COMMENTS
Norwegians fear Donald Trump as the plague he actually is. There is something solid about it.
DARK CLOUDS OVER A REFUSED BOY: Donald Trump in Florida in early July. Norwegians do not want him. Photo REUTERS / NTB
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Internal comments: This is a comment. The commentary expresses the writer’s attitude.
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Despite loud disagreement about aspects of, for example, the responsible right wing’s responsibility for terror on 22 July ten years ago, then there is an almost touching agreement on the foundations of Norwegian democracy. It is expressed when Nine out of ten of us say we fear Donald Trump, or someone like him, will return as American president after the election in 2024. When it comes to defending basic democratic rules, there are many indications that we in this country agree and believe, until Dovre falls.
It’s still coming more evidence of Donald Trump’s attempt to usurp power after he lost the presidential election to Joe Biden last fall. Last week came one of the clearest, when it became known that on December 27 last year, Trump asked his Attorney General Jeffery Rosen to say this: “Just say that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me and the Republicans in Congress.”
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The rose had become Justice Minister just three days earlier, after his predecessor William Barr – otherwise a staunch Trump enthusiast – had refused to join Trump’s insistence that Biden and the Democrats had stolen the election. The allegations of electoral fraud had already been refuted by several election boards and countless courts. The purpose of the change of Minister of Justice, and the pressure on the new one, was to get the Minister to say the word “corrupt”. But whether it was genuine righteousness, or the fear of being involved in something they would later bitterly regret, made neither Barr nor Rosen give in.
So short was the United States from a coup. So short was the scarcely possible then-Republican majority in the Senate from having to decide whether they, together with the president, should carry out a fascist-inspired coup in the United States. All because of the cult – the person-cult – America’s most divisive president in modern times had carefully built up about himself.
– Say the election was corrupt
And when it did not succeed Trump to pressure his ministers into illegalities, so just over a week later the president urged his supporters to storm Congress to prevent the implementation of the legal seizure of power, in which five people were to be killed. We know all this, yet it is not entirely inconceivable that Trump – or someone like him – will be the Republican presidential candidate in the election in just a little over three years.
Reader numbers and feedback says that no other international history engaged Norwegian media users like the US presidential election last year, and the dramatic aftermath it received. The figures from Dagbladet’s poll show that only four percent of Norwegians are not intimidated by a new round with Trump or a spiritual friend. The figures are so solid in Trump’s disfavor that there are only marginal differences between women and men, and between much and little education. Less than half of the FRP’s voters are apologetic for trumpism – and the apologetic ones do not all have to be FRP voters – on a bad day for the party in opinion polls. These are solid numbers.
– Real fear of coup
This means that Norwegians has taken for granted that for the first time in US history, Trump did not have a peaceful transfer of power. That for the first time in US history, a sitting president has refused to admit defeat – he still refuses. And that for the first time in American history, the president tried in several ways to carry out a coup.
In addition to everything the other, such as the soap opera with dictator Kim, the blackmail and demands for protection money from close allies in NATO, as if the President of the United States was another gangster king from, for example, Queens in New York. Or the pompous narcissism that the whole world laughed at, not even always behind the back of the emperor without clothes. No, we laughed his nonsense right in the face. It was just that it was not just nonsense. After all, since it was about the President of the United States, it was also serious. Donald Trump is thus a nonsense and a seriousness we in Norway quite emphatically do not want left.
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