Trump redoubles his presidential order in Washington: “This country is going to hell” | International

Donald Trump is back on the scene (or crime scene: it all depends on which half of the country you ask). The former president of the United States returned to Washington for the first time on Tuesday, a year after the attack on Capitol Hill and leaving the White House, to deliver a speech riddled with inaccuracies and falsehoods in which he exaggerated the achievements of his Administration, He has presented himself as a victim of the system and has focused on citizen insecurity, law enforcement and the protection of the border with Mexico. In it, he has defined himself as “the most persecuted person in the history of the United States” by a press “that is no longer free or fair.” And although he has avoided expressly saying so, he has dropped again that he plans to run for president in the 2024 elections. “They want to hurt me so that I can no longer work for you. But I don’t think that’s going to happen,” he said.

“Our country is going to hell quickly”, he has sentenced, before painting an apocalyptic landscape of “cities that, ruled by the Democrats, have become war zones”, controlled by “drug addicts and homeless people”, in which that “Satanists who prey on children are released on bail.” A country whose leaders deliberately leave the “doors open to allow immigrants to invade it.” “There has never been a worse border [gestionada] in the history of Humanity”, he concluded in a speech that lasted 97 minutes and in which at times he behaved more like a comedian buoyed by the laughter of his own than like a politician.

Trump, who has fallen back into the rhetoric of electoral theft (“I ran for president once and won, and then won a second, by many millions of votes”) and the use of the “Chinese virus” to refer to the pandemic, has proposed imposing the death penalty for drug traffickers (“if you execute one of those, you save 500 lives,” he has said) and has advocated “giving back to the police their authority, their resources, their power and their prestige”. He has also suggested that Democrats should allow the “homeless into their backyards” so they can “dirty their property, attack their families and get high where their children play.”

It was his first time in a public act in the city, 566 days after his last rally, with which he endangered the lives of hundreds of those police officers whom he has said he wants to defend. It was on January 6, 2021, shortly before leaving the White House, and 140 of them were injured (although he has not made any reference to that). He then harangued thousands of his followers, although he knew that many were armed, to march to the Capitol and influence the certification of the electoral votes that gave victory and the presidency to Joe Biden.

The insurrection that followed is the subject of a criminal investigation, carried out by the Department of Justice, and another parliamentary one, by a congressional committee that last Thursday provided evidence that during the three hours that the assault lasted the still The president deliberately decided to do nothing to stop the violent mob, even though he was “the only person on the planet capable of sending them home.” In an interview with NBC, Attorney General Merrick Garland, in charge of building (or not) the case against Trump, has promised to seek “justice without fear or favoritism.” “We intend to hold everyone accountable,” he added, “anyone who was criminally responsible for the events surrounding January 6.”

The return of the former president to the capital was loaded with symbolism. “Washington,” in Trump’s rhetoric, stands for all that — the corrupt political class, the media mainstreamthe intellectuals, the establishment scientist…—plotted against him to remove him from power against his will.

This time it was certainly a more peaceful audience than the one on January 6. Hundreds of activists and Republican officials from all over the United States gathered for the two days of talks and debates at the America First Agenda Summit, in a festive atmosphere, in which the great figures of Trumpism posed for one selfie after another. For the closing speech they scheduled the former president, who picked up many of the gloves that the speakers threw at him: the threat of China, the attacks on culture woke up (“We shouldn’t allow men to compete in women’s sports. It’s crazy”) or electoral integrity, allegedly at risk.

Senators, attorneys general, governors, state legislators or old glories of the Conservative Party came from all over the country to participate in a meeting that aspires to lay the foundations of the Party’s policies. Long-term Republican, beyond the next elections in November, and even beyond the presidential elections of 2024. “We are here to strike the seal, to set the axis that ensures freedom in this country, not for two or four years! but for 100 years!” exclaimed Brooke Rollins, former Trump White House interior adviser, at the opening of the forum on Monday. She agreed with the rest of the speakers in painting the previous Administration as the one that left the most extraordinary economic and security results in the history of the United States. Biden’s was defined in the best of cases as “a complete failure”, the result of policies of the “radical left”.

Rollins is president and CEO of the pressure group close to Trump America First Policy Institute (AFPI), organizer of the meeting. Founded in 2017, it is led by a group of advisers and officials from the former president’s cabinet, who, after the defeat in the last elections – a defeat they consider, without evidence, to be the result of electoral fraud – are preparing a political agenda for the next president. Republican, be it Trump or another. One of the stars of the meeting, veteran politician Newt Gingrich, compared that effort to the one carried out by the Heritage Foundation (thinktank still in operation, but has seen better days) to pave the way for Ronald Reagan’s conservative revolution in the early 1980s.

That agenda consists of 10 points, which were the focus of the tables and speeches, in which issues such as inflation, the price of gasoline or immigration have been addressed. The AFPI aspires to “make the world’s largest economy work for all Americans”; “to return control of health care to patients and doctors” (control, which, they claim, they lost during the pandemic, with confinement and vaccination mandates); to “restore America’s historic commitment to liberty, equality, and self-government”; to “give parents more control over their children’s education”, to “end the wall with Mexico”, and, incidentally, end human trafficking and defeat the drug cartels south of the border; to “ensure world peace through the use of American strength and leadership”; to achieve energy independence; to “facilitate voting and make it more difficult to commit electoral fraud”; and to improve security in cities. The last point is especially dedicated to Washington, known to its critics as The Swamp, the swamp, because it is literally built on one, but above all because of its image that evokes the rottenness of political corruption. The AFPI is committed to “draining that swamp.”

Weather hazards have made Trump’s appearance in the Washington swamp coincide with that of his vice president, Mike Pence, who was scheduled to speak in the city on Monday, but a storm delayed his arrival. He finally intervened in another republican forum, the Young America’s Foundation (foundation of the young America). “Some people may choose to focus on the past,” Pence said in his hour-long speech, which elaborated on the need to turn the page on the 2020 voter fraud hoax. “But elections are about the future. And I think conservatives need to focus on the future to take America back.”

Although he did not name him (other than to gloss over the achievements of his Administration), Trump floated on Pence’s words. As has been proven in the eight sessions of the committee investigating the assault on Capitol Hill, the former president put enormous pressure on his deputy in the weeks leading up to January 6, because he wanted him to use his power so as not to certify Biden’s victory, despite the fact that it was not clear that such a thing was legally in his hands. Trump put Pence’s life in danger with a tweet in which he singled out Pence in the midst of an insurrection, and seemed to agree with the cries of the mob calling for him to be “hanged.” In recent weeks, Pence has been showing signs of taking a step forward in the 2024 elections. It is the second time since Friday that both politicians have faced each other in events held on the same day and in the same city (the last time was in Arizona).

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