Winner or loser, Donald Trump would be a danger to American democracy. This is the message that Joe Biden tried to convey in an interview with CBS, which will be broadcast in full this Sunday, August 11. The first since he withdrew from the race for the White House on July 20, and the endorsement of his vice-president Kamala Harris to face the Republican Party candidate.
“If Trump wins, no, I’m not confident at all. And if Trump loses, I’m not confident at all either,” he can be heard saying in a published excerpt. on account X of the American channel. And to add to it: when Donald Trump speaks of “bloodbaths” in the event of defeat, or speaks of a “stolen” election, “he thinks what he says, we don’t take him seriously but he is sincere.”
The specter of a new January 6
A direct reference from the American president to the series of more or less recent statements by the Republican candidate for the presidential election next November. On the sidelines of a meeting in Ohio last March, for example, Donald Trump lent himself to warnings with a prophetic tone: “If I’m not elected, it will be a bloodbath. That’s the least we can say.” And he hammered home: “It will be a bloodbath for the country.” And while his teleprompter failed him due to strong winds, the billionaire sinks: “I don’t think there will be another election in this country if we don’t win this election… Certainly not an election that makes sense.”
Enough to give food for thought to the opposing camp, which summed up the sequence with a brief: “This is what Donald Trump is,” “his extremism, his affection for violence and his thirst for revenge,” added Joe Biden’s campaign spokesman, James Singer. The same one for whom the Republican candidate gave a glimpse of what he considered obvious: “Trump wants another January 6.” That day in 2021 when the outgoing president, defeated two months earlier, encouraged hundreds of white-hot supporters to march on the Capitol, the seat of the US Congress. The result of the assault: five dead, including a police officer, and more than a hundred injured.
The new axis of attack of the democratic camp
Three and a half years later, Donald Trump has still not been finally judged. His federal trial, which was to take place on March 4, was adjourned indefinitely after the Supreme Court agreed to take up the matter last February. In early July, the highest judicial authority with a conservative majority pushed back the deadline once again, by enacting the extension of the American president’s immunity to all “official acts” carried out during the presidential mandate. A decision “which clearly works in Donald Trump’s favor”, Françoise Coste, professor at the University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès and specialist in the United States, emphasized to L’Express. And which worries the executive couple.
Because the extension of presidential immunity could encourage the MAGA advocate (for Make America Great Again, campaign slogan used by Ronald Reagan during the 1980 presidential campaign and taken up by Donald Trump) to be repeated in the event of defeat in the supreme election next November. “It is an obvious fear, Trump feels that the Court has given him a blank check and is preparing public opinion for new excesses,” explains specialist Françoise Coste.
This is why Democrats may well be tempted to make the specter of a putsch the central theme of the presidential campaign. On July 29, Joe Biden threw a spanner in the works by arguing in favor of a constitutional amendment removing the president’s immunity “for crimes committed in the exercise of his functions” and by proposing an overhaul of the sacrosanct Supreme Court. A project that he clearly knows is “stillborn,” but which is part of a broader campaign strategy aimed at imposing the idea that the American democratic system would be more threatened than ever by the businessman’s return to power.