HAS Following the debate on September 10, in which Kamala Harris performed well against Donald Trump, there was a feeling of excitement within the American left, in the press and on social media: “Kamala had crushed Trump”, “it was a triumph”, “a turning point in the campaign”, “Trump would have a hard time recovering”, etc.
However, Harris’ supporters must keep a cool head, the game is not over. The 2016 election taught us that the usual rules of American politics do not apply to Trump, especially since no one can predict the impact that the second assassination attempt on him on September 15 will have on public opinion. The tragic return of political violence to the debate in the United States (of course, we also think of the attack on the Capitol in January 2021) may indeed lead to a change of system that is difficult to understand.
In the immediate future, fifty days before the election, let us first acknowledge that Trump is a political animal, whether we like it or not. If we were able to mock his total lack of political and electoral experience when, in June 2015, in a now legendary scene, he came down the escalator of Trump Tower and announced his candidacy for the Republican primaries, we can now consider him the most successful American leader. No one else on the contemporary political scene has participated in as many presidential debates (the debate on September 10 was the seventh) or managed to be nominated three times in a row, a record unmatched for almost a century and the four candidacies of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s and 1940s.
Serial scandals
This longevity seems all the more incomprehensible to us since Trump’s successes have accumulated since his first campaign. A non-exhaustive list is enough to give a dizzying impression: the leaked recording where he explains that he cannot avoid“grab women by the pussy”the repeated insults to American soldiers who died in combat (of “losers”), Russian interference in the 2016 campaign, his two impeachments (for trying to blackmail Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, then for his role in the January 6, 2021 uprising), his conviction in the case of porn star Stormy Daniels, his catastrophic management of the Covid-19 epidemic (symbolized by his suggestion that people drink bleach to cure the virus), or even the theft of classified documents…
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