Joe Biden did not let twenty-four hours pass before joining Donald Trump and inviting him to the White House to prepare for the transition on January 20, 2025. Like Barack Obama eight years earlier, the Democrat will have the mission of entrusting the presidency to a man who showered him with insults. The task was even more painful for Barack Obama. The Republican, who insisted on the pronunciation of his middle name, Hussein, had fueled, for years, the conspiracy theory of a birth outside the United States which made his presence in the Oval Office illegitimate.
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Arriving at the White House after the assault, given on January 6, 2021, by Donald Trump’s loyalists against Congress to prevent the certification of his victory, Joe Biden had set two objectives: turning the page on Trumpism and proving that a democratic regime could be as effective as an authoritarian regime. Donald Trump’s victory shows that he has failed to achieve them.
« I know that talking about unity may seem, to some, to be a crazy fantasy these days », Said Joe Biden, in his inauguration speech on January 20, 2021, finally arriving at the office he had always wanted to exercise. “ I know that the forces that divide us are deep and real, but I also know that they are not new. Our history has been a constant struggle between the American ideal, that we are all created equal, and the harsh, horrible reality that racism, nativism, fear and demonization have long torn us apart. “, he assured, pleading that the two parts of a deeply divided America strive to look at each other “ not as adversaries but as neighbors ».
A Congress devoured by its divisions
This hope of reconciliation was his first failure. The former senator from Delaware, shaped for more than three decades by a practice of politics, within the judicial affairs and then foreign affairs committees, which was based on compromise, discovered, belatedly, a Congress devoured by its divisions when it was not, with regard to the Republicans of the House of Representatives, subject to the tyranny of a Trumpist minority grouped within the Freedom Caucus.
Less than two years later, due to Donald Trump’s renewed control over his party, Joe Biden had mourned his hopes of reconciliation. The denunciation of “ MAGA Republicans [Make America Great Again] extremists ” Who ” do not just threaten our personal rights and economic security » but who « embrace political violence » has become a regular theme, since the mid-term election campaign, in the fall of 2022.
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