translated from Spanish: Something smells bad in America. U.S.

Sad spectacle offered the world america’s first presidential debate. Shameful for the first world power, which is wary of being an exemplary democracy and having a long Republican tradition based on the legacy of its Founders and the Constitution of 1787.
It was also an outrageous debate for the vast majority of the American people, who as citizens have the right to have candidates maintain mutual respect and discuss issues relevant to the country and make proposals. However, four weeks after the election, these citizens could not hear any of that, but only watch a fight between two schoolchildren.
American presidential debates have some aggression. But this one was incendiary. It was tinged with Trump’s ultra-bellicose style, for whom sharpening division is part of his strategy, because that’s how he stokes his hardened electoral base and pushes her to come to vote, which is a tactical goal in every presidential debate.
Trump managed to place the dispute on his ground, uncomfortable and blocking his contender. It was an endless and exhausting crossover of disqualifications based on lies and unthracian issues, full of childish provocations and interruptions from one to the other.
Presidential debates are also a kind of Republican institution. Vejarla has its costs. The President did not comply with the rules of the game provided for the debate, which proved frustrating. Sometimes he was obfuscated and seemed to be fighting with himself. That’s why many polls gave Trump the loser of the debate. It did not live up to the dignity that the Presidency of the United States deserves, which is a formal institution of the Republic, almost revered in the United States.
Joe Biden, for his part, withstood many low blows, but some responded with similarly caliber aggressions, lowering himself to the level of his contender, which made things worse. Biden did not show the temperance to always remain calm in the face of Trump’s provocations, nor was he able to contain his rival with intelligence with an effective strategy, capabilities that are very relevant to wielding the presidency well.
Trump’s misleading lies and claims were many. We’re used to it, we know he’s a world champion in that trade. But Biden also slid some.
But the most important thing for me is that the debate revealed three bad omens for America and its democracy, each serious on its own but we can relate them to each other.
President Trump, who is losing in the polls, said with complete aplomb that these will be the most fraudulent election in US history, mainly because of the mail vote he completely discredits and that it will be proportionately very significant in this election. In this regard, Biden fully validated the vote by mail and called for a vote and full confidence in the results.
Related to the above, faced with another question, Trump was unwilling to claim that he will respect the election’s results, but left it in doubt and called on his constituents to massively attend vote counts and audit them harshly. Biden, for his part, made it clear that he would respect the results, whether they favoured him or not.
And the third element related to the previous ones is that with regard to organized violent far-right groups and white supremacists who have been very active in the latest protests, such as the Proud Boys or the Ku Klux Klan, and who support Trump, the moderator asked Trump to call them to end the violence. But Trump evaded responding and, at the insistence, called on the Proud Boys to “go back and wait.”
If we relate the previous three elements, a bad omen will be built in the coming months for the US and its democracy.
If Trump loses in the first results of the election, he will likely quickly declare that it was fraudulent, not acknowledge his defeat, and cater in support of that position a violent process led by Trump supporting far-right groups, such as Proud Boys (whom he called for now only to “back and wait”), the Alternative Right (Alt-Right), the Ku Klux Klan and then almost all of his followers who believe him at the feet of Trump Says.
In the face of a disrecognise of the results by Trump and the groups that support him to back him up, it is almost certain that violent groups of America’s ultra-left will react such as “Antifa,” the Radical Left, and anarchist groups. The Black Lives Matter or BLM movement and others will probably be added.
This tense scenario uncertainty, perhaps violent, could last several weeks or months, by counting so many votes by mail and by objecting to the election results before the Us Courts.
As a result, we are facing the presidential election of the world’s largest power, with a respectable democratic tradition, in which even several weeks before it takes place, President Trump has already declared: it will be “the most fraudulent in history”; that the American electoral system is poor, vulnerable and has no credibility; has been put on the stage of ignoring the results of the election; and has asked a group of its most violent and extremist followers to “back and wait” for now. Some kind of call to rest the soldiers to wait for the battle order.
In addition to the uncertainty that all this could cause in the US, with its effects around the world, it would cause serious and worrying damage to democracy in that country, far more than has already been caused to it in the deastrous presidential debate.
I hope that my bad omens for the US will be nothing more than nightmares and that, if they come true, they will also not represent a preview of what later happens in Chile within a nefarious globalized phenomenon of populism and division.

The content poured into this opinion column is the sole responsibility of its author, and does not necessarily reflect the editorial line or position of El Mostrador.

Original source in Spanish

Related Posts

Add Comment