The president’s plans to announce his candidacy for the White House and the tycoon’s dominance in the Republican polls predict a rerun of the 2020 fight. It would be the first time in seven decades
The conditional is these days the favorite grammatical mode in Washington. Joe Biden could announce this Tuesday his presidential candidacy for the 2024 elections. Donald Trump would have it better than ever since January 6, 2021, the day of the assault on the Capitol, to become the Republican Party’s bid for the White House. And Governor Ron DeSantis, after months of presenting himself as the only one capable of making American conservatism turn the Trump page once and for all, would do better to wait another four years to throw his hat into the ring of national politics: the polls, one after another, paint him as a hopeless loser to the former president.
So even at a very preliminary stage of the election campaign, so many conditionals together lead to one conclusion: at this point, a sequel to the movie of the 2020 showdown between Biden and Trump is the most likely of scenarios.
That of the current president is the most certain and imminent prediction. US media confirmed last week with sources in his Administration that he plans to take advantage to announce his revalidation on the fourth anniversary of the day on which, a year and a half before the 2020 election, he launched the campaign that led him to oust Trump. On Tuesday’s agenda is one of his favorite pastimes: meeting with labor unions to brag about the commitment to infrastructure investments that his administration wrested from Congress. So he is planning, now as then, to launch his announcement with a video.
On that occasion, Biden based his message on the white supremacist protest in Charlottesville, Thomas Jefferson’s hometown, which ended in the summer of 2017 with the death of a woman who participated in the counter-demonstration. To justify his ordeal, he recalled what Trump said that day, “There were very good people on both sides.”
That equidistance provoked indignation across the political spectrum, but did not detract from its author’s popularity among his loyal base of followers. Neither did the news of the first impeachment for the alleged Russian plot, nor those of his second impeachment, for the attack on the Capitol, or, more recently, his indictment and arrest for the accusation of an obscure payment to buy the silence of the porn actress Stormy Daniels. Not even the various court cases he still has pending (among them, the alleged sexual assault of journalist E. Jean Carroll, whose trial begins this week). Quite the contrary: the latest scandals have only served to resuscitate his comatose expectations of being elected by his party for the presidential elections.
The History Dump
It would be his third campaign for the White House, since he defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016 and began to string one electoral failure after another: he lost in the 2018 legislative elections, in the 2020 presidential elections (despite the fact that he still resists, without evidence, to admit it) and in the mid-term elections last November, in which it seemed that he had received the final nail in the coffin. That’s when the world started talking about DeSantis, who has yet to confirm whether he’s running, as the young, relentless politician (he’s 44) who was going to send Trump straight to the dustbin of history.
Six months later, DeSantis looks exactly the same as Trump looked in November: a challenger incapable of winning. After sensational election results, the Florida governor has fallen victim both to his extremist policies on issues such as abortion, education or the book veto – an agenda that has caused many Republican donors to withdraw their support, fearful that it will scare away out-of-state voters – and to the viciousness of Trump’s personal attacks, an art in which the former president is a consummate master. For the moment, he beats him at home as well: the tycoon is garnering far more support than DeSantis among Florida state legislators.
Biden – who is also facing an investigation into the handling of classified documents from his time as vice president and has a son, Hunter, in legal trouble – has spent these months sitting back and watching his enemies fight each other, and waiting for one storm after another to subside, while he plucks his daisy without too much suspense.
Trump faces second court hearing tomorrow, but will not attend
Former President Donald Trump faces a second court front tomorrow, in this case for a defamation case related to an alleged rape of writer E. Jean Carroll, which will begin Tuesday with jury selection.
Trump is unlikely to attend the trial: Judge Lewis A. Kaplan has left it up to Trump and Carroll to decide whether or not to attend, and while the complainant’s lawyers have announced that she intends to attend all sessions, those of the former president wrote to Kaplan last week announcing that he “does not wish to appear at the trial.”
They cited the “logistical and financial burdens” that Trump’s trip will cause to the city, counting only the deployment of the secret service that would require his presence many hours before each of his speeches.
But, in addition, Trump has announced an electoral event next Thursday afternoon in New Hampshire, as part of the pre-campaign for the 2024 presidential election, in which the former president is the clear favorite among the Republican candidates.
The New York Times reports that the trial in the Federal District Court of Manhattan will not be very long, and could last between one and two weeks.
For the time being, Judge Kaplan has decided that the jury to be selected tomorrow will remain anonymous, even for the lawyers of the parties, because of the possibility that they may suffer some kind of harassment or attack by Trump supporters.
HEARING IS NOT FOR RAPE, BUT FOR DEFAMATION
The trial, which opens twenty days after Trump’s first court front – for improper payment to porn actress Stormy Daniels to hush up an extramarital sexual relationship – does not concern the allegation of rape in fitting rooms at a New York department store in the mid-1990s, an accusation that will be heard in a separate proceeding.
In this case, the defamation charge that Carroll, 79, brings against Trump, 76, for the attacks he made against her when she denounced in public in 2019 those facts: at that time, while he was still president, he said that the complaint was “a joke and a lie” and that what she was looking for was free fame to promote a book.
The fact that rape and defamation are not judged in the same process is explained because an alleged rape committed 25 years ago was already prescribed in 2019, but the state of New York opened in 2022 a legal window of one year to denounce prescribed sex crimes.
Trump’s legal team has tried to delay the opening of the new case by submitting several motions to Judge Kaplan, the latest claiming that a “cooling off” period is needed so that the jury can be objectively selected, but the judge has stopped all such attempts.