Editorial of the “World”. Elected four years ago on the promise of “Make America great again”, President Donald Trump ends his term by shaming her. History will recall that American democracy was challenged, and for a moment suspended, Wednesday, January 6, by a crowd of extremist supporters that the president himself had incited to march on Capitol Hill to prevent his Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, from d ” be officially declared the winner of the election of November 3, 2020.
This black day for the United States is the culmination of a tumultuous presidency that has ended up dividing the country into two parts, one that respects constitutional order and court decisions, and one that lives in a parallel universe. This universe, nourished by conspiracy theories, is that of an alternate reality in which Donald Trump did not lose the election by a difference of 7 million popular votes and the vote of 302 votes in the electoral college against 232, but wants believe that it was stolen from him by a massive and orchestrated fraud.
In this world of denial, it does not matter that some sixty court decisions, including at the highest level, that of the Supreme Court, have rejected the appeals to annul the election. Never mind, since the president himself, asking by telephone on January 2 to the head of electoral operations of Georgia to modify the results of the poll in his state, asserts that there cannot have been beaten by 11,779 votes, as the ‘show the records, because he knows he has won “Probably half a million votes”.
The American nation reaped on Wednesday what its president, populist, demagogue and narcissist, sowed for four years, with the complicity of the Republican Party. The officials who had agreed, at the start of his mandate, to assist him at the White House out of a sense of the State, the famous “adults” on whom we were counting to assuage him, threw in the towel one after the other. others, or have been dismissed. Mr. Trump has never made a secret of his seditious intentions: he had constantly refused, before the election, to commit to respecting the result of the poll if it was not favorable to him. He had also given his support to extreme right-wing groups such as the Proud Boys, which he had asked to join. “Keep ready”.
A deeply shaken democracy
It was these groups of supporters who stormed and invaded the Capitol on Wednesday, easily overwhelming a strangely light police apparatus, as members of both Houses of Congress began voting to certify the presidential election results. Evacuated, elected officials could only resume their work after several hours of unprecedented chaos, after Mr. Trump finally asked his supporters to step down.
It will be up to President-elect Joe Biden to rebuild this deeply shaken democracy. He now has the means, thanks to the crucial victory of the two Democrats who won the Georgia senatorial seats on Wednesday, giving their party control of the Senate, in addition to the White House and the House of Representatives. He has the stature, as his firm and lucid reaction to the attempted Trumpist insurgency has shown.
The trauma experienced on Wednesday may help. Many unknowns, however, remain. What will become of the insurgent-in-chief, Donald Trump, who still has two weeks in the White House and has been let go by his own vice-president? Will he have to be dismissed, even if he finally, Thursday, agreed to give way? What will be the influence of the good hundred Republican congressmen who continued, Thursday morning, to reject the result of the election on the pretext of massive fraud? How will Donald Trump’s 74 million voters react? The leaders of the outgoing Republican majority, self-proclaimed party of law and order, very belatedly rallied to the Constitution, will they draw the right lessons from this announced disaster? The world, stunned by so much fragility, anxiously awaits the answers.
