The US holds its next presidential election in November next year. The omens are not good. The country is heavily polarised, riven down the middle into two diametrically opposed ideological camps.

Political tensions are at an all time high, and political rhetoric is off the charts. There are two triggers.

The first is the attempt by the administration of President Joe Biden to derail the candidature of his main challenger and predecessor Donald Trump. Despite years of the establishment trying to degrade the man, his support has remained solid.

So Biden has decided the best way to cripple his challenger, in what has been criticised by his opponents as weaponisation of State machinery, is to use the courts to go after Trump.

The former president now faces over 100 charges in four cases instituted by democrat district attorneys who seem to have been put there specifically for that purpose. This ‘persecution’ has only strengthened Trump’s position as presidential frontrunner.

So Biden, apparently growing more exasperated by the day, has jerked up the attempts to derail his challenger’s bid. The establishment is now shopping around for democrat secretaries of state to bar Trump from the ballot on the basis that he “instigated an insurrection.”

This is based on the democrat narrative that the January 6, 2021, gathering in Washington DC who were protesting what they said was a stolen election, was an ’insurrection,’ and that Trump was responsible.

They are already moving to court and democrat controlled state legislatures to try and get Trump barred. It is a very tempting twist of legal sophistry to try and interfere with an election by barring one’s opponent and interfering with the will of the people, a subversion of democracy if ever there was one.

Barring Trump from contesting will wake demons in that country that it never thought existed anywhere apart from broken down countries.

The second trigger is the conduct of the election. The last US presidential election of November 2020 was very controversial. Small states like Nevada took almost10 days to count votes, while their much bigger counterparts such as Texas and Florida concluded theirs within the customary 24 hours.

In many democrat states, the secretaries of state simply dragged on the counting and kept on”finding votes” until they were able to narrowly overturn earlier leads by Republicans.

Indeed, in the mid-term elections of November 2022, California’s votes came in last and almost snatched the majority in Congress from the Republicans despite the latter’s early lead. A tried and tested method of electoral manipulation seems in place.

Unfortunately, the whole country is now awake, and it will not be possible to undertake these shenanigans in the 2024 elections. They will simply not work.

The covid cover, which was used to justify most of the controversial decisions like mailing ballots to everybody in a state and getting paid agents to collect the ballots from people in entire precints, is no more. Any shenanigans will be thoroughly contested by a now completely woke electorate. The US might not survive another controversial election.

The US is now at a tipping point. Either of these two triggers will set the US on a trajectory that is completely uncharted, one that only third world countries are familiar with- political violence, destruction, and a country on the edge towards self immolation.

The shenanigans going on right now in the US only happen in banana republics, where presidents harass and jail their political opponents on trumped up charges rather than face them on the ballot.

Biden has a choice to make. He has been a US senator for over five decades. Never in all those years has a US president attempted to bar a challenger by using trumped up charges on the eve of an election.

He can either decide to let a credible election take place, or push these two actions to their illogical conclusion, and become the first US president to face fully fledged electoral violence on grand scale across that country. His choices are that stark!
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