There are years that last a century, and weeks that vanish in a second. So much has happened in American politics in the month between this Saturday and June 27, the day of the debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump that set off all the alarms about the former’s reelection bid, that if you had woken up from a coma this Friday with the news that the Obamas were giving their support to Kamala Harris’s campaign for the White House, you would surely have had to ask for help to understand how everything that happened could have happened.
Too much historical event for such a short space of time. The list includes, among other sensational events: the first president in half a century to refuse to run for a second term; an attack on Trump that resurrected the worst ghosts of the history of American political violence; and the campaign of a female candidate a prioriunpopular, but in a matter of hours he managed to demonstrate that there is still a game more than 100 days before the date with the polls.
That Thursday of the debate in Atlanta, there were still 131 left until the elections, which were then the fight, somewhat boring because of what it had of deja vu, between an unpopular and elderly president (81 years old) and a convicted criminal ex-president who is also very old (78 years old). Biden’s disastrous performance during the ninety minutes of the face-to-face – the lapses, the lost threads, the unfinished sentences – caused that, even before the end of a chilling television spectacle watched by more than 50 million viewers, “panic” became the most repeated word among the Democratic ranks. With such a candidate, plagued by serious doubts about his physical and mental abilities, it suddenly seemed impossible to win in November.
That’s when movements within the party began to convince Biden that the time had come for political sacrifice, while Biden tried unsuccessfully to show that everything was going well, and that anyone can have a bad night. He gave an energetic rally in North Carolina and hoped that a television interview would be enough to dispel doubts about his abilities. He failed to convince almost anyone, despite the fact that he stepped up his presence in the media and, unusually for him, agreed to a press conference with questions from journalists. It was at the end of the NATO 75th anniversary summit in Washington; and the bad news is that he confused the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, with the Russian Vladimir Putin and Trump with Harris.
Both slips fattened a snowball that had been set in motion with the first opinion articles, loaded with friendly fire ammunition, which asked him, already on the night of the debate, to think better of it; with the editorial of The New York Times who the next day demanded his resignation; and with the successive desertions among his own people.
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The first to publicly call for him to step aside was Texas Congressman Lloyd Doggett on July 5. The trickle then became steady: four House members one day, the first senator the next… The day with the most casualties was July 19, at the end of the week when it became known that the party leaders in Congress (Hakeem Jeffries) and the Senate (Chuck Schumer) had warned the president in private meetings that his efforts were endangering the fate not only of his candidacy, but of all the representatives of decisive districts who are also up for reelection in November.
At the front of the Operation to replace Biden In the lead was former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, one of Washington’s most powerful Democrats and a woman who believes in the power of well-spent money to win elections but is not keen on losing them. It was her firmness with Biden, according to media reconstructions of what happened behind the scenes, that inclined the president to bow to the evidence.
Before announcing that he would not seek reelection – last Sunday, by surprise and in X – he still sent a final signal a couple of days before, who knows if by mistake, that he was ready to return to the road during this week that is ending. And he returned, yes, but not to the campaign, but, recently recovered from a covid that had him isolated in his beach house, to the Oval Office to give the most difficult speech of his long political life, in which he justified his decision on Wednesday as an act in “defense of democracy” with the idea of ”passing the baton to a new generation.”
Biden’s two messages in X – his resignation and his endorsement of Harris as a candidate – immediately helped Democrats regain the news cycle, after disastrous weeks for them and favorable to Trump’s interests.
While rivals were gouging each other out, the former president received a gift from the Supreme Court in early July, which ruled in favor of expanding presidential immunity. The nine justices, three of whom Trump appointed, were intervening in a complaint by the former president’s lawyers in connection with the Washington case, one of four opened against him, for his attempts to reverse the 2020 election result and for his involvement in the assault on the Capitol.
The Supreme Court’s favorable decision had two practical consequences: it delayed the trial, which will almost certainly not begin until after the elections, and it postponed the reading of the sentence in the Supreme Court from July 11 to September 18. Stormy Daniels case,in which a jury found him guilty in New York of 34 felonies related to paying a porn actress under the table to keep quiet about a relationship between the two that he denies. Later, the judge in the case The Mar-a-Lago Papers,The president, known for the confidential documents he took without permission from the White House, dismissed it last week, a controversial decision that has been appealed by the special prosecutor, Jack Smith. The start of the fourth trial is also pending in Atlanta, where he is accused of attempting to rig the election in the state of Georgia.
The Republican National Convention in Milwaukee last week was a triumphal procession for Trump, a demonstration that he leads a party that is free of dissent and entirely at his mercy. Two days before the convention, the candidate had survived an attack at a rally in Pennsylvania, the result of a Secret Service performance so disastrous that it led to the resignation of its chief, Kimberly Cheatle, on Tuesday. The investigation into the motives of the attacker, a 20-year-old named Thomas Crooks, is still ongoing.
Delegates at the convention, which also served to acclaim JD Vance as the Republican vice-presidential nominee, could only find one possible explanation for Trump’s survival: “divine intervention.” Throughout the week, the candidate seemed a changed man, amidst calls for national unity. But then he took the microphone to give his acceptance speech and the same old Trump returned: energetic, divisive and ready for a fight.
The speed with which Kamala Harris managed to rally (and enthuse) Democrats around her figure seems to have caught the Trump campaign off guard, which prepared for too long to defeat an elderly opponent with a bad memory. And suddenly, choosing Vance began to seem like a bad idea when it was already too late.
Harris already has the backing of the party’s heavyweights, first Pelosi, then Schumer and Jeffries, and finally the Obamas. She has raised record amounts for the campaign and has hit the road with vigor and a clear message: to present her fight with Trump as that of a prosecutor (she was one in California before becoming a senator and vice president) against a convicted criminal.
In another quirk of the calendar, this Sunday will mark the 100-day limit until the November election. The big question is whether Harris can maintain the enthusiasm she has aroused this week and whether that enthusiasm will be enough to beat Trump in the six (or seven) decisive states in which the presidency will be decided. There are 100 days that last an eternity and others that pass in the blink of an eye. Given what we’ve seen, the only thing that’s certain is that anything is possible in the most unpredictable election campaign in recent memory.
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