by Stefano Vaccara
NEW YORK (USA) (ITALPRESS) – Donald Trump has crossed another red line. This time not through a social post or an improvised joke in front of journalists, but during a Saturday evening election in Vandalia, Ohio, while asking Americans to vote for Republican candidates in mid-term elections on November 3.
“We won every battle, defeated every buffalo, overcome every threat and now we are about to defeat communists, socialists, radicalized lunatics and criminals once and for all,” Trump said. Then he added an even heavier sentence: “We will knock them out once and for all.”.
The problem is not Trump’s usual verbal aggressiveness. It is that the President of the United States was talking about his American political opponents, transforming once again the electoral competition into a battle against enemies to politically eliminate “one time for all”. Shortly thereafter he promised his supporters a great Republican victory by adding, with the usual vulgar language in his communes: “We’re going to shove it up their ass.”.
To immediately grasp the meaning of that “once and for all” was Steve Schmidt, for decades Republican strategist, councilman of the White House of George W. Bush and among the main leaders of John McCain’s presidential campaign in 2008, before breaking with the party during the first Trump presidency.
“The President of the United States is talking about Americans. Of his fellow citizens,” writes Schmidt in his newsletter The Warning. The point, he says, is elementary: in a democracy the defeated opponents in the elections continue to be citizens with the same rights and when they win they acquire the right to govern. For Schmidt, on the other hand, that “once and for all” represents a further leap in the Trumpian rhetoric: the political opponent is no longer simply beaten to the urns, but described as a threat to the nation.
This is the red line crossed on Saturday evening: not the insult, not the vulgarity and not even the umpteenth attack on the Democrats, but the idea that a part of America can be considered enemy of the other and that an electoral victory should serve to regulate the accounts “one time for all”. Less than a month after the vote on November 3, these are words that make the creeps come to those who still believe in the resilience of American democracy to resist any shock, even to those of Trump.
– photo IPA Agency –
(ITALPRESS).
