The Republican National Convention opened Monday in Charlotte, North Carolina.
It is fairly uncommon that, at the end of his first term, an American president finds himself fighting for his reelection. Donald Trump is nonetheless in this position as he prepares to accept the Republican Party nomination before the election in November. These days, all the polls are showing Joe Biden with a big lead after receiving the Democratic Party’s nomination last week, but the match is not lost yet for the outgoing president. He proved in 2016 that he was capable of thwarting the forecasts. But he still has a lot of ground to regain.
The biggest obstacle for Trump is that he has shown, in the last couple of months, his incompetence in managing crises. Whether it’s the COVID-19 pandemic or the indignation caused by the death of George Floyd under the knee of a police officer, the American president didn’t know how to chart a course and reunite the nation. Instead, he actually deepened the country’s divide in order to preserve his base of white voters from the Deep South. But for what?
What’s alarming, at this stage, is that we have no idea what Trump is planning for his second term. We could criticize Biden for having gambled too much with “Anyone but Trump” to the detriment of his agenda’s consistency, but at least he did something and formulated some objectives. On the Republican side, there’s… nothing. So far, Trump has been content with advertising the chaos that would ensue from Biden’s election. That will not suffice if Trump wants a victory.
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