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(Miami) It’s him or “communism”: Donald Trump has remained faithful to his strategy of polarization after suffering bitter setbacks in local elections, which put his party in a delicate position for the legislative elections in fall 2026.
A year ago today, he was re-elected after ensuring that he would boost the purchasing power of Americans.
But voters judge that the promise has not been kept, and Tuesday evening, the opposition candidates won largely in New Jersey, Virginia and New York, where the socialist Zohran Mamdani was elected to mayor after a meteoric political rise.
It was “very, very bad evening” for Trump, Robert Rowland, professor of communications at the University of Kansas, told AFP.
“We have the choice between communism and common sense,” responded the American president in a speech in Miami, Florida, in the south of the United States.
“If you want to know what Democratic parliamentarians want to do to America, look at the result of the election yesterday in New York, where their party installed a communist as mayor,” said the 79-year-old billionaire.
Trump, himself a New Yorker, however assured during an interview on Fox News that he “wanted the city to succeed. »
“Economic miracle”
The American president unflinchingly defended his economic policy and called on his party to do the same, even though according to Thomas Kahn, professor of political science at American University in Washington, Democratic victories have “a common theme: the cost of living”.
“We are achieving an economic miracle,” Trump assured in Miami, while polls show growing dissatisfaction among Americans with the cost of living and his strategy of customs duties.
He claims to have lowered the prices of gasoline, which have not changed for a year, and of food, which should increase by 3% this year according to the Ministry of Agriculture.
In his own camp, there is some concern.
Republicans need to hear “the warning,” Steve Bannon, one of the great ideologues of the Trumpist MAGA movement, warned Tuesday.
As for Vice-President JD Vance, if he judged on
“We will continue to work to provide a decent standard of living in this country, and it is on this point that we will be judged” during the mid-term legislative elections, he warned.
“Always be right”
Trump’s approach “is to always be right”, deciphers Robert Rowland. “But all of this comes up against what people experience when they go to the supermarket.”
Thomas Kahn talks about the gilding with which the Republican filled the White House or a glitzy party he gave for Halloween: “The Americans are struggling and they see him living like a prince,” the academic told AFP.
The Republicans, who narrowly control Parliament, are in an uncomfortable position one year before the midterms. These elections renew a third of the seats in the Senate and all those in the other component of Congress, the House of Representatives.
The conservatives “have linked their destiny to Trump” and the whole question for them is to manage to “dissociate themselves from him”, analyzes for AFP Wendy Schiller, professor of political science at Brown University.
But Republican candidates “cannot oppose head-on” him under penalty of being sidelined in favor of more radical profiles during the primaries, tempers Robert Rowland.
Trump himself called on his camp on Wednesday to adopt a hard line in Congress, at the risk of further prolonging the budgetary paralysis which has lasted for more than 35 days, a record.
