There is no better legal shield than that of more than 70 million people who blindly believe the lies that the man who is still president of the United States tweets at breakneck speed.
Provocatively, with the false mischievous tone that is reminiscent of when he claimed, amid general disbelief, that he aspired to be president of the United States, Donald Trump now openly talks about running for president in 2024. Constitutionally, a president can only serve two terms, but they do not have to be consecutive. So, why not? After all, the almost 70 million people who voted for Trump in November cannot claim ignorance. After almost four years in government, everybody knows who and what Trump is. “The show must go on,” they say.
Exactly. The show must go on. That is precisely what Trump hopes. He needs to raise funds and remain a key figure on the political scene, not only because of his ego and vanity, but out of sheer necessity amid a torrent of legal fronts that will predictably open up as soon as he leaves the White House. There is no better legal shield than that of more than 70 million people who blindly believe the lies that the man who is still president of the United States tweets at breakneck speed.
The figure of Trump is akin to that of a great illusionist. He draws the eye toward the pyrotechnics in order to hide the substantial part of the trick he is playing in plain sight. Fascinated and horrified, the eye focuses on him, and not so much on his policies or the political and social tectonic shifts which he causes, either as a consequence or as the catalyst. His defiant attitude in the face of electoral defeat hides the fact that Trumpism (understood as a nationalistic, supremacist, white, male, lower-middle-class movement) is a political reality that is not going to vanish with the arrival of Joe Biden. Quite the opposite. The impact of the financial crisis caused by the pandemic could encourage him to run if the new president fails to tap into something that the Democratic Party struggles with: how to sound credible to the working class when, to a large extent, it has become the party of the establishment precisely because the Republican Party has taken to the hills.
With or without Trump, Trumpism will hardly have disappeared in 2024.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.