Why Trump and Trumpism will not fade. Word of the New York Times
Win or lose, Trump and Trumpism will remain disruptive forces, according to the New York Times
If President Trump were to lose his re-election, as seems increasingly likely , it would be the first defeat of a president in office in 28 years. But one thing seems certain: win or lose, it will not go away in silence – the NYT writes .
At a minimum, he has 76 days left in charge to use his power as he sees fit and to seek revenge on some of his perceived adversaries.
Angered by a defeat, he can fire or sideline a number of senior officials who have failed to fulfill his wishes, including Christopher A. Wray, the director of the FBI, and Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the best specialist government in infectious diseases in the midst of a pandemic.
And if forced to leave the White House on January 20, Trump will likely prove tougher than expected and will almost certainly remain a powerful and disruptive force in American life. It received at least 68 million votes, or five million more than in 2016, and garnered around 48 percent of the popular vote, meaning it retained the support of nearly half of the public despite four years of scandals, jokes. arrest, impeachment and the brutal coronavirus epidemic that killed more than 233,000 Americans.
This gives him a base of power to play a role that other defeated presidents like Jimmy Carter and George Bush have not played. Trump has long toyed with starting his own television network to compete with Fox News, and in private lately he has proposed the idea of racing again in 2024, even though he would have already turned 78 by then. Though his candidate days are over, his 88 million Twitter followers give him a megaphone for being an influential voice on the right, potentially making him a kingmaker among the rising Republicans.
"If there is anything clear from the election results, it is that the president has a huge following, and he has no plans to leave the scene anytime soon," said former Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona, one of the few Republican officials. to break up with Trump in the past four years.
This could still allow Trump to get a second term and four years to try to rebuild the economy and reshape the Republican Party in his image. But even from outside his term, he could try to pressure Republican senators who kept their majority to resist Biden at every opportunity, forcing them to choose between conciliation or crossing over to his political base.
Until a new generation of Republicans steps forward, Trump could position himself as the party's de facto leader, brandishing an extraordinary database of information about his supporters that future candidates would like to rent or otherwise access. The allies imagined that other Republicans would make a pilgrimage to his estate in Mar-a-Lago in Florida to ask for his blessing.
"It's not like his Twitter account or his ability to control a news cycle stops," said Brad Parscale, the president's first campaign manager in this election cycle. “President Trump also has the largest amount of data ever collected from a politician. This will have an impact on competitions and policies for years to come ”.
Exit polls showed that, apart from prominent Republican "defectors" like Utah Senator Mitt Romney and the Lincoln Project's Never Trumpers, Trump enjoyed strong support within his own party, winning 93 percent of the Republican voters. It also did a little better with black voters (12%) and Hispanic voters (32%) than it did four years ago, despite its often racist rhetoric. And after his high-energy blitz across the teetering states, late-deciding voters led the way.
Some of Trump's arguments have had considerable weight with his party members. Despite the coronavirus pandemic and its economic toll, 41 percent of voters said he was doing better than when he took office, compared to only 20 percent who described themselves as being worse off. In adopting its priorities, 35 percent of voters pointed to the economy as the most important issue, twice as many as those who cited the pandemic. 49 percent said the economy was good or excellent, and 48 percent approved their government's handling of the virus.
"If he is defeated, the president will maintain the eternal loyalty of the party voters and the new voters he has brought to the party," said Sam Nunberg, who was a Trump campaign strategist for 2016. "President Trump will remain a hero within the republican electorate ”. "The winner of the Republican presidential primary of 2024 will be President Trump or the candidate who looks most like him."
Not all Republicans share this view. While Trump will undoubtedly continue to speak out and assert himself on the public stage, they said the party would be happy to try to go beyond him if he lost and he would be remembered as an aberration.
"There will never be another Trump," said former Florida rep Carlos Curbelo. “The imitators will fail”. It will gradually fade, but the scars of this tumultuous period in American history will never go away.
In fact, Trump failed to reproduce his lucky 2016 success when he secured the Electoral College victory even though he lost the popular vote against Hillary Clinton. For all the tools he had, he couldn't pick up a single state he didn't win last time, and since Wednesday he's lost two or three, with a couple more still on the razor's edge.
Other presidents evicted after only one term or less – such as Gerald R. Ford in 1976, Carter in 1980 and Bush in 1992 – have vanished into political shadows. Ford briefly contemplated a comeback, Carter occasionally criticized his successors, and Bush campaigned for his sons, but none of them remained a major political force within their party for long. Politically, at least, each of them was seen, to varying degrees, as a lost force.
The last defeated president who, after leaving office, tried to play a role of power broker was Herbert Hoover, who positioned himself to stand for election again after his 1932 defeat to Franklin D. Roosevelt and became an outspoken leader of conservative wing of the Republican Party. While he had exerted significant influence for years, he did not regain the nomination or change the verdict of the story.
For Trump, who more than anything else cares about "win, win, win", being known as a loser would be intolerable. On election day, during a visit to his campaign headquarters, he pondered this aloud. "Winning is easy," he told reporters and staff members. “Losing is never easy. Not for me, no it's not ”.
To avoid such a fate, the president tried to convince supporters on Wednesday that the elections had been stolen simply because state and local authorities were counting the legally received ballots. The fact that it wasn't true obviously didn't matter much to him. He was putting together a story to justify the legal disputes that even Republican lawyers deem unfounded and, if they fail, he would present himself as a martyr who had not been repudiated by the voters but somehow robbed by unseen nefarious forces.
Trump himself has a long history of fraud allegations. His sister said she convinced someone else to take the college entrance exam. The daughters of a Queens orthopedist claimed that their late father had given Trump a diagnosis of bone spurs to protect him from drafting for the Vietnam War as a favor to Fred Trump, his father. And his affairs have often trapped him in accusations and lawsuits.
Trump paid $ 25 million to his Trump University students to settle the fraud allegations. His charitable foundation was closed after authorities found a "shocking scheme of lawlessness". According to a New York Times investigation, in the 1990s he participated in dubious tax regimes, including cases of outright fraud. And Michael D. Cohen, his former attorney, wrote in a recent book that he rigged two online polls on behalf of Mr. Trump.
The president has survived all of this and a string of failures and other failures through a life of celebrity and populist appeals that gave him the aura of a winner he has cultivated. Since his stint in real estate and reality television, he has been a part of the country's pop culture firmament for 30 years, a recurring figure in films, TV shows and his own books.
It has been, for millions of people, a symbol of aspiration and golden wealth. He was the star of a popular television series for 14 seasons, which introduced him to the country long before he was nominated. And once he did, his exuberant demonstrations tied his supporters to him in a way that underlined how much a cultural phenomenon he is.
For months, as his chances of being re-elected dwindled, Trump told councilors – sometimes joking, sometimes not – that if he lost he would promptly announce that he would run again in 2024. Two councilors said he would stand by. that statement if his legal challenges fail, a move that, if nothing else, would allow him to raise funds to finance the demonstrations that support him.
When it appeared he was losing his campaign in 2016, he and some members of his family talked about starting a media venture, loosely conceived of as "Trump TV." Some of these discussions have continued this year as well, according to people who know them.
"There is no doubt that he is one of the greatest polarizing political figures in modern history," said Tony Fabrizio, one of Trump's pollsters. “His supporters adore him and his opponents insult him. There is no middle ground for Donald Trump ”.
(taken from the foreign press review by Epr Comunicazione)
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/perche-trump-e-il-trumpismo-non-tramonteranno-parola-del-new-york-times/ on Thu, 05 Nov 2020 16:16:37 +0000.