Question: whose quote is below? "If we win, I will deserve all the credit, and if we lose, it will not be my fault at all." Was it Adolf Hitler, José Mourinho or Donald Trump? Answer: Donald Trump, one day before the legislative and state elections that were held on Tuesday in the United States.
According to Trump, he deserves all the credit. "We had tremendous success," he declared, referring to his GOP. According to the entire American political world, it was not a success, it was a failure, especially for Trump.
Trump is, like Dracula, hard to kill. To date, the multiple forecasts of his decline have come to nothing. The orange monster has always come back, revitalized. But this time I think he won't come back. Aware that wishes too often defeat reason, I gamble and say that even if he presents himself as a candidate this Tuesday, as he has threatened to do, he will not be president again. The result of this week's election was the deadly stake in his vampire heart.
One of the curiosities of the American political system is that the Republican Party, the conservative, is identified with the color red. Well, Trump begged his supporters before the election to give him the landslide victory of "a big red wave." It was not so. Everything indicated, it is true, that President Joe Biden's party would suffer a dismal result. He had history against him to begin with. Previous presidents with more favorable personal ratings than him, including Clinton and Obama, received much harsher electoral beatings during the equivalent stage of his term. Alarming inflation and a recession looming on the horizon did not bode well for Biden either. As the old mantra goes, "it's the economy, stupid."
But in the end, as all diagnoses point out, the deciding factor in what turned out to be a slight red wave was "stupid Trump." All roads to Republican failure lead to it.
He was the one who set the Supreme Court justices who tipped the scales this year against legal abortion, a decision that convinced many women, in particular, not to vote Republican. Trump was the one who incited the invasion of the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Trump is the subject of numerous criminal investigations by the Department of Justice. And, finally, Trump was the one who hand-picked Republican candidates who, under normal conditions, should have won. They did not win because they were abnormal, mediocre or insane people whose only virtue, so to speak, was their blind loyalty to the cult of Donald Trump.
In short, the old Biden's unfavorable numbers weighed less in the elections than the even more unfavorable numbers, according to the polls, of his predecessor. And it is not that I say it, it is said by a multitude of Republican political figures who until now had been loyal to Trump. Here are some examples. David Urban, a veteran adviser to Trump since his 2016 presidential campaign: "Republicans have followed Donald Trump off a cliff." Frank Luntz, a well-known Republican pollster: “People I've talked to in the last 24 hours [the day after the election] have told me enough of Donald Trump. Enough of the chaos, screaming and screaming.” The conservative The Wall Street Journal in an editorial: "Trump is the big loser of this election...Trumpist candidates lost in elections that were clearly winnable."
Not only the Journal leaves him. The newspaper that had been his personal Pravda, the tabloid New York Post, is suddenly making fun of him. In the always faithful Fox News several voices begin to question him. A potentially decisive election for control of the Senate is pending on December 6 in Georgia. Republican leaders are pleading with him to delay announcing his presidential candidacy until after it's over. They know that the best thing that can happen to the party to win it is for Trump to keep his mouth shut.
Trump insists for now that he will go ahead and make his "big announcement" on Tuesday. But the messages from his coreligionists have managed to penetrate some corner of the wonderland that his brain inhabits. Trump begins to contemplate the possibility that he will end up being the thing in life that most horrifies him, a loser, a loser. He gave him away even before the election a week ago by attacking Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who is seen by a growing number of Republicans as the candidate most likely to win the presidency in 2024.
With that menacing gangster air that characterizes him, Trump said of DeSantis: “I think if he shows up, he could really do a lot of damage. A lot of damage...”. And then he specified that if DeSantis showed up, he would reveal "things" about his rival that would make him look very bad. “With the possible exception of his wife, I know more about him than anyone else,” capo Donald added.
Trump trembles at the possibility of suffering the ignominy not, in the first place, of losing the 2024 elections, but of not even being chosen as a candidate by the party he thought he had under his control. So we can expect that in the coming weeks and months he will pay less attention to Joe Biden and focus the hatred he carries within him on Ron DeSantis. He, everything indicates, will not answer. The big difference between Trump and DeSantis is that one is emotionally retarded and the other is an adult who, regardless of his ideology, has a certain degree of civic responsibility.
The former Republican governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, said this week, what anyone with half a brain knows and millions of American voters still do not, that "Trump's political instincts have nothing to do with his party or his country, they only have what to do with him."
I mean, going further, Trump has much more to do with Vladimir Putin than with DeSantis or with Biden or with anyone who values the freedoms that so many have fought for. The happy news of the week is that with each passing day more of his compatriots understand that Trump is a fraud and that democracy is a treasure that should not be wasted.
