While we await news on the migration issue in the Senate, and while President Joe Biden’s agenda, on various matters, continues to be stalled over internal differences among the Democrats, Donald Trump and his Republican Party are intent on one thing: taking control from the Democrats—of Congress in 2022 and the White House in 2024.
While he has not clearly stated whether he will seek the Republican nomination in 2024 or not, Trump is the one who really rules his party, controlling the tone and message that continues to be one of racism, prejudice, division, and anti-immigration, sustained by lies and falsehoods, like the one about “fraud” in the 2020 elections.
In light of news that a new caravan of migrants is mobilizing toward the U.S.-Mexico border, Trump emerges to stir up his followers and say, according to the New York Post, undocumented immigrants are “poisoning” the United States.
“Our Country is being poisoned with the millions of people that are illegally flowing through our Borders, in most cases not even questioned or stopped. Many are criminals from the emptied prisons of other countries, most of these are very dangerous people,” said Trump.
Same old, same old. What’s more, it feels like we are in 2015 when he announced his presidential candidacy, because once again he alluded to the wall that, according to him, Biden must finish.
And the only truly poisonous thing is Trump, with his destructive politics of hate that have divided not only the political class, but the country and, ten months into the Biden presidency, the atmosphere continues to be as toxic and tribal as ever. Trump’s followers, enveloped in the cult of their leader, don’t understand logic, continuing to believe that the election was “stolen” from Trump and, at the political level, no Republican figure has risen who could beat Trump. In Congress and at the national level no one, to this day, has dared to confront him. Those who hope to be reelected or elected in 2022 are looking for Trump’s blessing, so that his followers will help them win.
And I’m not even convinced that they are doing this out of fear of Trump. More likely, it seems they are just the same as him, because if they believe what Trump is doing is bad, they would have already denounced it. Those who criticized Trump have been excommunicated by the Republican leadership, so the only conclusion is that the others support Trump and all that he represents.
That is why they have not even supported the congressional inquiry into the January 6 attack on the Capitol, when the mob instigated by the president tried to violently prevent certification of Biden’s win. That is why those Republican leaders continue perpetuating Trump’s lie, that Biden won because of “fraud.”
And that is why Republican governors and legislatures around the country have closed ranks to undermine democracy, erecting obstacles in the way of exercising people’s right to vote. They also seek to obtain the right to not certify a presidential candidate’s win, as Trump tried to do in 2020, calling on Republican secretaries of state to not certify Biden’s win.
Those who think that with his defeat in 2020 Trump would leave the picture are wrong. The danger that Trump and his Republican enablers represent to democracy continues to be very real. We can only hope that those differences among Democrats don’t keep the party from confronting the real and imminent danger that Trumpism continues to pose to this country’s democracy.
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