The state of a nation is palpable in its television broadcasts, especially those on cable, a 24-hour news service.
After the impact of the multiple criminal charges against Donald Trump, who this Thursday appears before a judge in Washington, for trying to continue in the White House with a self-coup, in which the lawyers relieved the soldiers in the attempt to annul the will Expressed in November 2020, the main sets were filled on Tuesday with jurists or historians who analyzed the seriousness of the moment.
Some paragraphs of prosecutor Jack Smith’s indictment brief, where six co-conspirators are added (Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Sidney Powell, Jeffrey Clark, Kenneth Chesebro and a political consultant), gained special relevance.
“Despite having lost, the defendant had the determination to remain in power,” said that document. “He spread the lies that he had won and that there was fraud. These claims were false and the defendant knew it. But he continued to propagate them to make the falsehoods look legitimate,” he insists. “The objective was to annul the legitimate result of the elections,” he stresses.
There was also an echo of the phrase that Smith pronounced in a brief appearance, where he stressed that “these lies fueled the attack on democracy on January 6, 2021.”
All the sets? The Fox chain is another nation. Trump’s challenge was dispatched quickly, denying everything (“bacteriological warfare”, attempt to annihilate constitutional rights, freedom of expression) and focused “on the crime of the century”. That he is none other than Hunter Biden’s possible corruption, from which he would have taken advantage of his father. Devon Archer, the son’s convicted ex-associate, repeated this week in a House committee that Hunter put in phone calls to the then vice president, but they never talked about business.
This is the antidote that makes a good part of Americans look the other way, applaud, even, that a Putin impersonator undermines the foundations of the nation and tries to eliminate the will of the majority of 81 million voters.
It is a process that feeds back. Without any embarrassment, Trump considered that his accusation is comparable to “Nazi Germany, the former Soviet Union or dictatorial countries” and described it as electoral interference, a strategy to cover up “President Biden’s crimes” and put him in trouble. jail “for life”. He warned that not even for these reasons will he abandon the race to be the conservative nominee. All of this means that the US has entered uncharted territory.
Republican leaders and presidential rivals came to Trump’s defense. It is a repeated manual, although this time there was a crack. “I did what I had to,” former Vice President Mike Pence, another who aspires to 2024, responded yesterday with his refusal to prevent the confirmation of Joe Biden’s victory, on January 6, 2021, in the joint session of the two chambers he led. as president of the Senate, and made him the target of the wrath of his boss and the assailants of the Capitol.
“Trump asked me to put him above the Constitution and I chose the Constitution. My country is more important than anyone. No one who puts himself above the Constitution should be president,” he added. “His lawyers for him told him what he wanted to hear,” he clarified about Trump.
The matter is further complicated when the defendant is already indicted with a total of 74 charges –yes, 74– for the alleged bribery to shut up a porn actress (a hush of $130,000) or for stealing highly classified secrets (nuclear deployment, map to invade Iran,…), which were found in various rooms of his mansion in Mar-a-Lago (Florida).
But this is worse. The United States had never found itself in a situation like this, with a losing president mounting a plot to nullify the popular will, something not experienced in the 236 years of the country’s existence, breaking the traditional peaceful transfer of power and testing its foundations. democratic.
“What we accept as normal is nothing short of a miracle,” Ronald Reagan said of that transfer.
The former president is a disbeliever, according to the prosecutor’s brief. There he describes himself as the still president and his conspirators organized a plot of falsehoods (votes for the dead, for undocumented immigrants, manipulation of counting machines), to annul the results, something that no judge endorsed. His failure led to encourage the march on the Capitol, angering his faithful.
“This indictment is perhaps the most important that has been raised to protect democracy and the rule of law in a US court against anyone,” Richard Hasen wrote in The Slate.
But David Remnick posed a question in The New Yorker: “Will the American electorate be able to overlook a conspiracy to undermine democratic government and return the main conspirator to power?”
This is the question.
