US Elections: God’s Hand | US elections

What goes wrong can be worse. We are checking it day by day. The collective life sometimes seems to darken. And sometimes a bloody accident complicates things even more. The fact is that the journalist dies with his cell phone. She has to go to a Best Buy chain in downtown Miami to buy a new one (600 from the wing) and her mood takes a darker turn. He doesn’t know what to write in his little electoral diary, he is realizing that the rain of the previous days has been a blessing compared to the unforgiving heat of the sun in South Florida and, well, he thinks that what goes wrong can be worse.

While waiting for the employee to find a non-pink Samsung, the reporter hears a couple arguing. Male and female, under forty, white, English-speaking. He wears a sticker on his shirt that says he has already voted. The tone they use suggests that they live together: only the spouse is given such concentrated milk.

He tells her, quite angry, that if it weren’t for the coronavirus, elections wouldn’t even be necessary because Donald Rump would have been re-elected by acclamation. She, perhaps in favor of Joe Biden and the Democrats, then utters a sentence of those that are noted in the notebook: “So it was the hand of God, ok?”. That so Maradonian of the “hand of God” leaves the journalist to reflect.

In other circumstances, he would have been the one to approach and ask. Given the circumstances, it is best to keep social distances: getting into a couple’s argument has never paid off.

The point is that the man who has already voted may be right. Whatever you think of Donald Trump (and it’s reasonable to think very bad things), the US economy was rocket rocket until damn covid-19 appeared. The polls reflected a high level of approval for the president’s discharge. Many citizens hated it, it is true, but their pockets were overflowing. It is obvious that the pandemic, whether it came from the hand of God or anywhere else, has greatly complicated Trump’s plans and given the Democrats oxygen. As proof, a presidential tweet from yesterday which, translated, more or less says: “The fake news media mount covid, covid, covid all the time until the elections. Losers! “.

With more than 225,000 dead and nearly nine million infected in the United States, it makes a lot of sense for the media and people to talk about the pandemic. It also makes sense, within Trumpian logic, that the candidate for re-election seeks to minimize the worst disaster suffered by humanity in the past 70 years and its disastrous management since February. “Everything is going well, we are about to overtake it,” he said during a rally last weekend. The data indicate otherwise. But what Trump and his people have to record in the mind of the electorate is the very low unemployment (3%) before the emergence of the covids. The less voters think about disease and the more they think about the economy (the old one and, according to Trump, the one that will be back soon), the more likely it is to stay in the White House.

It happens that it is very difficult to ignore the disaster. Even in Miami, a thriving county characterized by optimism, the atmosphere is filled with sadness. And viruses. In Florida, unemployment rose to 6.8%. In the United States as a whole, up to 7.9%. Never since World War II, remember the Financial Times, a president tried to win a second term with so many people out of work. That’s why Trump, whom God or nature or a Chinese conspiracy (choose whichever option you prefer) played a joke on, struggles to talk about the past and the future. And it acts as if the pandemic was nonsense and the dark present did not exist.

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