Would a return to power of Donald Trump sound the death knell for American democracy? Less than a year before the presidential election, the question is being asked with increasing urgency by the former president’s adversaries.
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The world’s leading power is “sleepwalking towards a dictatorship,” asserts Liz Cheney, spokesperson for the Republicans opposed to the billionaire, while promoting her book on the subject.
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The former president, favorite in his party’s primary for the 2024 election, “told us exactly what he was going to do. He will not submit to court decisions. He will make appointments without worrying about them being validated by the Senate. He indicated that he would use the army in an absolutely un-American way,” the former Wyoming elected official listed Sunday in a television interview.
Liz Cheney even told Washington Post that she was considering launching an independent candidacy for the 2024 election, which should, barring any surprises of course, pit the former president against his Democratic successor, Joe Biden.
Liz Cheney
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Avenger
The increasingly violent rhetoric of the former tenant of the White House has already caused a lot of ink to flow, for example when he described his political opponents as “vermin”. Or when he promised to “avenge” his supporters after his defeat, which he never acknowledged, in the 2020 presidential election.
President Joe Biden has long made the defense of democracy one of his main campaign focuses. Seeing that his economic and social arguments are not working, the 81-year-old democrat insists with renewed ardor on the threat represented by his rival, and against which he considers to be the best defense.
“If Trump wasn’t running, I’m not sure I would run. But we cannot let him win,” the American president said on Tuesday, while touring Democratic donors in the Boston region (north-east).
AFP
Donald Trump “tells us what he wants to do. He doesn’t hide it,” Joe Biden once again assured, who also referred to the warnings of Liz Cheney, “a strong voice” according to him, and mentioned the magazine The Atlantic, whose latest issue is entirely devoted to portray a second Trump term.
The former businessman could “destroy institutions”, warns The Atlantic, which reviews his program in terms of institutions, defense, environment, immigration, judicial system…
“Donald Trump has shown authoritarian reflexes for a long time, but his political machine has become more sophisticated and the counter-powers have been weakened,” journalists from the New York Times.
One of the most resounding forums was signed on November 30 in the Washington Post by Robert Kagan, an intellectual known for his neoconservative diplomatic positions.
“Persecution”
“Let’s stop deluding ourselves and face the truth,” he writes, insisting that Donald Trump has a real chance of winning against a stubbornly unpopular Joe Biden, whose age worries voters.
Robert Kagan carefully describes how, once re-elected, the Republican would launch a full-blown “persecution” of his political adversaries and a purge of the state apparatus, deploying the army if necessary to crush any form of dissent.
Which challenge would probably be timid, he believes, in the most twilight passage of this already very dark demonstration: “In conservative tyrannies, ordinary people suffer all kinds of limitations on their freedoms, but this only matters to them in as much as they value these freedoms, many do not care about them.”
The main party responds to these accusations with his usual return-to-sender strategy: on Tuesday, he published a message on his Truth Social platform assuring, without really arguing, that it would in reality be Joe Biden the “real dictator” .
Donald Trump, facing multiple legal proceedings, believes that the current president “punishes his political opponents”, “ignores” the laws, “profits from power” and “subverts” the Constitution.