This is about Trump
Begoña Moreno and I presented our book 'Esto no va de Trump' (This is not about Trump) at Casa América. Magnificently illustrated by her, edited by La Catarata and Atalayar and modestly written by me, without ever imagining such an elegant act, accompanied by so many good friends and colleagues, teachers and journalists, sitting with the required distance and feeling infected with their support as we did this summer at the Ateneo de Santander.
Javier Fernández Arribas moderated the event and the interventions of the presenters, Vicente Vallés, Carlos Franganillo and Chencho Arias who spoke about the United States, the elections and Donald Trump with such interest and accuracy that those words seemed like a court of the press, a light of democracy built through dialogue, as if echoing a prophecy. "This is about Trump," Vicente Vallés said, because "these elections have something of a plebiscite about them".
"We will have to wait for something to happen in October, which it will, although I would say that Biden would win today", warned the consul and ambassador to the United Nations, Inocencio Arias. "The 'october surprise' is that unforeseen event that always determines the presidential elections," explained Carlos Franganillo, who was a correspondent for TVE in Washington where he worked, and continues to work, as a model reporter, like Vallés, for young journalists and students.
October 1st was the day. We went home and got up from bed the next morning without having slept. Like Al Pacino's character in 'Author!, Author!', a film so much a part of American culture that he would get up early to read the review of the premiere of the film published in the NY Times. So we were getting up early to read about the presentation of 'This isn't about Trump', now also on social networks, and see if it was indeed about Trump or if, on the contrary, it was about this world and this story, and politics and the presidential elections.
But on the morning of the 2nd, at the dawn of autumn 2020, which was awakening, we thought about the hidden surprise of American democracy when October comes, as we read on Twitter, Begoña and I, each at home, that the US President and his wife, Melania, were infected with COVID-19. The uncertainty that would come back and forth to take over politics and life, over and over again.
In order to bring some certainty to politics, fiction and history became a single formula centuries ago. Homer was the author. The presidential elections of 2020 are a further chapter in this unpredictable story, in which liberal systems and democracy act as instruments of legitimizing the truth. Which must finally be applauded by public and truthfully collected by press criticism to be credible. As happened in that scene with Al Pacino in front of the Manhattan newsstand.
Dark speculation is back to destabilise people's consciences, but democracy stands firm again and again. If the president overcomes the crisis, he will emerge strengthened and victorious in the face of the pandemic. If he emerges weakened, he will lose the election humiliated by his insolence. If he were to resign temporarily from office, Vice-President Pence would take over. If Biden is also infected, the parties would have to agree on a new candidate. If the Executive were to find its two representatives incapacitated, Congress would temporarily relieve them. If there was a power vacuum during the election periods, the institutions would take over.
More than 200,000 Americans who are victims of the coronavirus, most of whom will be entitled to vote in the elections on November 3, will not be able to do so. Whatever the outcome of the US president's illness, hopefully a happy one, American democracy is not about Donald Trump. It is an institutional exercise to guarantee citizens' freedoms and rights on the basis of laws based on a shared experience that reminds the world at least every four years that citizens are free and equal before the law, even though the gods in the months of October, leap years and elections, insist on making us believe that this conviction is a product of fiction.