So, Donald Trump is back. We left him flying on January 20, 2021 into the skies of Washington, ignoring the transfer of power ceremony, essential in democracy to reaffirm the unity of a nation. Joe Biden was sworn in; Donald Trump was absent. The outgoing president had just taken off for Florida. Two weeks earlier, on January 6, his mandate had experienced a pathetic twilight with the assault on the Capitol. We imagined the Mar-a-Lago retiree devoting his old days to regular golf practice.
Four years later, Donald Trump is once again at the gates of power. As if nothing had happened, as if the deaths of January 6 had never happened. Tuesday, November 5, the Republican could achieve the feat, unprecedented in the 21st century, of returning to the White House four years after being dismissed by the Americans.
The virus of demonization in politics
To understand this spectacular return, we must look at the recent history of the party he made his own. The history of the Republican Party, the Grand Old Party (GOP), before Trumpism. Because if the 45e president in the history of the United States, during his mandate and after his defeat, exacerbated polarization, he did not invent it. When he moved into the Oval Office, America had already been on this path for several decades, against a backdrop of the rise of the evangelical right. The seeds of discord had been sown.
There was, first, the Gingrich divide, named after the leader of the Republicans against President Bill Clinton (1993-2001). Newt Gingrich, once tipped to be Donald Trump’s vice-president in 2016, was the first to make Democrats not adversaries, but “enemies”. Of the “corrupted”. Of the “liars”. Of the “traitors”. He introduced the virus of demonization into politics on a large scale, ordering his troops to abandon the tone of civility and forget the idea of compromise.
Not without success. Because the voters, already won over by the fear of decline and downgrading, followed him, until the Congress shifted to the Republican camp in 1995, a first in forty years. We need to revisit the tricks and tricks of Newt Gingrich from back in the day. They seem very familiar to us, despite their outdated decor. And for good reason: Donald Trump has adopted his methods, bringing them up to date.
The Fox News Accelerator
Then there was the success of a new 24-hour news channel, Fox News, a formidable sounding board for the GOP right. It was Fox News that allowed the Tea Party, the populist movement opposed to Barack Obama’s tax policy and his health reform, to find a tremendous echo across the country. In 2010, Republicans associated with the Tea Party showed up in numbers in Congress during catastrophic legislative elections for the White House.
At that time, Fox News also regularly opened its channels to a real estate mogul who was starting to make his way off the business trail: a certain Donald Trump. Thanks to Rupert Murdoch’s channel, the Queens mogul could loudly proclaim that Barack Obama was probably not born in the United States. And as a result he was probably not American enough to govern the country.
By adopting new behaviors at the end of the 20th century, Ronald Reagan’s former party partially opened the GOP’s door to populism. It was enough for Donald Trump to step into the breach. In 2016, Republican voters, ripe to welcome the expert in demonization, discovered that, without knowing it, they were already Trumpists. The billionaire’s opponents within the party, starting with Jeb Bush, brother and son of the president, were therefore swept aside. Just like those who, eight years later, will try, more or less timidly, to prevent his return.
(1) Authors of the documentary Radical right, the conquest of Washington
