Trump, Musk and the bath of reality
The American midterm elections will have repercussions inside and outside the Trump administration. The wave of change has been of such a great magnitude that it is not manipulable and will stir up a landscape of stagnant and fetid waters. To begin with, the electoral result allows for several conclusions to be drawn, and there are two that are so basic that they seem obvious: the first is that in a democracy nothing is guaranteed, the ballot boxes must be filled; and the second is that politics cannot be conducted without taking social reality into account.
The electoral results have two clear losers: Donald Trump and Elon Musk. If the president has been punished above all for failing to keep his promises to improve the lives of Americans, for Elon Musk it has been of no use to spend 400 million dollars to support the Republicans and thus ensure legislation tailored to his business interests. Musk, settled in Texas, spent 200 million on slandering the Democratic candidates in his state with conspiracy theories, but they have not been enough to prevent the protest vote of an intrinsically Republican state. Silicon Valley, as a whole, has been repudiated for not paying enough taxes and for trying to impose an extractivist technology on citizens who have defended their natural resources like water.
The midterm elections are a vindication of politics and democracy—so imperfect and so essential. A demonstration of the virtues of a system with checks and balances that end up prevailing when mismanagement poisons life.
The defeat arrives opportunely when we are tired of hearing the propagandists of totalitarianism, who will continue to roam the USA and who are still looking for their moment in Europe, but who have been clearly sanctioned. A corrective that arrives when we are tired of hearing lunatics like Peter Thiel saying that democracy and freedom are not compatible and tired of hearing the propagandists of China seduced by the management capacity of a dictatorship.
The Democratic victory puts an expiration date on a Donald Trump who arrived with the promise of lowering prices and exiting wars and has failed to do so by a wide margin. Trump began his end by bombing Iran, a strategic error that, together with the rise in tariffs, has increased the cost of living for the Americans who have passed him the bill today.
If the president is always a lame duck, in the last two years of his term Trump will be an unpredictable mad duck, but he will be besieged by Democratic investigations into sensitive issues such as the files of the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein and the corrupt enrichment of himself and his family. Trump will resist, but he is already beginning to lose his shine among his own. Among them, Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who aspire to succeed him.
Democratic radicalization
The Democrats arrive at the Capitol and governorships after a journey through the desert that has brought new faces to the fore. After an open competition between moderates and radicals that had not been so lively for decades. They will have to choose their candidate very well if they want to maintain the momentum of change, and it will not be easy to find a candidate capable of mobilizing their own vote without scaring away the opponent when the party is leaning to the left.
These are times of change in the geopolitical order following the second war. A time of leaders in the three great powers who despise liberal democracy and of limitless technological transformations that generate economic and social uncertainty. Public interests are completely confused with personal interests and motivated solely by speculative greed.
Despite the scenario, we know that cohesive societies in which the system has legitimacy because internal balances work are the most stable. So, what is the main political enemy? Once again we have seen that it is distancing oneself from reality. Through elevation, like the Democratic elites with Biden, or through immersion in the sewer, like with Trump.
