While the race for the American presidential election officially begins this Monday, January 15 with the Iowa caucus, certain subjects are already coming back to the heart of the speeches of the former President of the United States, Donald Trump, widely favored on the Republican side, and current President Joe Biden, expected to be the Democratic candidate. From illegal immigration to gun violence, Le Figaro looks back at the eight key themes that will punctuate the campaign between now and the election on November 5.
Immigration is already a determining subject of the presidential campaign: in 2023, 2.5 million migrants crossed the border to reach the United States, including 300,000 during the month of December, a record. President Biden faces growing pressure from congressional Republicans who want to see concrete measures put in place to reduce the influx.
For more than a year, Republicans have reiterated their desire to initiate impeachment proceedings against Biden’s Minister of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas: he is accused of having willfully failed to strengthen restrictions on ‘immigration. On January 3, Mike Johnson, new Speaker of the House of Representatives, and around sixty Republicans went to Eagle Pass in Texas, a notorious migratory transit point on the border with Mexico, in order to put pressure on Biden and the need to adopt stricter border security policies.
At the heart of the debate is the question of a profound overhaul of the migration system: any procedure for requesting asylum in the United States allows applicants to remain in the territory while the courts decide, which can take years. A debate on which the favorite Republican candidate did not fail to bank, declaring that illegal immigrants “poison and destroy the blood of our country” during a campaign event on December 19. In response, Joe Biden’s campaign team compared Donald Trump’s comments in an email to those of Adolf Hitler or Mussolini. “I haven’t read Mein Kampf!”, the former president then defended himself, without ceasing to vilify immigrants.
The topic of immigration is inextricably linked to that of US aid to Ukraine: Congressional Republicans have repeatedly announced that they will not approve the new $60 billion-plus package. The aid that the White House wishes to grant to Kiev, as long as the government does not implement a policy of firmer security restrictions at the border. If, however, the Republicans pushed through Congress a law approving a $14 billion aid package intended for Israel – the question of support for which polarizes American opinion less than Ukraine – the Senate responded that only one bill including Ukraine, Israel, and humanitarian aid to Gaza would be acceptable.
The geopolitical context, marked by the war in Ukraine since the Russian invasion in February 2022 and the conflict between Israel and Hamas since the attack by the Palestinian terrorist group on October 7, 2023, is particularly murky. After establishing himself as a key ally of kyiv, Joe Biden is struggling to convince Congress to grant new aid to the country which has been bogged down in conflict with Russia since the failure of its counter-offensive. The repeated visits and calls from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will not have changed anything, especially since American public opinion’s support for the war in Ukraine is decreasing: 55% of Americans are now reluctant to see Congress grant new aid to Ukraine and 51% consider that the United States “has already done enough”, according to a CNN poll published in August 2023.
After a suspension of a few weeks during the holiday period, negotiations have resumed in Congress with a view to the next two deadlines on January 19 and February 2 to reach an agreement on a dozen finance bills, which include the aid to the two countries at war.
Also read: Joe Biden, president entangled in a world in crisis
Financial fraud, defamation, concealment of documents, riots at the Capitol on January 6… former President of the United States Donald Trump faces 91 criminal charges in four different jurisdictions. The dates of some of the current proceedings coincide with the electoral calendar, even if the Republican candidate’s numerous appeal requests are currently delaying two major cases: the question of his ineligibility for election in the name of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution , referred to the Supreme Court after the historic decisions of Colorado and Maine, and that of his role in the assault on the Capitol by activists on January 6, 2021, pending since his request for absolute immunity.
For the moment, Donald Trump’s legal setbacks seem far from penalizing his campaign: on the one hand because the main strategy of his defense is to slow down the ongoing proceedings, on the other hand because the Supreme Court itself seems to even reluctant to decide on questions of immunity and eligibility, for fear of being accused of bias. During his last appearances in court for his civil trial for financial fraud, the former president did not hesitate to denounce the “political bias” of the judge and the prosecutor of the State of New York and the “hunting to witches” to which he is the subject.
Also read: Why Donald Trump’s electability also depends on the Supreme Court
The current president and Democratic candidate Joe Biden, who celebrated his 81st birthday last November, is facing increasing criticism regarding his age. The cause is a tendency to stutter, look confused or even lose balance during public appearances, the most famous of which is undoubtedly the official visit to Vietnam which almost turned into a disaster when the president described the country as “third world”, before indicating that he wanted to “go to bed”.
Errors that his 77-year-old opponent does not fail to deride or parody. In a campaign video broadcast on his social network Truth in November, Donald Trump compared his meetings with powerful international counterparts during his mandate with the falls of the current president, against the backdrop of mocking music and a common thread: “we went from this… to this”.
