Since 2015, the recipe has been unchanged: Donald Trump draws on the endless resources of fear and fantasy. A local news story can become a national cause, an unfounded rumor can become a fraudulent demonstration. The televised debate between the Republican candidate for the US presidential elections and the Democrat Kamala Harris on Tuesday, September 10 on ABC, demonstrated this even more.
The first case concerns abortion. Faced with the massive mobilization of the left on this social issue since the Supreme Court’s decision in June 2022 struck down this right at the federal level, Republicans are clinging to a lie. The left would be in favor of abortion… after birth. On Tuesday, Donald Trump claimed that Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’s running mate, would believe that “Abortion in the ninth month would be completely acceptable”, just as “execution after birth”. In June, on Fox News, he already declared that the United States “pass legislation that allows babies to be executed after birth”. Obviously, no State has adopted a text to this effect.
The Guttmacher Institute, an authority on abortion monitoring, estimates that 1,037,000 abortions will have been performed in the country by 2023, despite the ban in fourteen federal states. In total, 94% of the procedures involved pregnancies during the first thirteen weeks. But the Republicans caricature the Democratic positions by denouncing abortions for pure convenience, on demand, without concern for the fetus. A position that is both cynical and insensitive to the tragedies experienced by women forced to abort very late.
The second fantasy aroused by Donald Trump himself concerns the gender issue. The former president claims that minors could be operated on under the influence of their teachers, driven by the ideology of awakening, and this without the knowledge of their parents. He thus falls within the cultural war launched by the Christian nationalist right, of which the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, was one of the standard-bearers.
Speaking recently in Washington before the organization Moms for Liberty, Donald Trump declared: “Transgender is amazing. Imagine. You can go to school and come back a few days later with the surgery. The school decides what will happen to their child. And you know, a lot of these girls say fifteen years later: “What the hell happened to me? Who did this to me?” This is false. Puberty blockers, hormonal treatments or operations, which are extremely rare in minors, all require written parental consent.
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