The investigative committee of the House of Representatives on the unprecedented aberrations of January 6, 2021 in the Capitol reminds citizens every day of the leading role of Donald Trump in one of the darkest days of the American Republic. The Justice of the State of Georgia is investigating the staff of the lawyer Rudy Giuliani for cooperation in an attempt to overturn the election result in his duel with Joe Biden, in 2020. At the same time, the New York prosecutor’s office has put the Trump Group under the microscope for tax evasion and business cases con, while FBI agents search the 45th President’s Florida residence, looking for classified documents.
At the same time, Donald Trump is spectacularly strengthening his influence within the Republican party, as his chosen ones are defeating their opponents in the intra-party primary contests in view of the crucial elections for the Congress, next November, reviving his ambitions for a spectacular rematch, in the 2024 presidential race.
Liz Cheney’s electoral failure
The most striking case was the Wyoming primaries on Tuesday, August 16, where Liz Cheney and Harriet Hageman competed for the Republican congressional nomination. The former is the scion of a family that has turned Wyoming into its political protectorate for half a century, when the political career of her father, Halliburton executive Dick Cheney, who worked in the White House during the Nixon and Ford administrations, served as secretary of defense, began and became America’s most powerful vice president under George W. Bush. Building on that legacy, Liz Cheney was until recently the number 3 ranking Republican in the House of Representatives.
In the primaries on August 16, she had against her a politically inexperienced lawyer from Sagen, a provincial town of only sixty thousand inhabitants, with her only asset being the support of Donald Trump. The result was overwhelming, as Hageman prevailed with a percentage of 66% against her opponent’s 29%. Joys and celebrations for Donald Trump who saw Cheney as his sworn enemy. The 56-year-old congresswoman voted in favor of his impeachment for the bloody raid of his followers on the Capitol, in fact, she assumed the duties of vice-chairman of the House Investigative Committee on the matter in question. Her case was not unique. Of the ten Republican congressmen who voted to impeach Donald Trump, only two managed to win the nomination in the primaries. According to the new report, the candidates supported by Donald Trump are winning in the internal Republican contests for all the offices that will be decided in November.
They have won 15 of 20 gubernatorial contests so far and 18 of 21 senatorial contests. Even more spectacular were the primaries for the nomination of the congressional candidate: Of the 140 candidates supported by Trump, only five were defeated, while the contests remain in six more states.
The obstacles in Trump’s way
The biggest obstacle to Trump’s ambitions for a vengeful comeback lies neither in Liz Cheney-style annoyances nor in the machinations of the McConnell-Pence-style Republican establishment, which finds itself no longer in control of its own party, but in the string of prosecutions which is getting narrower. But this is an operation of high political risk for the competent Secretary of Justice Merrick Garland and for the Democrats as a whole. Garland’s decision to order an FBI raid on a former president’s home under the 1917 Espionage Act is galvanizing Trump’s popular base and could backfire on public opinion if sufficient persuasion is not presented.
Even more, the authorities have so far refused to release the affidavit on which the controversial investigation was based, despite the fact that it has been requested by the most powerful American media. The picture remains very fluid, and the coming weeks will be critical as even potential intra-party rivals of Trump in the race for the presidency, such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSandis, are forced to identify with him, denouncing Garland and the FBI for turning America into a “banana republic”.
The conclusion
The conclusion is inescapable for anyone with eyes to see. Trump’s shock victory in 2016 was a historic accident of an otherwise healthy America, but a glaring symptom of a deeper and more abiding pathology, a swelling popular current that breathes rage against the political establishment from reactionary positions. Trump himself was not the one who created this current, but the one who managed to express it at this particular moment and turn it into a vehicle for his meteoric rise, taking advantage of the fact that in the 2016 contest he was lucky enough to be faced with one of the most typical representatives of a hypocritical, completely detached from the popular layers of the establishment, Hillary Clinton.
