In the end, as experts on American politics predicted, the Republican Party gave in to the weight of the 74,222,958 votes given to Donald Trump in November 2020 and saved the former President of the United States from a new indictment. .
More importantly, with the acquittal of the Senate on Saturday (13), he maintained the political rights of the Republican, who already claims to be a candidate for the White House in 2024.
The shortage of leaders of the association, both a cause and a symptom of the rise of Trumpism in 2016, sealed its immediate fate to that of the former president. It couldn’t be worse for what was once the GOP, the Great Old Party in the English acronym.
It took 17 opposition votes today for Joe Biden against Trump to confirm the impeachment approved in the House of Representatives expressly in January. Mitch McConnell, the leader of the Senate party who implied the former president’s abandonment, did not condemn him either.
With just seven dissenting votes in the GOP, it was clear that the party had chosen not to alienate the motivated electorate from the last election.
You are now going to have to face two underlying issues. The first is Trump. For now banned from social networks, it will manage to make noise. Polls show he is the most popular Republican leader in the country, with a big advantage.
As part of the party, which emerged from the far-right movements that flourished from the end of the 2000s, the former president sincerely applauds. Another seeks to inherit such electoral musculature.
To complete the fratricidal picture, there are the more traditional Republicans, who have always hated the histrionic ex-president, who will also seek to regain control of the party. Senator Mitt Romney’s vote against Trump shows this intention.
But it still feels like a tough assignment. The New York Times recently surveyed dozens of heads of state and local parties, the so-called base of support. Trumpism rules.
The polarization that gave Biden 81,283,098 votes in the U.S. election with the highest popular turnout in history since 1900 suggests that spirits will continue to be engaged.
The lack of a clear platform for Trump, deprived of the White House and media hostility, will be an issue yet to be analyzed.
The second node of the Republican Party is more complex. Abolishing Trump indirectly meant tottering the scenes of brutality on January 6, when the horde of nativists, Trumpists and others stormed the Capitol under the inspiration of the then president.
As the five days of the Senate trial amply demonstrated, no one was there because he woke up with a sudden urge to kill Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi. There was clear direction from above from the leader.
It is an indelible stain in American democratic history, which is also rife with episodes of violence and institutional spasms. The myth of the western lighthouse is a construction of the twentieth century, more precisely after the First World War, reinforced by the victory of the Second and with the Cold War.
Doubts? Just look at “New York Gangs” (Martin Scorsese, 2002), with the same nativists in conflict with immigrants and all manner of ethnic and social groups in the 19th century, with politics interspersed with pitched battles in what is today. hui a symbol of the cosmopolitanism of the United States.
Republicans joined the episode by saving Trump’s head from watching Trump’s votes. It is a calculation. The political beheading of the ex-president would create a martyr, a character just as difficult to manage, and would also risk alienating the nearly 75 million voters gathered.
Now, on top of the moral guilt for January 6, the party will have to face Trump, perhaps the most toxic leader the country has ever had.
Separately, there must have been a commemoration in the homes of the Bolsonaro clan and in Ernesto Araújo’s office at the Foreign Office, given the gang’s fervor towards Trump.
Populists around the world have tried to isolate themselves from the American leader, such as Binyamin Netanyahu (Israel) or Viktor Orbán (Hungary). The same did not happen in Brazil, making native Trumpists political accomplices on January 6.