One week before the presidential election on November 5 in the United States, it is not just the uncertainty of the result that dominates. Fears also gripped both camps, faced with the potential victory of the other. More or less rational fears, more or less based on tangible realities, but which, ultimately, could guide the steps of millions of Republicans and Democrats towards the polls.
In the Democratic camp
The fear of authoritarianism…
Last week, Donald Trump’s former Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly warned Americans of his former boss’s dictatorial leanings. Behind closed doors, Kelly said, the former president praised him for the loyalty Nazi military generals had to Adolf Hitler in another era.
The revelation is not surprising. For months, the Republican candidate has continued to multiply comments illustrating his fascination with authoritarianism and even exposing his plans in this area. Last December, in front of his Fox News friend Sean Hannity, he assured that he would only be dictator during “the first day” of his second presidency, if he were re-elected, then, in front of a Christian assembly this summer, he promised spectators that they wouldn’t have to worry about voting in four years if he wins.
A few days ago, he added more by portraying his political opponents, including Democratic representatives in Congress, as “enemies from within” against whom he would be ready to deploy the army and use the powers of the ‘executive. Words that made even his own troops shudder.
“We managed to prevent this kind of thing in 2020, and we must continue to do so in 2024,” summarized in an interview with Duty Democrat Tom Countryman, former assistant secretary of state for arms control and international security. “I was a diplomat for 36 years and I lived in countries that had autocratic regimes. I know what that looks like and I don’t want that to happen in our country. »
The fear of losing individual and collective freedoms…
Upon entering the race, Vice-President Kamala Harris made the defense of abortion rights one of the fuels of her campaign. And for good reason…
The invalidation of the judgment Roe v. Wade by the United States Supreme Court, which strengthened abortion bans in 22 states, could go even further under a new Republican regime.
Yes, Donald Trump reiterated in early October that he would veto, as president, a nationwide ban on abortion, sending the matter back to the states. But its detractors fear the implementation of a measure proposed by Project 2025, the highly controversial policy manual intended for a future conservative administration. One of the members of the group, from whom Donald Trump seeks to distance himself at the end of the campaign, calls for the use of a law dating from 1873, the Comstock Act, to prohibit the mailing of abortion pills which currently serve two-thirds of abortions in the United States. These conservatives also dream of criminalizing the possession of the equipment that clinics need to do their work.
Another fear: after having built a hate speech towards the media critically scrutinizing his policies, Donald Trump seems ready to take action by attacking press freedom in the country, by depriving TV channels in his line of sight of their ability to spread information he doesn’t like. A few days ago, he indicated that CBS “should lose its license” because of the interview that Kamala Harris gave to the network and which he did not like. On October 20, unhappy with the treatment the channel gave him during his televised debate with the Democrat, he threatened to reduce ABC’s broadcasting capacity to zero.
The fear of seeing the environment destroyed…
While the hurricane Helene hit Florida last month before continuing its devastating path on several other states, Donald Trump repeated his skepticism about the ongoing climate crisis, calling it “one of the greatest scams” in history. He subsequently took part in two fundraising campaigns in Texas alongside wealthy oil businessmen to whom he reminded of his unwavering support.
Faced with a Biden government which has advanced legislation in the fight against global warming and a Democratic candidate who has promised to continue this momentum by implementing new tax credits for emerging industries, particularly in manufacturing clean energy, Donald Trump remains stuck on the policies of his first term by promising to offer more land to drilling.
During his first term, he withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement while downplaying, as he continues to do, the dangers of climate change.
In 2023, 3.4 million Americans will receive $8.4 billion in tax credits to improve the energy performance of their homes. The decarbonization promoted by the current government involves, among other things, financial assistance to acquire electric vehicles, install heat pumps or solar panels. If elected, Trump has pledged to cancel remaining funding for this aid.
The Republican candidate also denigrated electric vehicles, suggesting in passing that government incentives for easier access to them could dry up during a second term. And last June, his campaign team indicated that he intended to take the country out of the Paris Agreement a second time.
For the Republicans
The fear of communism…
Since the start of the electoral campaign, the specter of a communist and collectivist regime led by Kamala Harris has been raised by Donald Trump to mobilize his troops, even if the comparison is mostly absurd.
