Disunited states
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Subdued to Trump and united behind the myth of the stolen election, the Republican camp is accelerating its insidious destabilization of institutions. Many experts warn of the high risk of authoritarian drift and violence.
The images of the Capitol invasion took a year without losing any of their power of terror and amazement, but in the meantime a mirage has vanished: Donald Trump’s victory is no longer in doubt. The outgoing president certainly did not manage to be re-elected, and he failed, in all possible ways (judicial, institutional, insurrectional…), to force the outcome. But if we consider that Joe Biden had made it his cardinal mission to restore the democratic ideal and to mend the divisions of a country that his predecessor insists on fracturing again and again, then his helplessness borders on the failure – and Trump may well boast, waiting for the time of a hypothetical comeback more unstoppable than the previous one.
At the heart of the event, it might have seemed attractive to read the assault on Congress on January 6, 2021 as a final spasm of the Trumpist moment before liquidation. It could hardly be more wrong: everything today indicates how much violence unleashed that day, by crowds at the confluence …