The numbers say that Joe Biden could still make it at break of the earphones, at noon on November 4th European continental time. But the numbers themselves say that Donald Trump could indeed lose, but by a very narrow measure and therefore being able to always say that half of America was with him until the end. And being Trump he will say, he has already said it, that the vote was, would have been, stolen, lying shamelessly. Postal voting is controlled, reliable and attempted fraud has always been around 0,00007 percent. Anyway Trump will split the country even further in two, if he wins because he won and if he loses because he lost.
With states already attributed, informally but with full credibility, to a winner, Biden has 4 electoral college votes at noon on Nov. 225 (the one the President does) and Trump 213, and 270 are needed to win. There are seven states in the balance, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada and Arizona; in two, Pennsylvania and North Carolina, the rules require waiting until November 6 and 12 to scrutinize postal ballots that arrive late but still sent by November 3. At this point they can be glimpsed different scenarios and make various calculations odds, and these lean perhaps more in favor of Trump than of Biden, but the more serious thing is to wait. Pennsylvania and North Carolina will still be attributable before the legal deadlines, which must be awaited for the official announcements.
Now, the first political conclusion to be drawn is that even if he leaves the White House Trump has not really been defeated. This vote confirms that, despite four years half of America lived amid concern and horror, despite the semi-denialism of health on Covid, despite the obvious strategy of dividing the country and not uniting it on racial issues and great civic culture, and despite much more including the collapse of America's moral standing and leadership around the world, Donald Trump is still at the top of American politics and can legitimately claim to be its most representative figure between the second and third decades of the century. Trump's electorate doesn't care much about standing, indeed like their idol they say that having less is good because it gives back a free hand to their country which is therefore more scary and in the end will have more… standing.
From our point of view as Europeans, pay attention more than to American internal politics the consequences of this on its foreign policy, this is unfortunate and for a very simple reason. A century after the first decisive American steps towards world leadership, steps taken during and after the First World War and concluded after the Second, American voters have rewarded, and this figure remains even if Trump were to be refused a second term, the man who repudiates the policy of a dozen predecessors with twitter and presidential initiatives, and without defining a new one, if not the upheaval from "running war". Not everything Trump has done is wrong, but he certainly didn't know or want to define new logics and procedures.
America leapt into the leading role, first only financially and then politically undermining Great Britain, to better serve its interests and making New York the financial capital of the world, already a century ago. Trump throws everything overboard, practices a "racing war" that it does not recognize allies or chooses them with highly variable geometry and argues that this will better serve American interests; he wouldn't be able to say a word about how and with which men American finance already created its power in the time of his great-grandparents, but he pontificates in a big way. And, that's the point, no less than 100-120 million Americans believe him.
Among us there are those who rely, to interpret America today, on Marxist schemes of class struggle for which Trump would represent not the poor but the impoverished and the others would be the pseudo-intellectual elite who despise the impoverished. But there is no need to disturb Marx. The United States has followed in the rich/poor, center/periphery relationships, administrative centralism against local autonomies, all-American logics and schemes based on the difficult relationship, always difficult except for a few seasons, between commonman and elites, in the name of a robust populism, less improvised than the European one, but equally radical. The Trump season is the latest incarnation of this populist scheme. “They have ruined you, they despise you and I will save you and defend you”. This is the message and this, confirmed by the long session of 3 November, has passed.
Biden's message was "We can do much better than what we have before our eyes, we are not like that", and it was only half past. Today's America, 2016 was not an accident, it is what Trump found himself already packaged. He didn't create, he just exploited a slow erosion of the role of Congress, where there are no longer strong personalities and good connoisseurs of foreign policy; it has exploited the marginalization of the high bureaucracy especially of the State Department to the full advantage of the White House, with the National Security Council having gone from 50 people under Bush the father to 400 under Obama, to the complete disadvantage of diplomats; it has exploited the political polarization that shuts up everyone's mouth critics within the ranks. But all this was already before Trump. Trump is the product of that America where a group of young Republican deputies newly elected in 1994, the season of the pyrotechnician Newton Gingrich who is now a great supporter of Donald, said they did not have a passport and boasted of it as a flag of true Americanism. And we don't care about the world, as they once said in Italy. This is Trumpism. Even more than wishes for victory, Joe Biden would need wishes to be able to do something good if the victory should, in extremis, be his.
