sides, disinformation, the Department of Justice And much more. “During his first term, Trump’s corruption and brutality were mitigated by his ignorance and laziness. In a second, Trump would arrive with a far better understanding of the system’s vulnerabilities…and a far more targeted agenda of retaliation against his adversaries and impunity for himself,” Frum writes.
For Trump, who said goodbye to 2022 while staring into the abyss of political futility and heads into 2024 sitting on his books awaiting justice and bloated with popularity, playing the victim served to connect with a base loyal supporters who consider him a little less. than a martyr. In recent weeks, he has raised his voice with an already openly vengeful speech.
The climax came last Tuesday, when he bragged about his rhetoric by sharing on his own Truth Social network account, a cloud of concepts published by the British Daily Mail newspaper. These were words used by a thousand potential voters, who were asked by a pollster for a concept that sums up what they expect from a second term from the two candidates who aspire to the White House. “Revenge,” “power,” “economy,” and “dictatorship” were the terms highlighted in large print in the Trump swarm. At Biden? : “Nothing”, “economy”, “democracy” and “peace”.
The fact that the former president appropriated a list that everyone would have preferred to forget is a new demonstration that if Trump is anything, it is not “just any other” politician, but someone capable of emerge unscathed from statements like those he recently made on Fox News. . He said he would be a “dictator from day one” to “close the border with Mexico” and resume “oil extraction.” And then democracy would return. This democracy which has been put on the ropes several times since its appearance on the political scene in 2016, as a candidate, as president and as former president.
Register for our weekly newsletter to get more English media coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition