Nothing can discourage Donald Trump, who is still determined to stand against all evidence as the winner of the 2022 presidential election, in which Joe Biden outstripped him by seven million and 74 electoral college votes. The congressional commission of inquiry into the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol attack, which disqualified it as biased, failed to do so, despite presenting sufficient evidence of the existence of a plan orchestrated by the then president. to avoid relief in the White House, actually an insurgent coup d’état. Even the more moderate Republicans have failed to form an open minority among conservative voters who still gullibly buy the swindle of vote-stealing and, worse, cling to their preference for Trump as the 2024 presidential nominee.
Few presidents have managed to maintain such overwhelming influence in the Republican Party after a chaotic administration and an undeniable electoral defeat. Trump has not yet announced his presidential candidacy, but the possibility of his running weighs heavily on the candidates and the midterm campaign.
Trump was instrumental in appointing the three Supreme Court justices who ruled against the right to abortion, favoring gun ownership as a constitutional right, and against the regulation of pollutant emissions by state regulators. And they are not moderate Republicans, but quite the opposite, the candidates running for the primary, Florida Governor Ron de Sanctis and former Vice President Mike Pence. The Republican Party, in this sense, faces the challenge of breaking the Trump-imposed dynamic that is fatally undermining democracy. These are times when the international context of the war in Ukraine compels us to bolster the values that autocracies like Putin’s are trying to impose in the worst possible way.
The most serious problem is the extremism that has seduced Republicans, so it’s not surprising that increasingly radical candidates are emerging for November’s election, many of whom belong to conspiracy groups, anti-vaccinationists and violent criminals like those who stormed Congress. Neither does the radicalization with apocalyptic undertones from Trump himself, who this week painted the landscape of a country with overflowing borders, invaded by immigrants, attacked by drug addicts and vagrants, where satanic child molesters are released from prison and finally civil war rages Edge. Everything ready for the appeal to the strong hand and the strong man, to the saving dictatorship. The worst of all horizons.