The US Congress is tightening the noose around ex-President Donald Trump, the chief election thief. Pushed against the wall in the aftermath of his November 2020 defeat, stubbornly refusing to listen to the advice of members of his cabinet who urged him to devote himself to the transfer of power, Trump led the charge to subvert the result. He encouraged his armed supporters to disrupt the ballot certification process, even refusing to appeal for calm when they forced their way into the Capitol, the inner circle of American democracy.
In the aftermath of this murderous assault by a raging mob, light-hearted right-wing thinkers said it was an exaggeration to call the affair a coup d’etat. Many Trump supporters and prominent Republican elected officials continue to trivialize the seriousness of the actions committed on January 6, 2021.
A congressional commission of inquiry, chaired by Democrat Bennie Thompson, observes the events of January 6 in the stark light of the facts, corroborated by 1,000 witnesses and 140,000 pages of documents. The assault on the Capitol was “the culmination of an attempted coup. Donald Trump was at the center of this conspiracy,” Thompson concluded.
The attack was not accidental. There was a design at work behind this attempt to prevent Congress from certifying the result of the presidential election. Trump and his most immoral minions have coordinated the effort to pervert the Constitution and democracy of the United States. An imperial presidency? We were getting dangerously close until institutions reflecting the system of checks and balances dear to American democracy blocked Trump’s way and confirmed Biden’s victory.
The January 6 attack is not a bad dream of the past, however. It is still very much alive in the minds of the far right and the Republican Party which, for the moment, remains a monolithic formation evolving in a narrow corridor, between the temptation of a Trump 2024 candidacy or Trumpism without the Donald .
Efforts to subvert the electoral process are ongoing in states under Republican control. Without burden of proof or justification, more than 20 of these states have passed laws to restrict the universality of the ballot, tighten access to polling places and monitor the conduct of election workers, sometimes under threat of prosecution. criminals. It is ironic, to say the least, that the party responsible for the greatest attempt at voter fraud in modern history in the United States, the Republican Party, seeks to suppress fraud where there is none, while all of his current intellectual thought and action is geared towards mass fraud and deception. Willful blindness to the power of ten.
The disintegration of the Democratic ethos within the Republican Party concerns us more than it first appears. The United States is Canada’s main economic and strategic partner, whose interests would be ill-served by another four years of Trumpist turbulence.
Canada and Quebec are democratic nations, imperfect of course, but they mostly adhere to respect for universal suffrage and institutions. However, in homeopathic doses, revengeful populism is very present in our political debates. Just listen to one of the main candidates for the leadership of the Conservative Party, Pierre Poilievre. We need only remember his support for the inflammatory remarks of the so-called Freedom Convoy, which paralyzed Parliament Hill and cross-border trade.
Nowadays, even the craziest and most bizarre ideas from the United States find their way into our debates thanks to the instant pollination of social networks. In our big neighbour, the chief promoter of democracy in the world, there is cause for concern when a party slides towards authoritarianism to the point of considering itself the only natural party capable of governing.
The smooth transition of power is one of the founding acts of the United States and an essential condition for the vitality of democratic nations. This heritage is under attack in the United States. The American people are more divided as to the seriousness of the threat to American democracy: a majority of Republican voters believe the lie of the stolen election.
The work of subversion and perversion of democratic institutions will be at the heart of the internal struggle for the soul of the United States and, more broadly, for the legitimacy of the democratic systems that the new powers, China in the lead, charge of obsolescence. These are the lasting lessons of the insurrection of January 6, 2021. In America, a democratic experiment two and a half centuries old is exposed to the onslaught of man.