The 11-year-old girl saw the name of the former president Donald Trump on my computer screen and freaked out. “What happened to Trump?” she asked me excitedly, as if a monster had suddenly appeared to her in a nightmare.
“Nothing,” I said, “don’t worry; he is still locked up in his home in Florida. ” And she left, unconvinced of what he had just said.
I’ve thought it through and I think I should have given you another answer. You do have to worry about Trump. For a liar and for the millions of people who believe his lies.
The fact that we do not see and read it on social networks as before, due to the fact that Twitter and Facebook have it blocked, does not mean that it has lowered its dangerousness for the democracy of the United States. Trump is betting on the big lie to control the Republican party and, perhaps, to try to return to the presidency.
The big lie is that Trump won the last presidential election and that there was a major fraud to put Joe Biden in the White House. But there is no evidence – none – that that happened. Official results indicate that Biden won with 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232. Even in the popular vote, Biden – with more than 81 million votes – far outstripped Trump, who got 74 million votes.
Most mind-bogglingly, members of the Republican Party have bowed to protect Trump’s false arguments and publicly defend his lies. Any Republican who dares to question Trump’s vision of the election runs the risk of losing his position within the party. What Liz Cheney.
Congresswoman Liz Cheney was the third in the hierarchy of the Republican party in the House of Representatives. But this week she was removed from her partisan post and replaced.
If the daughter of Dick Cheney – one of the most radical vice presidents the United States has ever had and, in part, responsible for the start of the unjustified war in Iraq in 2003 – is not accepted into the leadership of the Republican party, it is that something strange is happening.
What is happening is that Republicans are terrified of Trump.
But Liz Cheney was never a Trump fan. After the insurrection in the Capitol on January 6, she was one of 10 Republicans who voted to remove the president, who shortly before had prompted the crowd to march to the headquarters of Congress. That one, Trump was not going to forgive her. And he just charged it.
She, however, was not silent. “Today we face a threat like never before,” she told Congress in a speech prior to being removed from office. “An ex-president, who sparked a violent attack on the capitol to try to steal the election, is trying to convince Americans that he was taken away (the presidency). And so it is inciting more violence (…) and that negatively affects the democratic process ”.
One of the things that I have always admired about the United States is its democratic certainty. Whoever has the most electoral votes wins the presidency. Point. And even in a very close election – like the one in 2000 between George W. Bush and Al Gore– the loser acknowledges his defeat and, in doing so, reaffirms the validity of the system.
But with Trump that did not happen. He neither acknowledged his defeat nor congratulated the rightful winner. And everything could have been like the overflowing tantrum of an egomaniac. The problem is that it is becoming the new truth of one of the two parties that rule political life in the United States.
As a journalist, I have had to interview several Republicans after the 2020 elections and when I ask them about Trump and his lies, it seems that the devil appeared to them and they evade the subject. They do anything to avoid unleashing the fury of the former president.
The United States has a robust system for holding elections and counting votes. But Trump, as a sore loser, wants to create doubts in the system to justify his defeat.
That is Trump’s big lie. And there is nothing more sad and embarrassing than swallowing the lie of a bully with a gigantic ego and then going out to defend it.
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