Biden’s strategy for dealing with it? His unstoppable sense of humor: “I know I look like I’m 30, but I’ve been doing this for a while,” he reportedly said at a charity event in September. Asked the same month about his election to the Senate in 1972, the president said “I remember when I was young… it was 827 years ago.”
American society is divided more than ever on questions of “wokism”: in January, the resignation of Claudine Gay, president of the prestigious Harvard University, after a controversy over anti-Semitism within the institution, revealed the extent of the American divide. From the censorship of textbooks deemed too “woke” to backpedaling on positive discrimination measures within American universities, the debates are legion and polarize the opposition between the two political camps.
Also read: The making of elites in the United States: history of American universities
This is evidenced by the question of gender, which is radioactive in American society. While the number of children and adolescents diagnosed with gender dysphoria tripled in the United States between 2017 and 2021, Democrats and Republicans are clashing over this thorny debate. If the most left wing of the Democrats prioritizes this need to educate children about “integration”, which involves recognition of the difference between biological sex and sexual identity as a social construction, the “Grand Old Party” criticizes such an approach, which it considers to be an indoctrination of young Americans. Former President Donald Trump notably announced a heavy agenda on this subject in July, if he were re-elected, affirming that he would crack down on “pink-haired communists” and against doctors offering transitional care to transgender minors.
The United States is torn apart over the right to abortion. More than a year and a half after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 1973, around twenty states banned or strictly restricted access to voluntary termination of pregnancy: in Texas, Kate Cox, a young woman of around 31, was forced to leave the state to be able to have an abortion , even though her pregnancy presented serious risks to her health. However, she had taken legal action to obtain authorization to have recourse to an abortion due to her particular situation: this is the first time, since 1973, that a request for emergency abortion has been required from a tribunal. Other states with a Democratic majority have, on the contrary, taken the opposite view by passing decrees guaranteeing women’s free access to abortion, allowing the Democratic Party to restore its popularity rating.
Also readAbortion: one year after the annulment of the Roe vs. Wade ruling, the United States divided
In the six referendums organized since to protect abortion or the fetus, pro-abortionists have achieved a full success, including in conservative states like Kansas, Kentucky, Montana and Tuesday in Ohio. While this thorny debate still electrifies American society, the Supreme Court recently announced that it would rule by the end of 2024 on the question of the use of the abortion pill, thus coinciding with the election deadlines.
Although it remains below the peak reached in 2017, the number of deaths due to the opioid crisis in the United States has started to rise again in 2023, in particular due to the proliferation of a new type of drug fifty times more powerful than heroin and a hundred times stronger than morphine: fentanyl has become the bane of public authorities, supplanting in just a few years all other drugs produced by drug traffickers. This synthetic powder, the leading cause of death among 18-49 year olds, is the cause of two thirds of the 110,000 overdose deaths in the federal state in 2022. The same year, the authorities seized enough fentanyl to kill all the American population. A total of 150,000 Americans have died from fentanyl-related overdoses, leading Republican candidate Nikki Haley to declare that the drug “has killed more Americans than the wars in Iraq, Vietnam and Afghanistan” (a correct statement, since the three wars combined caused the deaths of 65,000 Americans, according to the New York Times).
The subject is likely to come up again on the sidelines of the elections, when more than a quarter of Americans consider opioids and fentanyl to be the greatest threat to public health, ahead of obesity and firearms, after an Axios-Ipsos poll in August 2023. Joe Biden announced that he wanted to tackle the problem head on by promising to tackle the entire production chain while encouraging the sale of Narcan, a spray nasal which helps prevent overdoses. For his part, Donald Trump has still said little on the subject, a blind spot that his Republican adversaries still in the race point out. Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida running against Trump in the Republican primary, has repeatedly promised that he would send the American army to Mexico to fight against the cartels.
The year 2023 marked a new record for gun violence in the United States with 656 shootings, despite a drop in the number of total gun deaths (nearly 19,000, compared to more than 20,000 the previous year). previous year, according to the Gun Violence Archives census site). The subject of carrying weapons risks once again occupying a central place in political debates. At the level of the different states, legislative reforms are increasing, but they are struggling to penetrate federal policy which, faced with a powerful lobby from the arms industry, is still resisting adopting measures that would apply to the whole country.
On the Democratic side, President Joe Biden spoke in favor of strengthening gun safety measures and enforcing so-called “red flag” laws that allow temporary confiscation of a person’s gun considered threatening. His main opponent Donald Trump claimed to be the president “most supportive of firearms and the Second Amendment” of the United States Constitution, which enshrines the right to bear arms, a position seconded by Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, who takes a dim view of “red flag” laws.