The United States has entered an election year. With eight days to go before the first Republican primary in Iowa, it's hard to feel the slightest sense of popular excitement, given the familiarity of the main players: the president, Joe Biden, on the Democratic side, and his predecessor, Donald Trump, the overwhelming favorite for the Republican nomination. Each seems to be jumping the gun and anticipating a new duel. Each despises the other and can't say enough harsh things about them. Each also needs the other, a fateful tango between a precocious octogenarian and an advanced septuagenarian whose movements a majority of Americans have little desire to observe.
Trump electrifies the airwaves. Every day has its outbursts, its mockery of a public figure's physique, its profane rewriting of history, like a remark about how the Civil War could have been avoided by being "negotiated." The ex-president was in Iowa on Saturday, where his main Republican rivals, Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, are holding a series of public meetings, without managing to close the gap in the polls. Speaking in Newton, Trump reaffirmed his incendiary strategy. On the third anniversary of his supporters' assault on the Capitol, he called for the release of the "hostages" of January 6, 2021. He repeated this word several times, relayed by several close friends on broadcasts.
The reversal is complete. After denying that there was any level of insurrection, paying tribute to the supposedly legitimate anger of MAGA ("Make America Great Again") activists and normalizing their actions, Trump now presents them as victims of state persecution.
It's a misrepresentation that he also intends to apply to himself, whether in upcoming trials on January 6, 2021 – in Georgia and at the federal level – or before the US Supreme Court. In particular, the Supreme Court has agreed to rule on Trump's exclusion from the Colorado primary, decided by that state's supreme court. America's highest court is expected to rule on the growing number of appeals in dozens of states to prevent the former president from running again. The nine justices will hear arguments from both sides on February 8. They will also have to rule on the key issue of possible presidential immunity from prosecution, which Trump is claiming.
Biden unofficially entered the campaign trail on January 5. In Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, the Democratic president gave a trenchant speech against his rival, quoting him extensively by name, something he had long refused to do. Once again, the assault on the Capitol offers Biden an angle of attack already tried and tested before the mid-term elections in November 2022: that of an existential threat to the "sacred cause" that is American democracy. "Trump is trying to steal history the same way he tried to steal the election," he summed up. "Donald Trump's campaign is about him. Not America. Not you. Donald Trump's campaign is obsessed with the past, not the future He's willing to sacrifice our democracy."
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