US Elections: The month that blew up American politics | USA Elections

There are years that last a century, and there are weeks that disappear in a second. So many things have happened in American politics in the past month between this Saturday and last June 27, the day of the debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump that set off all the alarms about the former’s re-election candidacy, that if you hadn’t already woken up from a coma this Friday with the news that Obama…

There are years that last a century, and there are weeks that disappear in a second. So many things have happened in American politics in the past month between this Saturday and last June 27, the day of the debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump that set off all the alarms about the former’s re-election candidacy, that if you had woken up from a coma this Friday with the news that Obama is supporting Kamala Harris’ campaign for the White House, you would surely have had to ask for help to understand how everything that happened could have happened.

So much historic action for so little time. The list includes, among other sensational events: the first resignation of a president running for a second term in half a century; an attack against Trump that revived the worst ghosts in the history of American political violence; and the promotion of a candidate possibly Unpopular, but in a matter of hours he managed to demonstrate that there is still a game just 100 days before the appointment of the elections.

On that Thursday of the debate in Atlanta, there were still 131 votes to be cast in the election, which then made the battle somewhat boring because of what was on offer. Deja vu, Between a disliked and elderly president (81 years old) and a convicted criminal ex-president who is also very old (78 years old). Biden’s disastrous performance during the ninety minutes of face-to-face – lapses, lost threads, incomplete sentences – led to “panic” becoming the most repeated word among the Democratic ranks even before the end of a horrific television spectacle watched by just over 50 million viewers. With a candidate who was surrounded by serious doubts about his physical and mental abilities, winning in November suddenly seemed impossible.

Movements began within the party to convince Biden that the time for political sacrifice had come, while he tried unsuccessfully to demonstrate that everything was going well, and anyone would have a bad night. He held a fiery rally in North Carolina and hoped that a television interview would be enough to dispel doubts about his abilities. Despite the fact that he had increased his presence in the media, he was unable to convince almost anyone, and he attended a press conference with questions from reporters, something unusual for him. This was at the end of the NATO 75th anniversary summit in Washington; and the bad news is that he mistook Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for Russian Vladimir Putin and Trump for Harris.

The two slips thickened a snowball that had begun running earlier with opinion articles, loaded with friendly fire ammunition, that had told him to think better than he already was on the night of the debate; with editorials of the new York Times The next day they demanded his resignation; and this was accompanied by frequent desertions among his own people.

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On July 5, Texas congressman Lloyd Doggett was the first to publicly call on him to step down. Later the flow became steady: four members of the House of Representatives one day; from the first senator to the next… The day with the most casualties was July 19, at the end of the week when it was revealed that party leaders in Congress (Hakeem Jeffries) and the Senate (Chuck Schumer) had warned the president in separate private meetings that his efforts were endangering not only the fate of his candidacy but also the fate of all representatives from decisive districts, who also renew their positions in November.

in front of Operation Replaces Biden Former Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, one of the most powerful Democrats in Washington and a woman who believes in the power of well-used money to win elections and knows little about losing elections, was put in charge. According to the media’s reconstruction of what happened behind the scenes, it was her firm support for Biden that pushed the president to surrender the evidence.

Before the announcement that he would not run for re-election – last Sunday, by surprise and ending with this. And he returned, yes, but not to campaign, but, after recently recovering from a Covid that had led him to isolate himself in his beach house, returned to the Oval Office to give the most difficult speech of his long political career, in which he justified his decision on Wednesday as an act in “defense of democracy” with the idea of ​​​​”handing over the baton to a new generation.”

Biden’s two messages

While rivals were gouging each other’s eyes, the former president received a gift from the Supreme Court in early July, which ruled in favor of extending presidential immunity. Nine judges, three of whom were appointed by Trump, participated in a claim by the former president’s lawyers regarding the Washington case, one of four prosecuted against him for his involvement in efforts to overturn the 2020 election result and the attack on the Capitol.

The Supreme Court’s favorable ruling had two practical consequences: it delayed the trial, which almost certainly would not begin until after the election, and it postponed the sentencing hearing in court from July 11 to September 18. Stormy Daniels case, in which a jury in New York found him guilty of 34 felonies related to paying a porn actress money to keep quiet about a relationship between them, which he denies. Later, the judge in the case Mar-a-Lago Papers, Known for taking confidential documents without permission from the White House, he dismissed it last week, a controversial decision that special prosecutor Jack Smith has appealed. The start of a fourth trial is also pending in Atlanta, where he is accused of attempting electoral fraud in the state of Georgia.

The Republican National Convention, held in Milwaukee last week, was a triumphal parade for Trump; staging that he leads a party without potential dissenters and that it is completely at his feet. Two days before that convention, the candidate survived an attack at a rally in Pennsylvania, the result of a Secret Service action so devastating that his boss, Kimberly Cheatle, had to resign this Tuesday. The motivations of the attacker, a 20-year-old man named Thomas Crooks, are still under investigation.

Delegates to the convention, which also praised J.D. Vance as the Republican vice presidential nominee, found only one possible explanation for Trump’s survival: that there had been “divine intervention.” The candidate had seemed a changed man all week amid calls for national unity. But then he took up the microphone to deliver his candidacy acceptance speech and returned to being Trump as always: energetic, divisive and ready for a fight.

The speed with which Kamala Harris managed to unite (and enthuse) Democrats around her seemed to have put the Trump campaign, which had been preparing for too long to defeat an elderly opponent with a poor memory, in trouble. And suddenly, the choice of Vance started to look like a bad idea when it was too late.

Harris already has the backing of party heavyweights, first Pelosi, then Schumer and Jeffries and, finally, Obama. She has racked up record campaign fundraising figures and has hit the road with vigor and a clear message: casting her battle with Trump as that of a prosecutor (she was in California before she was a senator and vice president) against a convicted criminal.

In another quirk of the calendar, this Sunday will mark exactly the 100-day mark until the November elections. The big question is whether Harris will be able to sustain the enthusiasm she has aroused this week and whether that enthusiasm will be enough to defeat Trump in the six (or seven) pivotal states where the presidency will be decided. There are 100 days that last an eternity and others that pass in the blink of an eye. Given what we have seen, the only thing that is certain is that anything is possible in the most unpredictable electoral campaign in recent memory.

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