Joe Biden wins US elections: "Trump tries to discredit democracy to stay in power"
This interview was conducted before Joe Biden's victory in the US presidential election was confirmed.
As an expert on presidential power and democracy, William Howell observes with alarm the attitude of President Donald Trump after Tuesday's elections in the United States.
This political science professor at the University of Chicago believes it unlikely that, by speaking without evidence of voter fraud and launching legal battles, Trump will win a second term after losing to his Democratic rival Joe Biden.
But Howell warns in an interview with BBC Mundo that the president sows anger and discontent among the population that will have dangerous consequences in the future.
The following is a synthesis edited for clarity of the telephone dialogue with Howell, author of the recent book "Presidents, Populism and the Crisis of Democracy":
How would you describe the state of American democracy after these elections, with President Trump saying without any evidence that there was fraud and posing legal challenges to the results?
Our democracy was hit. It did not fall. He is still standing. But she was hit.
Trump spent all his time in office working to delegitimize and attack other branches of government, undermining democratic norms, sowing anger and discontent.
And it continues to do so; He's redoubling it now, just as he's waging all sorts of court battles that, so far, we have very little evidence to believe have any merit.
At least in the short term we can take some comfort from the fact that the courts are summarily rejecting these claims and the media is not obsessing over all the rhetoric and lies emanating from the White House. They are points in favor of our democracy.
But it is still alarming that we have a president who behaves in this way, unthinkable at any other time in recent US political history.
And I think that both by virtue of the actions he has taken and the problems that he has revealed over the past three and a half years, we see a democracy that is not what we thought it was: it is impoverished.
At the same time, the system seems to work: the votes are being counted, the institutions are doing their job, the courts sometimes accept and sometimes reject these appeals from President Trump… So where exactly do you see the risk?
The risk at this point is not that Trump might somehow take one of these court cases all the way to the Supreme Court and then give him a second term. That seems very, very unlikely to me.
Rather, the risk is that by behaving in this way, by speaking in this way, you are sowing anger and discontent among the general public, that there will be millions of people in the wake of this election who will think that Biden somehow made it. stole, that he is a cheater and that the whole system is against them.
In the midst of a pandemic in which we desperately need trustworthy institutions, find ways to unite and coordinate our response to this pressing health crisis, it is going to be incredibly difficult to run this country with so many people who believe what Trump is saying right now.
That is the real risk.
So you say that the president basically tries to discredit democracy in order to stay in power ...
That is what you are trying to do.
Like I said, I don't think it's going to be successful. But saying that you will not be successful does not mean that your actions have no consequences.
The consequence is that there are going to be a lot of people who follow Trump who are going to think that in fact everything is rigged, as Trump has said all along.
They are also part of this country. And we have to find some way to unite again.
Biden will have to find some way to rule this wayward country, which is filled with anger in certain segments, and Trump's actions are contributing to this.
There are other things that could also indicate that America's democracy is healthy: Turnout will hit an all-time high, people voted peacefully, and they made their voices heard. Aren't they good signs?
They absolutely are.
We were concerned there would be violence in the streets and so far we have seen no signs of that. There were pockets of 25 or 50 protesters gathered, sometimes with weapons, demanding that they be able to watch people count the votes. That is alarming.
But we haven't seen anything at the level of what he worried would happen after Trump urged his supporters to go to the polls and monitor what happens.
There will be a declared winner finally. That will be the positive; not whether Trump concedes or shows some benevolence after a defeat.
Why is the award speech important?
The concession speech is not important because it is formally required for a transfer of power. Is not that.
Rather, what a concession speech does is confirm the outcome of a choice by the loser, which then has the effect of signaling to his followers that the outcome must be respected, that things were indeed fair.
In order for any democracy to prosper and for people to speak beyond their differences, we need some basic beliefs that people are acting by the rules.
A concession speech can serve that purpose and affirm this basic notion that we are all in this together.
Trump is now the second highest-voted presidential candidate in U.S. history, after Joe Biden. How do you observe this phenomenon?
I think it attracts so many votes first because the country has grown and second because turnout has been remarkably high.
I don't think that, as a proportion of the country, their support is greater than that of other presidential losers in the past.
Do you have any clues about the future of Trumpism after this election?
I don't think he's going to go away, because I don't think Trump is going to go away.
And I think the preconditions that laid the foundation for Trump's rise to power are going to continue, such as an ineffective government in dealing with the deep challenges associated with immigration, population movements, structural changes in the economy, all cultural anguish. and damages that people have experienced.
Trump has shown that that could be a ticket to the presidency, and that will be available to others who want to take advantage of it.
And what would Trump's legacy be for US democracy?
What it has done is reveal how vulnerable our democracy is, that when a demagogue arrives at the White House he can do significant damage.
Perhaps we had a false sense of comfort, that we had solved all the challenges of democracy. We hadn't. That he was so disruptive to our politics in such a short time suggests that things were more precarious than we thought.
