The race is crowded Republican nomination in the White House: there are now about ten candidates, but more will come. There is something for all tastes: find a former president, a former deputy, two governors, four former governors, a senator, a former UN ambassador, two entrepreneurs, a black, only one woman so far.
The field of contenders widens; and the list of judicial troubles grows longer Donald Trump, which, in the polls, remains the pacesetter for the nomination. The tycoon is the subject of a federal Grand Jury which is collecting testimony in Florida on the handling of the hundreds of confidential documents stolen from the White House until the FBI seized them at his residence in Mar-a-lago: a sign that the investigators are preparing to ask for a referral to trial.
On Wednesday 7 January, one of his former close collaborators was heard. And an embarrassing phone call came up in the media in which Trump boasts that he kept the classified dossiers, including one on a possible attack on theIran.
The more candidates there are, the more votes are dispersed. This plays into the hands of the former president, who can count on a large and ‘loyal’ base of supporters. Among those in the running, there is no one who so far surpasses or approaches him: RealClear Politics, which averages the polls, gives him between 10 and 20 points ahead of all the others, including his bogeyman, the governor of Florida Ron DeSantis.
Democrats: flat calm, all behind Biden
In the democratic field, on the other hand, no leaf is moving: after President Joe Biden announced his candidacy, no one challenged him, apart from the writer Marianne Williamson70 years old, who had already come forward – she tried again in 2020, without any success – and Robert F. Kennedy jr, big name, nephew of JFK and son of Robert, brother of JFK. If Williamson is a ‘neo-Rooseveltian’ idealist, Kennedy mixes ‘no vax’ and conspiracy theorists: neither of them will go far.
It is possible that the situation among Democrats will evolve if Trump, who is about to turn 77, loses ground and if a match looms between Biden, who will be almost 82 on Election Day, November 5, 2024, and Ron DeSantis, who he will be just 46 and that he could exploit the obvious and obvious to his advantage physical frailty of the president.
For now, however, it is flat calm, even on the left. The People’s Party has decided to run Cornel West70 years old, black, moral philosopher and civil rights activist, who in 2016 and 2020 had supported the candidacy for the democratic nomination of the ‘socialist’ senator Bernie Sanders, who this time gives up.
With the agreement that avoids the risk of default of the Union until January 2025, Biden has also removed from his head a sword of Damocles that hung over his electoral campaign: it is one of the reasons why the agreement made by the Administration Democrat with the Republican Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy is much criticized by the ‘would-be’ Republicans.
Republicans: the new faces of the nomination
The last to enter the republican arena are important characters, but they don’t have many chances. Mike Pence64 years old, former governor of Indiana, former Trump deputy, a vein of Italian blood on his mother’s side, ran as a candidate on his birthday: a ‘poisoned apple’, because the ‘Trumpians’ judge him a traitor who, after four years of total flattening on the positions of his boss, refused, on January 6, 2021, to endorse the reversal of the outcome of the elections under the pressure of the troublemakers who gave theassault on the Capitol instigated by the then president.
In his campaign launch video, Pence does not name Trump or show images of him, but says that “different times require a different leadership“: “Our party and our country today need me to appeal, as Lincoln said, to the best angels of our nature,” he says, highlighting his personality, his frankness, his jovial character. It is the first time in US history that a former deputy challenges his former boss.
Simultaneously, they applied Chris Christie61 years old, former governor of New Jersey, already aspiring to the nomination in 2016 without great success, often involved in judicial disputes – he promises to oppose Trump and give him a hard time – and Doug Burgum67, governor of North Dakota, who must build national notoriety and who writes in the Wall Street Journal “We need a new leader for the changing economy.”
Pence, Christie and Burgum reach out to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, the most accredited ‘anti-Trump’; the black senator from South Carolina Tim Scott; the former governor of Arkansas Asa Hutchinson, 73 years old; the former US representative to the UN Nikky Haley, 51, former governor of South Cariolina; the biotech magnate Vivek Ramaswamy37 years old.
Others who consider whether to enter the lists are the senators Ted Cruz e Rand Paulthe former secretary of state Mike Pompeo and the governor of Virginia Glenn Youngkin.
The star in the firmament of the ‘anti-Trump’ who were – or almost – Trumpians, is DeSantis, who urges the Party to “turn over the page”. The ex-president’s campaign accuses him of plagiarizing the slogan “Great American comeback” (contrasted with ‘Make America great again’). Of the debt deal, DeSantis says: “Before the deal, our country was heading towards bankruptcy; after the agreement, our country is still heading towards bankruptcy”.
Catwalks in Iowa for ‘wannabe’ Republicans
Many of the candidates for the Republican nomination showed up in Iowa at the ‘Roast and Ride’, an annual event that has given them a runway in the state that will open the primary series in less than eight months. Absent Trump, subject to attacks from rivals and criticism from the public.
Pence was among the protagonists of the event, riding a Harley Davidson, his passion, leather jacket and cowboy boots. Once he told of having asked his wife as a gift for a motorcycle and having had a dog, later called Harley.
Nikki Haley has urged “a generational change,” which she and DeSantis interpret best of all, as news hit that her husband Michael is about to begin a year-long mission to Africa with the South Carolina National Guard — he’ll leave her alone for the whole countryside.
In Iowa, public interest was focused on DeSantis, pugnacious, flanked by his wife Casey, in a leather jacket and on his back the image of a Florida alligator and the words ‘Where woke goes to die’ – a reference at the ‘woke culture’ opposed by conservatives.
Trump, instead of avoiding controversy, goes looking for it: his congratulations on his social ‘Truth’ to the dictator Kim Jong-un for North Korea’s entry into the WHO board arouses criticism from its rivals. Haley, who knows more about foreign affairs, notes that “you don’t rejoice with a thug who has threatened America and our allies.” DeSantis notes that “Kim is a murderous dictator”; Pence says that “no one should praise the dictator of North Korea or the leader of Russia who launched the aggression of Ukraine … we are for freedom and for those who defend freedom.” But Kim and Putin will not decide USA 2024.
Cover photo EPA/JUSTIN LANE