(Washington) The stakes could not be higher nor the voters more disillusioned: the United States is heading towards a new presidential duel between Trump and Biden, in a heavy climate of democratic fatigue and political violence.
“It’s hard to get excited about it,” admits Keely Catron, 22, “it’s frustrating that our only two options are two very old white men. »
A resident of Arizona, a state which will be key for the presidential election on November 5, 2024, this education science student will therefore vote without joy, but without hesitation either for Joe Biden.
Within the Democratic Party, the candidacy of the 80-year-old president does not arouse any serious contest, despite his anemic popularity and concerns about his age.
As for Donald Trump, 77, although surrounded by legal proceedings, he is nonetheless leading the race for the Republican nomination.
Yet polls show that a majority of Americans would like other candidates.
Is it any wonder then that 65% of them say they are often or always exhausted when thinking about political life, according to a recent opinion survey by the Pew Research institute?
This weariness also takes the form of a silent distrust towards the two major parties, the institutions and, for a minority, towards the very notion of democracy.
According to the University of Virginia Center for Political Research, 31% of Donald Trump’s supporters, but also 24% of Joe Biden’s supporters, believe that democracy is no longer a viable system and that other options should be explored. forms of government.
This discouragement, this tension, the former Republican president like the current head of state responds in a radically opposite way.
“Great overflow”
Joe Biden still believes he can repair the “soul” of America.
“We are the United States of America, for God’s sake, there is nothing we can’t do, if we do it together!” » he repeats in almost every speech.
Hence his regular calls for consensus, despite the now gaping partisan divides, and his conviction that if the middle class lives well, the institutions will be preserved.
Donald Trump, for his part, is betting on the desire for control, even on the temptation of authoritarianism, in the face of a “decline” that he promises to halt.
He therefore relentlessly attacks the supposed weakness of his opponent, whether physical, mental or diplomatic.
“Our enemies and our allies consider it a pathetic joke,” said Donald Trump recently after a foreign policy speech by Joe Biden.
In 1868, a certain Georges Clémenceau, young correspondent in America for the Parisian newspaper Le Temps, was already observing with fascination the verbal and sometimes physical violence around the presidential election: “a general wantonness of minds” which “very rarely ends without riots and without battles.”
But the future head of the French government also noted that after this “great overflow of the overflow of all passions”, “the will of the people manifests itself sovereign, and order suddenly comes into being”.
“The victor ascends to the Capitol, while the defeated party adjourns and prepares its revenge,” he wrote.
Except that Donald Trump has never acknowledged his defeat in 2020 and promises, if he wins next year, to pardon the attackers of January 6, 2021.
That day, a crowd of his supporters invaded the Capitol, seat of Congress, to try to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s election.
Will the 2024 election, whatever its outcome, see the same type of violent protest?
According to a survey by the University of Chicago, nearly 7% of Americans believed in June that the use of force was justified to bring Donald Trump back to power, while a little more than 11.5% considered the contrary justified to resort to violence to prevent him from becoming president again.