First there are the facts, the overwhelming numbers of Donald Trump’s victory. Absolute majority guaranteed in the Senate, in the Chamber, landslide victory in the count of electors. Against the courts that condemn him; against many big names in his party who define him as fascist and unreliable; against the voices of global and US progressive elites; against a democratic party left in tatters by the decay of Joe Biden, by his painful and necessary, yet belated, decisions; Against all this, his personal battle was won by Donald Trump, who four years after the defeat and ignominy of Capitol Hill returns to the White House, without the need for a coup, but with the overwhelming vote of the American people. These are the facts, and as often happens they have taken it upon themselves, in their brutal simplicity, to manifest themselves and disprove the stories.

Harris: always treated with skepticism

The stories, yes. Let’s rewind the tape of the last few months, starting from last July 21st, in which Joe Biden made his withdrawal official from a race that for him had become humanly impossible, and certainly losing from a political point of view. His deputy, always treated with skepticism by all the main observers, and hidden from the public opinion for years by Biden’s cabinet and the leaders of the Democratic Party, was in fact the only real candidate to challenge Trump. No one else has really engaged in an internal political battle, all the other timid hypotheses have disappeared overnight. Even faster. Suddenly, the awkward and absent-minded vice president became – in one forgetful tale – the “best possible candidate”. This improvised narrative was indeed supported by the sole factual element of a sudden return of large financiers to the side of the Democratic campaign. In hindsight, one might think that after having stopped wasting money on a candidate who was certainly a losing candidate, they invested in a candidate who was most likely a losing candidate, so as not to find themselves in the unpleasant position of having to justify themselves after that unlikely victory. Be that as it may, what has been said, from Harris’ investiture onwards, is that an impressive comeback was underway. There has certainly been a significant change for the better in the polls compared to when the candidate was the outgoing president, visibly ill and incontrovertibly inadequate. But could this be enough to erase the advantage accumulated by Trump? And was it really conceivable that years of voluntary hiding of the figure of Harris, and of criticism directed at her, would disappear? And an entire glorious party, that of the Democrats of America, could prove credible after it had shown itself incapable of guiding Biden’s necessary exit from the scene in an orderly manner, proposing to its voters and militants a choice between various proposals, possibly solid and credible? The narrative of the media and anti-Trump elites removed these obvious questions, immediately, and the answers came clear in yesterday’s polls.

An angry and frustrated society

More profound and radical than the removal of Harris’s weakness, and above all of the entire process that led to her losing candidacy, there is the removal – prolonged over the years now – of a look at the impoverished, enraged, frustrated society, which has in Trump his unlikely and consolidated idol. It is that deep America made up of “places that don’t matter”, which is very similar to the provinces of the entire West which in the most peaceful of hypotheses turn to conservative or ultra-conservative parties, and otherwise seek “revenge” in Brexit and in the most driven, extreme and reactionary. The voting map, when it is consolidated, will show us the prevalence of Harris in the coastal enclaves, in New York that looks to Europe and in California that governs the world’s communications, and in the middle a red sea of ​​Republican votes. It is that profound America that looks back, considers abortion a murder and homosexuality an offense against God and country, and is united in a strange bond with that of Elon Musk, a handful of billionaires who are totally libertarian in their behavior, who would like 3% taxes and a state so light as to allow militarized roads to protect their luxurious neighborhoods served by full automation. The former vote, the latter finance, Trump is elected.

The differences between Trump and Berlusconi

Judging and condemning those who have a career like Trump’s behind them, the courts of half of America that condemn him, a badly stopped coup attempt, is easy, and even politically necessary. However, easy judgment has never been helpful in understanding phenomena, especially the most politically and civically dangerous ones. Once again, with the clearest and most frightening clarity, the American vote asks the world of knowledge and progressive powers to look around and within, and to understand why, for years and years, it has no longer been able to speak to the world of the weakest, of the most fragile, that is, of those that the global left has always aspired, in all its forms, to represent. It is necessary not to “get back to winning”, but to collaborate for a better world, and to prepare for scenarios that will sooner or later also arise on our side of the Atlantic. It is said, indeed, that this time too we were the first, and that Berlusconi is a Trump from thirty years earlier. There are similarities, but there are more differences, which are perhaps even more relevant. What distances the two subjects is undoubtedly the clearance of violence and wickedness, the legitimization of full violence in a cruel society, by foundation and evolution. This is Trump’s America, and perhaps the West we have before us, so different from the rhetorical but all in all true dream of Berlusconi, who couldn’t understand why an important part of Italy hated him. For Trump and Trumpism, exactly the opposite is true: hatred is his fuel, and at the same time the mature product of a resentful and pessimistic society, which ignores social and climate change, whatever the cost. Because the future does not exist, and mercy has truly died: if we are its killers, we claim it with a sneer on our lips. And this is probably the deepest and most frightening abyss that the whole world faces today, and sees clearly in the mirror of the American vote.

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