Antonio Navalón
As of this writing, it is a fact that Donald J. Trump will go down in history as the 45th president of the United States. But not only will he go down in history for that, he will also go down – among other things – for being the first former U.S. president to face criminal charges. Seven trials are still pending against him.
The first – the verdict is scheduled for Wednesday, January 31 – is for the case against him for alleged fraud in the value of his assets. The second, with a resolution date of March 4, is about a criminal process that has as its axis the assault on the Capitol by his followers on January 6, 2021, as well as other actions to try to reverse his defeat in the 2020 presidential elections. It is necessary to mention that, if found guilty, the penalty could reach 20 years in prison, making it impossible for him to serve a second term as U.S. president. Of the other five charges, three are criminal proceedings and would force him to serve a possible prison sentence; the other two are civil proceedings.
Despite the previously described scenario, it is clear at this point that for a majority of Republicans – and I do not know if it is only for Republicans – Donald Trump’s time as president of the United States was not enough. There is an atmosphere of anxiety, motivation, and desire for Trump, the one and only ineffable, capable of dismissing a country and an assistant with equal ease, to return to the White House. He refused to behave like a retired president and never ceased in his intention to return to the post that, through a democratic election, was taken away from him in 2020. What is clear is that he will not come back the same; the eight years that have elapsed since his electoral victory and his subsequent defeat will be enough to, should he win, see a renewed version – I do not know if for better or worse – of Donald J. Trump.
Whoever finally prevails in this year’s U.S. elections will find that he or she will be tasked with ruling the shadow of a country that was once the most powerful on Earth, but that right now is submerged in a sea of contradictions where the possibility of Trump becoming president again is not the least of them. The reality is that whoever manages to position himself as the forty-seventh president of the United States of America will do so, occupying a position that is nothing more than the representation of the memory of an implacable nation that is now a ticking time bomb. Polarization, social anger, and global maladjustment are contagious, create diseases, and engender situations that return, again and again, to the origin of the creation of significant human traumas.
No one knows how to determine what remains of the origins of when it was made. No one can reconstruct or guarantee that the scale of values with which we were conceived will still be in force when it is our turn to take over the responsibility. Make no mistake, the world has changed a lot since the last time Trump sat in the Oval Office.
Trump is a message of war, not because of his fighting spirit or because he is more battle-hardened than the supposedly peaceful Joe Biden, but because his style and way of being and expressing himself make him a potentially warlike and aggressive element. The problem is that his reappearance on stage comes amid a scenario in which much of the world – directly or indirectly – is in the midst of a conflict. A character with these characteristics can either precipitate catastrophe or, on the contrary, he can be a promoter of the global order and peace that the world so badly needs. Being the top U.S. leader still means being responsible for and head of the world’s largest and most efficient army.
The United States, the great Republic of the North, the country that has managed to accumulate almost 250 years of democratic experience, needs to face the dimension of the problems it has. The morning of January 6, 2021, was marked by the insurrection of admirers and fans of Donald Trump – who has also been shown to have directly or indirectly had his share of participation – towards the U.S. Capitol. This does not mean that four years after that incident, Trump may not have the possibility or the determination to create or seek to establish a scenario where peace reigns, especially within his country.
As for the world, understanding the coexistence between the virtual encirclement, the financial transformation, and the proportional distribution of a planet that is not bipolar and has not only one empire but several needs to be recomposed and restructured. However, I fear this will not be a process that cannot be done peacefully. Therefore, whichever way you look at it, Trump is one – if not of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse – then one of the horses that either have to bring about the Apocalypse or to delay and delay the end of time from coming on the world stage.
And what will happen in Mexico? As always, our country is an easy and cheap piñata at the disposition of whoever governs in the United States decides to do with it. Since 1940, all U.S. presidents have asked their Mexican counterparts to take charge of the growing tension and instability on our southern border. Despite constant demands and attempts, none had relented in complying with this U.S. desire. It took the arrival of Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his enigmatic and contradictory understanding with Donald Trump for Mexico, after so many years, to send its National Guard and seek to armor the southern border, fulfilling the great desire of our northern neighbors.
At this moment, everything is confusing. There was a time when migratory flows were cataloged and distinguished by the place of origin of each person who left their country in search of a better opportunity and – in some cases – to safeguard their own lives. However, Trump’s immigration policy, followed by Biden and maintained by López Obrador, has made migration something that affects all those who want to cross from Mexico to the United States. Consequently, if it was already unmanageable when the migrants were from a single country or a few countries, now imagine when they are a global representation of what is left of the Americas.
The path of putting more soldiers, returning migrants to their countries of origin, or trying to cut off their migratory flow, we already know the result it has had. The problem is that until there is another political proposal on migration and another way of looking at the situation, all we will have are soldiers, police, and deportations.
The word “migration” will be a crucial element in the run-up to this year’s elections. Just as in the 1960s, during the Kennedy era, civil rights and racial segregation were the real issues at the forefront of U.S. national politics; in this case, what happens with the immigration issue will be extremely important. Now, immigration is all about protesting, creating, unifying fronts, and making the country more intransigent and polarized. It seems that Americans have forgotten that they are a country built on migrants. It also appears that the fact that the last time the U.S. military mobilized internally was to stop the National Guardsmen deployed in the face of non-compliance and disobedience by Democratic governors in the South to orders issued to integrate people of color socially has ceased to matter.
Today, thanks to the politics unleashed after Donald Trump’s first 2016 campaign and in the face of the attitude of some governors like Abbott of Texas, we are back to the same point. The National Guard comes to the aid of the defense and sovereignty of the states against federal orders and fiat. The big question lies in resolving whether migration will be the pretext to produce the spark of confrontation not only ideological or dialectical but also physical in the United States.
We are waiting for Trump. I am not particularly pessimistic about what may happen as I know that time – as I have witnessed firsthand – has been enough to transform some of the beliefs I held as recently as eight years ago. That said, why can’t we give Trump the benefit of the doubt and trust that he has learned his lesson?
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