On December 14, 2000, Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens found that most of his peers had committed a legal coup by preventing Florida from resolving the Gore-Bush election dispute. “Although we will never know for sure the identity of the winner of this year’s presidential election,” he wrote in a private note, “the identity of the loser is completely clear. It is the confidence of the nation in the judge as an impartial guardian in the exercise of the law”.
Twenty years later, on December 14, 2020, the day the 50 states of the Union certified the results that gave Biden victory, Trump insisted that he was the winner, denounced massive fraud and harangued his supporters to “defend democracy”. On January 6, 2021, they stormed the Capitol, the culmination of an attempted coup that cost nine people their lives.
The marble columns of American democracy, the same ones that withstood the attack of 2000, once again withstood that of 2020. The fact that Trump has now been prosecuted demonstrates this. It is not clear, however, that in the elections on November 5, 2024 they will end up giving in to the force of MAGA, the authoritarian movement led by Trump himself. 15 months to go.
Trump has everything going for him to be the Republican candidate for president. De Santis, the Florida governor who could overshadow him, is a bluff. There are plenty of Americans willing to have him lead.
The polls place Trump and Biden tied with 43% of the intention to vote. That is, there are tens of millions of Americans who will support Trump even if he is accused of conspiring to steal the 2020 election. They don’t care that the evidence against him is overwhelming. They know, as everyone has known for two and a half years, that he lied to the Americans, intimidated many officials and incited violence from his supporters to cling to power knowing that he had lost. They believe that he is the victim of a witch hunt, similar to those in Nazi Germany and the Stalinist USSR.
They don’t care if you behave like an autocrat by resisting a peaceful transfer of power. They also didn’t care that, as president, he flirted with dictators, denied climate change or the pandemic, harassed judges and journalists, disregarded the Constitution, and maneuvered to enrich his family. They share your anger against the open, plural and inclusive society that the Democrats represent. There is no court evidence that can shake their faith in Trump.
This is the drama facing the United States. The people can choose an enemy of the people and of democracy.
In just four months, Trump has been prosecuted three times: for buying the silence of a porn actress, for keeping secret documents in his home that endangered national security, and for conspiring to alter the outcome of the elections and undermine general confidence. in the democratic system.
He knew, when he announced his candidacy in 2019, that nothing could happen to him even if he shot himself on Fifth Avenue in New York. Dozens of lawyers continue to make an effort to camouflage his crimes so that it is so. They are lawyers who will now try to delay the trial for the attempted robbery of the last presidential elections. They have to ensure that it is not held before November 5, 2024. Their maneuvers will focus the campaign of a candidate who will present himself as a victim and the only possible savior of a corrupt country. However, even if they fail and Trump is found guilty before the election, his candidacy will still be valid. He will be able to be chosen and forgive himself when he is in the Oval Office.
What Judge Stevens found in 2000 is much more true today. The reactionary right has eroded trust in the institutions. The popular will can elevate a dictator. American democracy has never been so threatened.
