LAS VEGAS – An “imperial” presidency with Donald Trump who promises to govern harshlyno longer conditioned by the Washington administrative machine (which in 2016, when he arrived at the White House, he did not know) and by a Republican party now totally trumped. Heavy hand with illegal immigrants for whom he hypothesizes detention camps and expulsions also extended to the 11 million “undocumented” foreigners who have been working in the country for years. And a foreign policy marked by his admiration for dictators and by its “negotiating isolationism”: America that will no longer defend allies who, in its opinion, do not spend enough to arm themselves.
The endless ininterview granted by Donald Trump to Timepresented as a government program of the future Republican administration, is, in reality, above all the confirmation signed by The Donald of two elements already highlighted by various political analysts (and explored for some time also by Courier). On the one hand, the determination to govern in his second mandate (if he is elected) without the constraints that limited his authoritarianism in the first: theattorney general (the Minister of Justice), who has always enjoyed, in American history, wide autonomy from the White House, will instead have to be under his orders. He will be fired if he doesn’t indict the people Trump wants to see convicted. For the rest, an administration totally under his orders because it will be guided at all levels by officials loyal more to him than to the Constitution (whose selection, as we have written several times, is already underway).
The second element, to which even greater attention must be paid at this stage, concerns his communication strategy in the electoral campaign: Trump threatens disasters – mass detention of immigrants, abandonment of allies in Europe and Asia, punishment of political opponents – because he has always been convinced that one governs with fear and not with good feelingsbut also because he now sees the polls in which the number of Americans fascinated by the strongman is growing, while the defense of democracy ends up in the second row among the needs expressed by many, especially young people.
On foreign policy, Trump sends messages tailored to the mood of a large part of the electorate: not the political threat of abandoning the West to its fate, but the president-CEO of the US company who says he is no longer willing to leave 40 thousand soldiers USA to defend South Korea from Kim Jong-un if that country, very rich and aggressive competitor of American businesses, will not pay much more for American protection. Same goes for Israel. Trump and the Republicans are certainly on his side even more than Biden, but the former president feels indignation rising over the massacre of civilians in Gaza and so states that it is right to attack Netanyahu.
As for immigrants, he knows that this is Biden’s real weak point: even the president knows it and now would like to (belatedly) correct course by closing the borders. He prevented it for electoral reasons and now attacks by threatening to do similar things more harshly. No one knows how far he will or will be able to go (judges should not allow him to expel those who have applied for asylum) but Trump knows that, whatever he says, he is treading water here: the resentment against illegal immigrants, once limited to conservatives law and orderhas now also been extended to many Democrats and, above all, it has also spread among black and Hispanic minorities. It is the return to the classic wars between the last: the African Americans in the ghettos are indignant because the democratic administrations of the metropolises try to absorb the wave of arriving migrants, ending up offering them (housing, schools, healthcare) more than what is given to the poor residents .
And since polls increasingly find representatives of social groups mistreated by Trump (including African-Americans) saying “we know he is what he is but we like what he says”, he he continues to blurt things out, focusing on catchy phrases: always ready to debunk them or contradict them in other discussions. Or even in the same: in the interview with Time first he says he doesn’t want to see Biden convicted because he has too much respect for the office of president of the United States. But then he adds that, if the Supreme Court does not establish the principle of the absolute irresponsibility of the occupant of the White House for any crime committed while he is in office, then Biden will be put on trial.
