Jean-Baptiste Talbourdet / M Le magazine du Monde from a photo by Mandel Ngan / AFP
StoryIf, as president, Donald Trump is to take on the role of unifier of the nation plagued by the coronavirus pandemic, the candidate for the November election advocates economic recovery.
1er may the presidential helicopter Marine One tears Donald Trump out of his confinement. The President of the United States is going to spend the weekend in the Camp David residence, out of sight. This is his first trip outside the White House since March 28. He then went on boardAir Force One at the port of Norfolk, Virginia, to witness the departure of the hospital ship Comfort rushed to New York, then the epicenter of the Covid-19 health crisis. These five weeks often seemed to him " months ", and he complained.
Always in a hurry to announce his victories, he is doomed to patience. A master in the art of panicking the pack, he is trailing an unpredictable virus, which he cannot even insult or mock on social networks. Donald Trump's reaction to the blast, accompanied by the country's brutal halting, turns this confinement into an allegory of an unparalleled mandate.
The confinement highlights as never before the inconvenient cohabitation of the two bodies of Donald Trump, in turn president and anti-president, father of a nation shaken by the tens of thousands of dead and chief insurgent against the directives of his own State. When they vote in the presidential election on November 3, will Americans have these dark spring days in mind?
During the first three years spent in the White House, Donald Trump had, even more than his Twitter account, the valve of regenerative and fusional meetings. In front of the tides of red caps struck with his campaign slogans, the president gave way, sometimes once a week, to the permanent candidate, mocking without limits his oppositions: the Democrats, the refractory Republicans Never Trumper, fewer and fewer, or the media who do not unreservedly praise it. Cloistered in Washington, the two men are only one, speaks the other after one to sometimes contradict or depart from the urgency of the hour, the fight against the Covid-19.
A public reduced to a minimum
To access the White House in the age of the virus, visitors must first go through a clear canvas tent set up along the grid that surrounds the presidential complex in order to control its temperature. The assistants in charge of this task deceive the boredom plunged into their mobile phones because silence reigns over the federal capital. The most famous part of Pennsylvania Avenue has been emptied of its tourists and tribunes from a thousand causes that usually meet there.
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