(From New York) Biden versus Trump or Trump versus Biden. Whichever way you look at it, the results of the Super Tuesday primaries held in 15 US states have clearly shown that the November elections are likely to be a rematch, albeit in a very different general context compared to 2020.
Gone is the pandemic of Covid-19 that had brought the world to a standstill and so many of the politicians who had tried to govern it into disarray.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump is facing 91 indictments. Instead of living like a former president, he spent the last four years working on retaking the Republican Party and expanding his MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement to include no small number of extremists. For his part, Joe Biden is embroiled in two wars he never wanted: the Ukraine war, now in its third year, and the Israel-Hamas war, with no end in sight. On top of the turmoil overseas, Biden has to govern a nation dominated by extremist voices overshadowing the moderates, including his own very own. Like his rival, he faces old age and a biased news media that is more concerned with exposing his gaffes than the successes and shortcomings of his policies.
That is why the Trump-Biden rematch is bound to be different.
The moderate wing of both parties in Congress has disappeared, or rather has narrowed considerably, because most moderate members of the Senate and Congress are unwilling to be targets of the venom and reprisals that make bipartisan bills exhausting in their processes and irrelevant in their outcomes. Proof of this is the rejection of the Mexican border security measure which was a convenient election battleground rather than the solution to which moderates of both parties had agreed. The prosperity of America, as reflected in its economic data, with annual GDP growth of 2.5%, inflation 50% lower than in 2022, and a strong labour market with unemployment at around 3.7%, has failed to convince US voters. The middle class is disappearing. It is increasingly marginalised by the wealth generated by corporations and powerless in the face of a world changing at breakneck speed, driven by Big Tech companies lacking any real regulatory framework.
The role of religions continues to be a decisive factor in the electoral process,
as the analysis of the Super Tuesday vote shows, in which white evangelicals have supported Donald Trump, at times with more than 75% of the vote. The reasons are to be found in a fideistic attachment to the Republican Party and the need for a fighter capable of challenging the barbarism of modernity and the representatives of the Democratic Party. According to Samuel Perry from the University of Oklahoma, “despite the fact that the former president is a serial liar and a serial philanderer who staged a quasi-coup and who keeps intimidating his opponents with threats of violence, there is a persistent belief that no Republican candidate, no matter how problematic, could be worse than a Democrat.”
For his part, Biden, the second Catholic President in the history of the United States, continues to champion issues such as the freedom to choose to have an abortion, or issues related to the transgender and LGBT+ community, which do not always coincide with Church doctrine.
However, if these issues do not completely alienate his Catholic supporters, they do broaden his electoral base. Nevertheless, with a Muslim community increasingly frustrated by inaction on Gaza and vetoes on the ceasefire, the new elections could prove to be a tough race.
“As the nation prepares for a general election later this year, the lay faithful are called to exercise their special vocation of making the church present and fruitful in those places and circumstances where it is only through them that she can become the salt of the earth”, declared Archbishop Gustavo García-Siller of San Antonio in an op-ed published in America Magazine on the role of Catholics in the upcoming elections.
“Christians are not a social club that gathers on Sundays to receive nice-sounding catchphrases. We are to influence the heart of society!”, the bishop points out.
In the opinion of Monsignor García-Siller we must start by asking ourselves whether love for neighbour occupies a central place in the candidates’ electoral programs.
