Lhe electoral campaign whose outcome will have the most impact on world affairs at the end of a year full of votes has begun in the United States in Iowa, and its results leave no room for doubt. By crushing the caucuses organized in the polar cold in this rural and very conservative state, Donald Trump confirmed his status as favorite in the race for the Republican nomination for the November 5 election.
Republican voters are, however, best placed to measure Donald Trump’s immeasurable contempt for the rules. The latter did not deign to participate even once in the debates between candidates organized by the Grand Old Party, a civic exercise as healthy as it is elementary.
The former businessman had more than one reason to celebrate his triumph on the evening of January 15. Her most serious rival, the former ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, was beaten for a distant second place by the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, whose campaign is nevertheless in agony. Here she is deprived of momentum for the already crucial meeting of the New Hampshire primaries scheduled for January 23.
These first results are as embarrassing as they are worrying for American democracy. For the first time, voters were asked to vote on a former president whose final act was to trample on the cardinal principles of their country: respect for the results of an election and the peaceful transfer of power within the framework of of an alternation.
Three years later, Republican voters have forgotten the degrading images of the outgoing president’s supporters storming the Capitol in Washington to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s indisputable victory. Worse, a good number of them continue to subscribe to the delusional conspiracy theory of a stolen election maintained by the defeated party.
The poison of doubt
This confinement in denial is not anecdotal, since Donald Trump has made the thirst for revenge, the desire for retaliation and resentment the program proposed to his voters. This is how we must understand the vast purge that he envisages in the case of a victory in November, to place faithful everywhere selected on this criterion, and not that of competence, certainly at the cost of a weakening the federal state, for the greater benefit of the adversaries of the United States.
Voters in Iowa were also not put off by the legal deadlines that await Donald Trump and a number of accusations that do not exactly paint the portrait of a statesman. Here again, the latter managed with the help of complacent media to instill the poison of doubt.
In the parallel reality maintained by the ex-president, the violation of electoral campaign financing rules, the pressure exerted to modify the results of the 2020 presidential election or the illegal conservation of classified archives after his departure from power do not constitute nothing about attacks on institutions. On the contrary, it is having to answer for one’s actions that is presented as a threat to democracy.
Time is now running out for Republicans who refuse the return of chaos and destructive ego to the White House. They only have a few days to rally behind an alternative candidacy and prevent the nomination race from being disguised as a plebiscite.