Public Enemy Number One

With Donald Trump’s inauguration, the Republican Party continues to dig its own grave. Not that it is absolutely out of the question that Trump may ultimately be elected president, considering the peculiarities of the electoral map and the crazed state of mind in which Americans find themselves. It’s up to Hillary Clinton, now, to not squander the extraordinary political support from the left that Bernie Sanders led to the Democratic Party.

Using his typical incendiary tone in Cleveland, real estate magnate Donald Trump, the Republican Party’s sacred presidential candidate, committed to being the “voice” of the people, of those who “work hard but no longer have a voice.” This is something a good portion of the “people” is apparently eager to believe. Since entering the presidential race, Mr. Trump has made speeches of abysmal populist vacuity, which has given him votes from millions of Americans during the primaries. He could have, despite everything, broken this caricature in Cleveland, or at the very least given himself a little more substance. But it is obviously a caricature in which he is fully contained and that, up until now, has been wonderfully useful to him.

Has American political life ever produced a less “presidential” candidate? It’s sufficient to notice the general ineptitude of the remarks he made Thursday evening and his superficial vision framed against a backdrop of a dystopian and distorted image of reality. He claims, without batting an eye, that within seconds of his arrival to the White House he would know how to fix any problem imaginable in re-establishing “law and order” throughout the United States, if not throughout the world.

It is understood that Trump the Conqueror is the evolutionary result of American democratic life and, more particularly, of the ruin and division of the Grand Old Party. It is understood that he is the incarnation of the perfectly legitimate anger and social unrest felt toward the disconnected elites. But this incarnation is so very terrifying. It is truly alarming that so many voters would be so ready to follow him, even including some militant Democrats who supported the “socialist” Bernie Sanders. The major public dissidence to Mr. Trump’s candidacy during the Republican convention has been from a staunch ultraconservative: Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.

Fittingly, Republicans are digging their own grave due to the years they have been steering in the wrong direction in terms of the social and demographic evolution of the United States, running exclusively on votes from the fringes of white conservative voters. In fact, since 1992 the GOP has not once obtained the majority popular vote (George W. Bush only won in 2000 by a large number of electoral votes, following the Florida embroilment.)

This is how the “neo-republican” Trump, more liberal than the rest of the party on issues such as homosexuality and abortion, has finally resigned himself to the idea of joining with a running mate like Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, another pure and hard conservative, in hopes of rallying voters on the right, notably the evangelists. The net profit of this marriage of convenience: Republicans will find themselves from now to the voting booths of Nov. 8 having to defend a particularly extremist voting platform, adjoining Trump’s isolationist, anti-immigrant, and anti-Muslim positions to the archaic positions of the party in social and environmental matters.

As it happens, the only true bond for Republicans, and the convention in Cleveland demonstrated this clearly, consists of trying to unite the party around the aversion inspired by Democrat Hillary Clinton. As the Democratic convention opens on Monday in Philadelphia, the challenge for her, a candidate of the establishment, will be to be careful not to neglect the extraordinary reserve of support that Bernie Sanders created on the left. This also applies to the future of the Democratic Party, if not the progress of American democracy. It is no longer time for the traditionally centrist compromises of principle. In the current electoral order, Mr. Trump is public enemy number one. His election would be a catastrophe.