I do not know if there is full awareness of the importance of the challenge that American society has made to Donald Trump. The Republican Party's capitulation to Trumpist delusions has cost it dearly. And a good portion of its voters have crossed the line: voters are people – therefore, there are all kinds of them – but they still have a certain point of sensitivity and perception, and are capable of becoming indignant when a government loses the notion of limits and acts with total impunity. Trump cannot understand this because his miserable ego is desperately in need of recognition. But the defeat has been so enormous that it seems unlikely he can choose to forge ahead by breaking the rules of the game. Given the reaction of the citizenry, it is hard to believe that the institutions would let themselves be contaminated. Americans have set the limits of what is possible. And Trump has been left disoriented. Out of dignity, he should go home. Recognize his lack of sense of reality. He will not do it, he will hardly be capable of understanding why so many people have reacted against his delusions and wanted to save the institutions before democracy decayed.

“Networks are not limited to reflecting unrest, but rather summon it”. This was stated by the director, Esther Vera, in her column on Monday, in which she invited us to reflect on the destiny of democracies in the digital age, and I agree. It is evident that the history of the media explains and accompanies the evolution of societies. And it is also true that in modernity –when information technologies have been modifying themselves in an increasingly accelerated way– the idea of change is inscribed in day-to-day life. By definition, economic structure, the evolution of communication, and the configuration of institutions determine processes. And there is no doubt that things change with a celerity that makes prediction difficult.

The unbearable frivolity of Minister Óscar Puente has lamentably marked the narrative and the debate regarding the terrible Urda train accident. His appearance on the first day as the government spokesperson—in accordance with his position—laid him bare. His entire speech revolved around one idea: attributing responsibility for the tragedy to a human error by the person in charge of the Atocha control center, who gave the order to the AVE train driver to start in normal mode. Consciously or unconsciously, the worst of politicking came from his soul: facing an extreme situation by looking for a culprit to pin the blame on. And failing to realize that with this frivolity, he was only further complicating the situation.

1. Saturday in Barcelona a poisonous mushroom of tension sprouted: about five hundred young people dressed in black caused destruction around Plaça Catalunya. These are moments of social and political tension with the right-wing forces launched in the reconquest of power and with neo-fascist music throughout Europe, and agitation is the order of the day. The reactionary wave is spreading, duly directed, while democratic parties of the right and left are rather faltering. And the Barcelona unrest leaves signs that suggest that something is moving and the traditional schemes are not working.

“My first objective is for Sánchez to leave,” said Feijóo when Aimar Bretos (Cadena SER) asked him if he would make a pact with Vox. The end justifies the means: whitewashing the extreme right. We all know that if Sánchez does not lose, he will not govern, but it is a lack of respect for the citizenry and an unusual display of his limitations that Feijóo permanently deflects the ball and, instead of explaining what he wants to do and why he wants to do it, entrusts everything to the president's attrition.

“It is getting dark in the land of lights”. Someone wrote this on a window of a ground floor in a Paris street. What is happening is not a moment of collective rage, but the consequence of a presidential model absolutely detached from the citizenry. We can go into a thousand details and speculations, but the chaos that France is currently experiencing expresses the failure of President Emmanuel Macron. Six months before the end of his term, his political figure has run out of breath and is now only lashing out senselessly. It is the culmination of arrogance. Of a character who has not understood that the presidency of the Republic neither grants impunity nor is above the citizenry, to whom it must be accountable. And what has happened is that the president's insolence, the self-complacency that illuminates him, has created the sensation that France was neglected. And in part it is true. But above all, it is the inability to understand and address the concerns of the citizens that has trapped the president. And it seems as if he still does not want to realize it.

Without ideas, without direction, and increasingly distanced from the citizenry, the left to the left of the socialists present a miserable spectacle of impotence and an absence of goals and discourse, such that the only thing that surfaces are worn-out egos that no longer attract anyone, trapped in the mire of the eternal and pathetic psychopathology of small differences. There is no project, only infighting, and not even the emergency of the sustained growth of the far right serves to make people react and place the need to curb the authoritarian drift above the miserable dynamic of move over so I can take your place.

1. There are no nuances left now. One after another, the European right-wing parties are capitulating, surrendering themselves to the far-right. In Italy, the latest whim of President Giorgia Meloni, who has already been in power for four years, has been an electoral law that gifts seventy seats to whoever obtains 42% of the votes, that is to say, a bonus that minimizes pluralism. And everyone has taken it in their stride. We are in the dynamic of "anything goes".

“We will not allow the attempt at emotional manipulation of the Spanish people.” These words are Feijóo’s, to justify the PP’s refusal to attend the minutes of silence for the death of Maricarmen Abascal. An exercise in insensitivity that portrays the character and manifests his inability to grasp the moods of the citizenry.

1. The Maricarmen case has triggered the emergence of the housing issue on the scene, and has generated an impact on public opinion that has highlighted the abuses and limitations of the market. And now the paradoxical situation could arise where it is the right—an active collaborator of those who speculate with this fundamental right—that capitalizes on it. Sánchez has found himself with his back to the wall precisely when a topic breaks out to which the left should be more sensitive than the right, and the government has not been attentive enough to what should have been a priority of its mandate.

