Trump wants to return to the White House and blasphemes about his successor's "destructive" two years. US President Biden also attacks his predecessor. Dozens of helpers are working on "The Trump Project" at his official residence.
On the day Donald Trump threw himself headlong into the political fray and painted the verbal picture of a "shattered" United States, the White House launched a new website: "The Biden-Harris Record". On it you can find a positively washed job reference from the previous administration of US President Joe Biden and his Deputy Kamala Harris. Graphic factsheets and flowcharts show how White House and Democratic actions are addressing the issues of the present and the future. "Results for the American people," they call it.
Instead, the ex-president's speech at his Mar-a-Lago residence on Tuesday night made it sound like the rest of the United States was over on the mainland ablaze and on the verge of the apocalypse: blood on the city streets, drugs and guns in hands of criminal southern immigrants, destroying the economy; the workers ignored, the families destroyed in schools because of "gender madness" and last but not least the nuclear war already on the doorstep.
The temporal parallel can be coincidence. Much more likely, however, is calculation by the Democrats. Biden and the party leadership may have known that Trump would announce his candidacy. "Biden trolls Trump," headlined the US news site Axios on Tuesday about the Democrats' activities at the same time. "My predecessor promised an infrastructure week. A week that never came," Biden introduces a video on the same day that can be seen on his Twitter account and praises his own infrastructure package. Trump failed in his attempt to do so, Biden brought his through Congress together with Republicans.
The two contradictory accounts of the past two years are primarily suitable for confirming voters' party preferences. Swing voters are extremely rare, very few are always faced with an open decision as to why they choose where to vote. It's all about mobilization. Those in power refer to what has been achieved, Trump promises to be able to find water again in the desert. Only those for whom truths are flexible have to look along.
This is how the ex-president presented himself to his invited guests as a fighter for the forgotten, who are disadvantaged by the "radical, left-wing madmen" aka Democrats and their leader Biden. That worked in 2016 when he was narrowly elected. But whether it can be like that again remains to be seen. At the time, his opponent was Hillary Clinton, a textbook representative of the political establishment. Biden, on the other hand, is much more approachable.
About a third of Republicans belong to Trump's steadfast base, for the rest the party is more important. So he may have to get past a strong internal party competitor at some point. At the latest when a competitor should emerge in the primary elections who represents conservative values and could bring the Republicans back into government. "I am your vote," Trump said in his announcement, and "this is not my campaign." This can be interpreted as a small peace offer to the Republicans who are not part of his base.
The world has moved on in the past two years, and even more so since 2016. In terms of content, Trump has to adapt, for example with his unclear attitude towards Russian President Vladimir Putin or with climate change, which even some die-hard Republicans no longer deny. But there's still a grief at its base about a lost past that for the most part never existed - or only for a certain demographic. Trump continues to address them. But he has lost his quality as a pure underdog. The fact that he presents it differently doesn't change anything.
The midterm elections have shown that fewer Americans share Trump's views than his faction had hoped. Candidates supported by him were defeated in the crucial races. Perhaps more important to the mobilization was for people to feel the impact of the conservative victories of Trump's presidency on their lives. This produces Democratic voters who may form a much larger "silent majority" than Trump always claims of his own supporters.
The Republicans have moved far away from the reality of life for a large part of the urban population, for some Democrats it is the other way around. In all political camps, it is about encouraging one's own party to vote. That's how it was two years ago, when voter turnout hit a new record, and Democratic voters more than anything else wanted to prevent Trump for four more years, not Biden as their president. In the first half of his mandate, the Democrat delivered more than critics in his own party thought.
The 2024 presidential election is a long time away. Republicans still have time to sort themselves out. It was "very, very early" for a preview of the Conservative primaries, said one of their election strategists on US radio station NPR the day after Trump's announcement. If the current situation were to remain, he said, the ex-president would still have slight advantages over an opposing candidate.
The Democrats are already much better prepared for attacks from Trump's camp than they were six years ago, which shows the parallelism of events. At that time, the entrepreneur was simply not taken seriously, even Republicans assumed his defeat. Biden's advisers call their activities "The Trump Project", writes the "New York Times". Just don't get on the defensive is probably a motto. For a possible renewed duel, dozens of helpers are already collecting campaign ammunition: Trump's speeches and interviews, any articles about him. And not just since yesterday.
