Is American democracy entering its final year? With 11 months to go before the presidential election, a succession of alarmist articles and speeches are sketching the outlines of a second Trump administration. The Atlantic magazine published a special issue on the former leader's plans, which the editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg refers to as "an existential threat to the entire world." The United States is "sleepwalking into dictatorship," according to Republican Liz Cheney, a former Republican congresswoman from Wyoming.
In the Washington Post on November 30, the neo-conservative hawk Robert Kagan penned a gloomy op-ed that included the following prediction: "The Trump dictatorship will not be a communist tyranny, where almost everyone feels the oppression and has their lives shaped by it. In conservative, anti-liberal tyrannies, ordinary people face all kinds of limitations on their freedoms, but it is a problem for them only to the degree that they value those freedoms, and many people do not."
The polls, while unreliable, are fuelling the panic. Trump is crushing the Republican primaries and is regularly predicted to beat President Joe Biden in the event of another duel. "If Trump wasn't running I’m not sure I’d be running. We cannot let him win," Biden said on Tuesday, December 5 in Boston. His sacrificial gesture hardly inspires enthusiasm, at a time when a majority of Americans are concerned by the advanced age of the incumbent.
But why sound the alarm so early about the Trump threat, when the primaries don't start until January 15, in Iowa? Because this time he is advancing unmasked.
A case in point: his migration and security policies, detailed by the New York Times in a lengthy investigation published on November 11. They include the militarization of the border with Mexico, vast detention camps for undocumented immigrants and an unprecedented deportation campaign, an end to the automatic granting of US citizenship to the children of immigrants born in the United States, and the death penalty for drug traffickers, inspired by Xi Jinping's example in China.
Beyond immigration, Trump is teasing a historic break with rule of law. The former president is driven by a sense of revenge – aimed partly at Biden, whose 2020 victory he still does not recognize, and at all those who have tormented him over the past two and a half years, starting with the judges and federal police in charge of the investigations into his activities.
Decrying what he considers the politicization of the justice system, despite the charges brought against him in four cases, Trump wants to turn these same federal instruments against Biden and those close to him. "What they've done is they've released the genie out of the box," he declared in an interview with Spanish-language network Univision on November 9. He also intends to settle scores with those who, in his eyes, have betrayed him, such as former attorney general Bill Barr. Trump has turned a personal vendetta into a collective crusade, as he explained back in March before the Conservative Political Action Conference. "I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution."
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