Joe Biden did not let twenty-four hours pass before joining Donald Trump and inviting him to the White House to prepare for the transition, on January 20, 2025. Like Barack Obama eight years earlier, the Democrat’s mission will be to entrust the presidency to a man who He will have showered him with insults. The task was even more painful for Barack Obama. The Republican, who insisted on the pronunciation of his middle name, Hussein, had for years fueled the conspiracy theory of a birth outside the United States, which made his presence in the Oval Office illegitimate.
Upon arriving at the White House after the January 6, 2021 assault by Donald Trump’s loyalists against Congress to prevent the certification of his victory, Joe Biden had set two objectives: turn the page on Trumpism and demonstrate that A democratic regime can be as effective as an authoritarian regime. Donald Trump’s victory shows that he has failed to achieve them.
“I know that talk of unity may seem, to some, a crazy fantasy these days. »said Joe Biden, in his inauguration speech on January 20, 2021, having finally achieved the role he had always wanted to perform. “ I know that the forces that divide us are deep and real, but I also know that they are not new. Our history has been a constant struggle between the American ideal, that we are all created equal, and the harsh, horrible reality that racism, nativism, fear, and demonization have long torn us apart. »he asserted, claiming that the two sides of a deeply divided America are struggling to look at each other. “not as adversaries, but as neighbors”.
A Congress devoured by its divisions
This hope of reconciliation was his first failure. The former senator from Delaware, shaped for more than three decades by a political practice, within the judicial affairs and then foreign affairs committees, based on compromise, discovered, belatedly, a Congress devoured by its divisions when he did not want it. was, with respect to the Republicans in the House of Representatives, subject to the tyranny of a Trumpist minority grouped in the Freedom Caucus.
Less than two years later, due to Donald Trump’s renewed control over his party, Joe Biden had regretted his hopes for reconciliation. The complaint of “MAGA Republicans [Make America Great Again] extremists » WHO “ don’t just threaten [leurs] personal rights and [leur] economic security »but who “Embrace political violence” has become a regular topic, starting with the midterm election campaign in the fall of 2022.
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