“History will judge them sooner than they think and more forcefully than they think,” said President Sánchez, addressing Vox, the PP, and Junts while acknowledging his parliamentary defeat in the debate on the housing decrees. Immediately, the page has begun to be turned. The reasons for the summons have taken a back seat. The issue of housing is no longer news. Attention has shifted toward what has been read as an insinuation of an immediate electoral call. Coquetry or an anticipation of his intentions? The president is asking for a pause to finish deciding. It seems that this failure on a topic he thought would give him a significant boost has unsettled him, and he fears that by continuing, he may enter an endless agony. Now, what he must evaluate is whether he dares to run again or if he will go home. In any case, the right-wing parties will rush to claim victory: they have toppled the president.

It is evident that right now housing and immigration are decisive in public opinion and symbolize the concerns of the citizenry. The human condition, in its precariousness, has a natural tendency toward the logic of 'us and them' which easily tilts toward a dynamic of confrontation: the good guys and the bad guys. This logic, present at all levels of life, is capital in politics. The democratic principle that grants power (and the approval of laws) to whoever achieves half plus one of the seats contributes to this attitude.

Suddenly, signs appear that give reason to think that the fabrications that led to the regressive phase of the transition from liberal democracies to post-democratic authoritarianism are beginning to decline. It was Milton Friedman who said that "the invisible hand of the market is superior to any other institution that regulates economic life" and that, consequently, the "social responsibility of business is to increase its profits," when the rise of capital was unfolding against the post-war mixed economy. This logic has been imposing itself at the same time that liberals and social democrats were disturbingly blurring.

Definitely, the authoritarian delirium that threatens democracies has moved to Europe. Meanwhile, in the United States, Donald Trump, with polls clearly on the decline, is losing his cool, probably unable to understand that the continued display of his indecency has ended up discomforting some of his own. There are reasons to think that Trump—despite still having two years left in office—has entered a downward slope. We will have objective data soon, when the midterm elections arrive, which, if the polls are not wrong, augur a serious defeat for the Republicans.

Now, the Catalan national right is turning the page. It seems that the hangover from the Procés is considered over. If President Illa captured the need for detente that existed in Catalan society when independence movement hit its limits, it now seems that conservative Catalanism sees that the time has come to reconfigure the traditional dialectic between right and left (with the national question in the background), before melancholy makes them lose their footing, opening the way for alternatives outside their control.

President Illa has decided to break the monotony, conscious, perhaps, that it was trapping him. His restrained tone was rewarded during the bewilderment of the 'Procés' aftermath and, by making a virtue of calm, he grasped the country's need to lower the tone and take a pause. With this criterion, and with his rejection of shrillness, Illa has been making progress, at a time when the exercise of conjuncturally assuming the framework of the possible seemed to be imposing itself.

Last Monday, King Felipe VI received the Minister of Defense, Margarita Robles; the Chief of the Defense Staff, Teodoro López Calderón; and the Commander of Ceuta, Luis Fernández Herrero, at the Zarzuela Palace. The Palace's communication services immediately released a solemn image in which the King and the two military commanders were seen dressed in military uniforms. A detail that did not go unnoticed and which triggered speculation due to the absence of President Sánchez, who is responsible for setting and directing governance strategies. The military power, therefore, wanted to make its presence felt, and the Head of State offered them the opportunity, amidst rumors about discrepancies between the President and the Minister. And it is hard to believe that the image was innocent. In a country that comes from where it comes, the staging is, at the very least, unsettling. What is the reason for this militaristic gesture in the face of a crisis of considerable complexity that does not admit dysfunctional gestures, much less of this character? The monarch staging the army.

For the first time since the defeat of Nazism, the AfD, the far right, could govern a state in federal Germany. In other words, the taboo of Nazism is collapsing overwhelmingly: with 44% of the vote and 39 seats, while the CDU goes from 40 deputies to 16. The humiliation of the German Christian Democrats is so resounding that submitting to the adversary would be a definitive surrender in the current times, with the risk of being absorbed. And paradoxes of history, everything will depend on the BSW, an eccentric and marginal left-wing party opposed to immigration, willing not to contribute to blocking the far right. A gesture that would not cease to be indicative: a left-wing party would join the growing trend on the European right of giving recognition to neo-fascism. That is to say, the reactionary impulse crosses borders: it has already swept enough on the right, now it only remains for the left to join in. In any case, whatever happens, one thing is certain: the taboo of Nazism, which had been established in the postwar period, is dissolving in Germany, which would thus join the shift towards the far right like almost all of Europe.

These days we are seeing how the Ceuta crisis is causing Pedro Sánchez to collapse. The Spanish president had found a tone and a profile that allowed him to take advantage of the gaps produced in a Europe that is brazenly shifting towards post-democratic authoritarianism. This had worked for him in Spain and abroad, at a time when the left is rapidly blurring. Management—and it was noticeable day by day—wears you down, but a certain sense of anticipation and a style contrasted with the permanent state of irritation of the right gave the president some leeway.

“Liberty and democracy are incompatible”. It was Peter Thiel, the superhero of Pay Pal and Palantir Technologies, who thus gave meaning to the offensive against democracy that has been circulating in the United States for some time and that Donald Trump is putting into practice with systematic abuse of power, permanently disregarding the legislative and judicial branches. The ball has been inflating. The ideologues of the government, with Vice President J.D. Vance in the front line, have joined in. And the anti-democratic flood has continued to prosper, in the USA, but also in Europe.