One country, two Presidents
Artikkel - Matei Norbert Balan
Whether it likes it or not, America might be stuck with two Presidents. Wherever Donald Trump might be the upcoming year, playing golf or spewing hate in a FOX studio, the current reinforcement of the idea that the degenerate establishment has achieved power by cheating will continue to do harm for years to come. Whatever happens now, Donald Trump will always be the rightful president to his followers. And that’s a problem for President-elect Joe Biden.
Foto: Hasan Almasi / Unsplash
Fifty years ago, the Italian writer and scholar Umberto Eco observed that seizing political power in a country no longer required military action. “Today it is only in the most backward countries that fascist generals, in carrying out a coup d’état, still use tanks,” he wrote. Any country that had reached a high level of industrialization, (so a country where the media plays an important part in the daily life), Eco thought, could now do without gunpowder and blood, for in the post-war era “a country belongs to the person who controls communications.”.
In the wake of this year’s US Presidential Election results, which project Joe Biden as the 46th President of the United States of America, one thing seems more clear than ever. America might not be a backward country, where fascists attempt a coup by deploying armed troops on the streets (even though many fear this outcome), but it certainly is a country where two realities seem to operate at all times. These two realities are sustained by the media, which is in turn split in two. First, there’s what many call the ‘mainstream’ media (against which Trump and his followers have always rallied against). Then there’s what others call ‘alternative’ media. More than often the distinction between the two is blurred, to say the least. Mainstream media content is constantly chewed up and reappropriated into alternative content, and alternative content (sometimes in it’s raw and potentially dangerous form) ends up in the mainstream.
A country does belong to the person who, according to Umberto Eco, controls the communications. But what happens when, like in the US, a country has two equally powerful systems of communications which are in a constant wrestle over the role of the hegemon? What happens when this constant polarization of the media ends up polarizing the very reality it’s viewers hold to be true?
Well before the election night, when, due to the current pandemic, many US citizens were opting to vote by mail, Donald Trump and the entire media apparatus behind him started contesting the validity of the mail-in ballots and the security of the remote voting system – a ‘they’re going to fuck us over’ narrative was pushed fiercely. In tandem, another story was told as every media personality, pundit, FOX anchor, right-wing YouTuber, and imageboard member wasn’t even considering that Trump didn’t have ‘four more years’ on the horizon. A Trump victory was the only option Trump’s side has ever considered, and, of course, if things weren’t going to turn out this way, it was going to be due to election fraud.
On election night, these two narratives amplified to the point that they were so vibrant, so solid, that anyone who paid attention to what was discussed in the studios of the FOX network, to what Alex Jones was yelling in the studios of Infowars, to what Sargon of Akaad was discussing on his live stream, or to the fear-mongering on the vitriolic threads of 4chan or Stormfront, could easily start believing that Donald Trump would definitely crush Joe Biden.
But Joe Biden won. What the incumbent President Donald Trump has recently called in a tweet the ‘lamestream media’ (a perfectly legitimate way for a grown-up elected official to refer to the free press) has acknowledged the victor, which was then congratulated and recognized as the next POTUS by world leaders like France’s President Emanuel Macron, and Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Did this make Donald Trump the loser of the election? Well, not in his own opinion.
Trump took to Twitter, his usual tool of misinformation and propaganda, to claim over and over again that he has, in fact, won, and that the Democrats are guilty of electoral fraud. The ‘Trump and GOP are victims of the Democrats’ narrative now had steroids injected into it. Mike Pompeo, the US Secretary of State, who in the past has constantly urged foreign powers to accept election results and ensure a peaceful transition of power, has recently declared, with a bit of a smirk on his face, that there will be a “smooth transition of power to a new Trump administration”. And just to add more gasoline to the fire of fear of a potential coup, ever since election night Trump has been firing people from the top of the military apparatus who have opposed or criticized him in the past and then replaced them with what could potentially be more friendly figures. This could mean that he is indeed planning to at least try and use the military. Or maybe he’s just covering some tracks. Whatever might really be going on in the state apparatus, which Trump still leads, Trump’s supporters are acting just like he is. And Trump is acting like he hasn’t lost.
What has been going on for the past couple of days can only be understood as two presidents running a country split into two (regardless of President-elect Biden’s calls for unity and de-escalation of conflicts) using what looks like two separate versions of the same media that should be concerned with speaking truth to power and keep the US citizens informed. The struggle for power becomes more fierce as Trump continuously refuses to accept defeat. The more he will sink into denial, the more his followers will sink into denial. The damage caused now by Trump and his temper will be irreversible. Furthermore, he may not be the 46th President, but there’s a chance that he’ll keep running his own country from his Twitter account and from the studios of FOX,
Then, whatever President Joe Biden intends to be, he will find himself against opposition from his own unpredictable and forever loyal to Trump countrymen the likes of which the US might have never seen before. And running a country that’s forever split into two, where hate and warmongering are the norms, is a far bigger challenge than we can imagine. After all, you can escort trespassers from the White House, but you can not escort people out of their own country.