“It’s a circus, a clown show,” said Samir Qaisar, an activist from the Revolutionary Communist Party of the United States met on the sidelines of the Democratic National Convention last August. “Kamala Harris is anything but a communist. She is pro-capitalism, pro-Wall Street, pro-Israel — she is American imperialism incarnate. »
Nevertheless, by regularly calling Kamala Harris “comrade”, by accusing the father of the vice-president – an illustrious professor of economics from the West Coast – of being Marxist, by broadcasting doctored images associating the Democrat with the former USSR, Donald Trump invented a threat that resonates with his base, particularly in rural regions where conservative voters have had the impression for years of having progressive policies coming from big cities or Washington shoved down their throats . And they end up posing as victims of a regime that they perceive as authoritarian and serving values that do not resemble them.
In Democratic states, this more conservative rural community does not hide its anxieties, even anticipating future or fantasized policies that will force them to abandon their pick-up gas and their firearms, dictate their clothing, control the education and even the gender of their child… This is what many seriously express.
An anxiety about political minority and constraint summed up by a strong image in the depths of Oregon, that of agricultural lands and arms fairs, by Dennis, a Republican crossed last spring: “This gives us place in this uncomfortable situation where 10 coyotes and 2 sheep are thinking together about what they are going to have for dinner. And in the end, it’s always the same people who get eaten. »
The fear of “migratory submergence”…
Last Thursday, campaigning from Arizona, a state bordering Mexico, Donald Trump described Joe Biden’s United States as “the trash can of the world” being filled with hordes of illegal and undocumented migrants attracted by “borders open”.
The statement was a logical continuation of many others that in recent weeks have associated immigrants with drug dealers, criminals, rapists and even pet eaters. A racist discourse which also mentioned “the poisoning of the blood of the nation” by these people from outside and which maintains the conspiracy theory of the “great replacement” and its derivative, in the United States as elsewhere in the world, invasion and “migratory submergence”.
And this fear of the other seems to work very well to mobilize the Republican troops. 82% of these voters place immigration at the top of their concern this year, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center. Against 39% among Democrats. The theme also came up repeatedly during the four days of the Republican National Convention this summer, where Donald Trump and his guests reiterated a promise to launch a vast deportation campaign, once elected, to cleanse the country of “bad genes.” » which circulate there. Some 15 to 20 million migrants would thus find themselves in the crosshairs, or 4 to 9 million more than the number of undocumented immigrants estimated by the Center for Immigration Studies.
The implementation of these mass deportations, which the Republican presents as “militarized” and “historic”, however, remains uncertain and could be costly. In 2023, the escorting of 142,580 illegal immigrants to the border by Customs and Border Protection of the Department of Homeland Security cost American taxpayers $420 million, according to agency data.
The fear of never achieving power again…
The change of political color in 2020 by Joe Biden of the very Republican Georgia, but also of Arizona, has fueled a nagging anxiety since the 1990s within the American conservative movement: that of seeing a majority constantly strengthened by minds progressives invade all of the key states of the country, passing through the cities and the suburbs, to the point of removing conservatives from places of power forever.
Since his first electoral campaign in 2016, Donald Trump has skillfully been able to titillate this feeling through the cultural war he launched against the Democrats. The concept, basically, was imagined by Republican Newt Gingrich in the last century. It was he who moved American politics into the field of division, resentment and insult of which Trump became the great helmsman.
The loss of control of the instruments of power, for the Republican camp, has become a strong theme among the populist who, faced with the growing heterogeneous coalition which brought Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to power in 2020, is increasing his warnings in the face of the loss of the country at the hands of the Others. A diversion which, he recalls without proof, will involve “electoral fraud”, a threat now repeated ad nauseam by his supporters during his political rallies.
In 2020, the Federal Cybersecurity and Security Infrastructure Agency declared the last presidential election to have been “the most secure in American history.”
But the alternative reality woven by the ex-president is tenacious: “If we do not win these elections, we will never win again,” assured Woody Clendenen, a Republican at the head of a paramilitary group in California, last June.
