The danger of a great democratic victory

The president's party is always defeated in midterm elections. Perhaps it is an exaggeration to say “always”: Teddy Roosevelt in 1902, Franklin Roosevelt in 1934, Bill Clinton in 1998, and George W. Bush in 2002 gained a few seats thanks to exceptional circumstances. Donald Trump will not be added to these historical anomalies: the Republican Party will suffer a defeat.

What remains to be seen is whether the defeat will be manageable (losing the House, but maintaining control of the Senate, for example), serious (ending up in a minority by a very small margin), or disastrous (with a Capitol painted Democratic blue).

This is the big question. Because we are talking about Donald Trump. The president who ended his first term by inciting a violent assault on the Capitol and has never acknowledged his defeat to Joe Biden. The president whose second term is being much more erratic and calamitous than the first. The president who seems to show symptoms of dementia in every speech and every public statement.

The president, after all, enjoys a fanatical and almost religious cult among a minority of American citizens: the MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement believes that the Truth, with a capital T, lies only in the words of Trump. Even if they sound like delirium.

Never before had the Republican Party spent so much money in a midterm election. Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, has given Republican committees about 450 million dollars, an unheard-of thing. Of this money, more than a third has gone to Texas, the state where Musk lives. He does not hesitate to state that if the Republicans lose, “democracy is over.”

The most likely scenario is that the majority of voters will go to the polls thinking about reality (high inflation, expensive fuel, unaffordable housing in cities), which should hurt Trump. Although these are parliamentary elections, in which each state has its own problems and each representative accumulates their own merits and demerits (something much more complicated and varied than the European Parliament elections, although with a similar component of punishment for those in power), the Republican Party has seemed like a Trumpist sect for years. It is to be assumed that the candidates will pay for this.

However, can you imagine the amount of advertising, covert propaganda, smear campaigns, and false information that can be paid for with 450 million dollars? And that is just the money Musk has put in.

With such a fortune at their disposal, Republican candidates have been able to create a virtual universe in which their classic voter remains convinced that all problems, starting with high prices and low wages, have a culprit: the Iranian regime, which (supposedly) threatens to drop atomic bombs on the United States; immigrants (who supposedly steal jobs, commit crimes, and eat neighbors' pets) and "the communists," that is, the opposition.

This means that a segment of the population will be willing to believe any accusation of electoral fraud that Trump throws out. Of fraud or anything else.

The predictable Republican defeat should not have major consequences if, as we were saying, it falls within the margin that Donald Trump is willing to accept. Undoubtedly, in foreign policy it will be noticed much less than the European Union expects. The president will continue to be president.

However, a heavily defeated president would not be, as on previous occasions, the proverbial “lame duck,” but rather a furious madman whose limits we do not yet know.