Even ousted from Facebook, the former US president still holds his party with an iron fist.
Image d’archive de Donald Trump.
AFP
Despite maintaining his ban on Facebook, Donald Trump wanted to display his influence on Republicans on Wednesday by exhausting, in a salvo of press releases, one of the few elected critical of his party and by reiterating his accusations, without foundation, of fraud election.
Despite his defeat of Joe Biden in 2020 and a second infamous dismissal proceeding, triggered after the deadly assault on the Capitol by pro-Trump protesters, the stormy billionaire remains very popular with Republican voters. And he knows it.
Deprived of social networks since this attack, it is through press releases that the former president attacked Liz Cheney, one of the few parliamentarians from his party to have voted in favor of his indictment for ” incitement to insurrection ”.
With all his weight as a former president, the real estate mogul called for her to be removed from her position as number three Republicans in the House of Representatives, to replace her with a young pro-Trump elected official, Elise Stefanik. “Liz Cheney is a warmonger fool who has nothing to do with the Republican Party hierarchy,” Donald Trump wrote.
Cheney in trouble
The Republican has never explicitly conceded his defeat in the presidential election of November 3, 2020 to Joe Biden. Despite the repeated failures of his legal actions, he had maintained on social networks the myth of massive electoral fraud until January 6, when Congress was to certify the victory of his Democratic rival.
Gathered that day in Washington to listen to him, some of his supporters then launched an assault on the Capitol. Social networks reacted quickly, suspending the billionaire’s accounts. And the supervisory board of Facebook, whose decisions are binding, ruled Wednesday that the former tenant of the White House “had created an environment where a serious risk of violence was possible” on January 6.
36-year-old Elise Stefanik voted that same day in Congress against the certification of Joe Biden’s victory in several key states. After a vigorous impeachment trial in February in Congress, Donald Trump was acquitted.
Liz Cheney “continues” to assert “stupidly that there was no electoral fraud,” thundered the real estate mogul Wednesday, “when in fact, the evidence (…) shows the opposite” . An internal vote on his retention in the number three position could come as early as next week, when Republican lawmakers, on vacation, return to Washington. Republican House leaders Kevin McCarthy, number one, and Steve Scalise, number two, have already claimed this week that Liz Cheney no longer has parliamentary group support.
– “History will judge us” –
While other Republicans targeted by the ex-president’s attacks carefully avoid reacting publicly, the elected Wyoming proclaims that Donald Trump, who cherishes the idea of running for office in 2024, should not “play a role in the future ”of the country. And it was by calling on her colleagues, in a forum, to turn their backs “on the cult of the Trump personality” that she reacted to her inflammatory statements on Wednesday.
The party “is at a decisive turning point”, she wrote in the pages of “Washington Post“. “We Republicans must decide whether we are going to choose the truth” or “join Trump’s crusade to delegitimize the outcome” of the presidential election. “History will judge us”.
In stark contrast, pro-Trump Republicans are courting the billionaire at his home in Florida. Latest: Ted Cruz, who posted a photo of the two men on Tuesday evening, smiles on his lips. Opposite, Republican defenders of Liz Cheney are rare. She “refuses to lie”, had greeted Tuesday evening Senator Mitt Romney, another pet peeve of Donald Trump. Faced with these divisions, Joe Biden estimated Wednesday that the Republicans were “in the midst of a kind of mini-revolution”.
To give voters information “coming directly from Donald J Trump’s office,” the former president this week launched a site with his press releases. But its impact remains far from the immense sounding board he found on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, underlines Joshua Tucker, professor at New York University: “Let’s be clear, if you are Trump and you want to have a influence in 2022 and (…) perhaps introduce yourself in 2024, it is better to be on social networks. ”
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