Political time is about to contract in the United States, as the notable primary season opens with the holding of the Iowa caucuses on January 15. An exercise where Donald Trump remains ahead everywhere, outrageously, despite and at the same time thanks to all the trials hanging over his nose. If primaries were held in each state tomorrow, he would probably win them all hands down.
Hope is the last to die, says a Brazilian proverb. So it is with the anti-Trump Republicans who, faced with Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida, hardly meeting expectations, are turning to the improbable Nikki Haley, making significant progress in the polls, certainly, but still very far from threatening the hegemony of the leader in the race for the nomination of the Republican Party with a view to the 2024 presidential election. Fifty percentage points separate them on a national scale. There is as little belief today in Trump’s ouster as there was in his election in 2016. The agitation around Nikki Haley could only be temporary.
The shift would perhaps not deserve so much attention if the former governor of South Carolina, and former American ambassador to the UN under Mr. Trump, had not just received major support, that of the political machine of the extremely wealthy Koch family, not without also sowing controversy. The latter is undoubtedly the source of the most powerful conservative political financing network in the country, known as Americans for Prosperity Action. The Koch network had refrained from taking a position on the presidential elections of 2016 and 2020. Let it break with this neutrality by putting its eggs in M’s basketme Haley, in the hope that she can create a buoyant anti-Trump dynamic, is notable. Especially since, when it comes to the crux of the matter, Nikki Haley’s electoral fund is some 18 million dollars, according to the Ballotpedia site; that of Trump, 60.5 million. The Kochs’ money will restore a certain balance.
Five weeks into the Iowa caucuses, the battle between Mr. DeSantis and Mr.me Haley for the role of Mr. Trump’s main but very distant rival is the subject of analyzes which the American press delights in. In voting intentions in Iowa, the “moderate” Haley is neck and neck with the orthodox conservative DeSantis in the wavering candidacy. She is also ahead of him in New Hampshire, where primaries will be held the following week. Iowa and New Hampshire: two battlegrounds that often set the tone. Or not. That Mme Haley continues his momentum and pressure will intensify on Chris Cristie, former governor of New Jersey who has made the all-out denunciation of Mr. Trump his business, to abandon the race for the nomination in profit of the politician. So much speculation which will necessarily have weighed on the fourth televised debate between Republican candidates which was held Wednesday evening in Tuscaloosa, Alabama – in the absence, as usual, of Donald Trump.
The Republican family bickers, we do not forget that they are all essentially of the same ideological school, to varying degrees of right-wing slippage. They are not all from the same chapel, but they all belong to the same large conservative church that has lost the north, united in their anti-democratic hostility. The Kochs may have been disgusted by Trump’s attempt to overturn the result of the 2020 elections, but they are nonetheless close comrades due to their libertarian affinities. It took the assault of January 6, 2021 for people like Nikki Haley and Liz Cheney, who published an anti-Trump opus on Wednesday titled Oath and Honor, finally bite the hand that had fed them. So much so that, in a certain way, it is not so much Mr. Trump’s aims as his method that clashes with them, the ex-president being the extreme and grotesque culmination of a Republican Party which has since maintained at least Cheney senior, under George W. Bush, the design of an “imperial presidency”, all-powerful, freed from counter-powers.
Two dystopian papers published Monday, one in the New York Timesthe other by The Guardian, show how a second Trump presidency would be more authoritarian, more violent and more vengeful than the first, as the man and his followers learned from their mistakes during the first term and learned to manipulate the machinery of state. If Trump were re-elected, American democracy and society would face unimaginable turmoil. Understandably, we can only hope that Nikki Haley manages to find the recipe capable of blocking Trump’s path before the next presidential election. However, this would not prevent the extreme right, by strong tendency, from continuing to percolate within the Republican Party.