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FILE PHOTO: Former U.S. President Donald Trump attends the closing arguments in the Trump Organization civil fraud trial at New York State Supreme Court in the Manhattan borough of New York City, U.S., January 11, 2024.
The Supreme Court throws Trump a bone
The US Supreme Court agreed to rule on former President Donald Trump’s contention that he is immune from prosecution for his actions in office, a surprise decision that will delay Trump’s trial for allegedly seeking to overturn the 2020 election.
Trump’s lawyers say a president can only be held accountable for actions taken in office through impeachment in the House of Representatives and conviction in the Senate. Critics say that would essentially put any president above the law – as Judge Florence Pan elucidated by asking Trump’s lawyer whether under this theory a sitting president could assassinate a rival and remain immune (Trump’s lawyer said “yes,” by the way).
What happens now: The Supreme Court set a trial date of April 22, and froze all Trump’s DC court proceedings in the meantime. The months of delay may prevent a conviction in advance of the election, even if the Supreme Court rules against him. Polling shows moderate and independent voters would be less likely to back Trump if he is convicted, so delaying trial long enough could moot the question.
January 6th: One year later
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi, everybody, Ian Bremmer here, and it is January 6th, one year on, a date that's going to be seared in American consciousness for a long time. And of course, depending on who you are in the United States, a date that has a radically different meaning for you than many of your neighboring Americans. And that of course is precisely why this crisis of democracy has become what it is, that Americans don't agree on what actually happened on the date. Was this seditious behavior, trying to overturn a legitimate election, being exhorted to violence by the former sitting president of the United States, Donald Trump? Or was it a group of patriots trying to ensure that the false certification of a stolen and fraudulent election would not place and ensuring that Trump would be installed as reelected as a legitimate president?
Literally, the country is divided not down the middle, only about 30% of Americans believe in the latter narrative, but it's an enormously disturbing divide. And look, simply by saying this, there are people that are watching this video that are going to disagree with me and say, "how can you say that President Trump called for violence, and this was all BS, and this was a fake insurrection." And I am someone who came out on the day and said, this was not a coup, it was not a coup attempt. The military was not involved and was independent. Judiciary did its job. And I mean, the possibility, the worst possible scenario was that a bunch of sitting legislators and maybe even the vice president were in physical danger and could have been killed. And that would've been a horrible, horrible thing, but we've had assassinations of presidents in the past in the United States and the US has gotten through it.
The reason that this is such a critical crisis in the United States is not because of the violence on January 6th. It's because the aftermath of January 6th was only greater political division. The aftermath of January 6th was only that larger and larger numbers of Americans believe that the election was stolen falsely, and larger numbers of Americans believe that their principal enemy is the political opposition across the aisle, in their own country. Their fellow Americans, their fellow citizens, their fellow patriots are actually their enemies and countries that operate like that don't stay functional democracies for long. This is not new. I've been talking about this. We've been talking about this as a country for a while now.
The US election process has been getting worse through the last two cycles. In 2016, an election that Trump won legitimately and I did not vote for him, but I told everyone at the time he was my president, but a lot of people that didn't vote for him did not say that. Hillary Clinton, of course, conceded and called Trump on the evening and congratulated him, but a large number of Democrats on the media and even sitting in office believed and said that the election was stolen by Trump, who engaged in collusion with the Russian government and shadowy forces to ensure that they could steal the election from Hillary Clinton.
And we even had an impeachment procedure over that. And we had the Mueller investigations over that. And for years you had Democrats saying that Trump was not a legitimately elected president of the United States. Then we had the 2020 election and it got a lot worse because in this case you had the sitting president of the United States saying that the fair election, which was certified by Republicans in the key states like Georgia and Arizona, and found no cases of significant fraud anywhere. And all of the cases that were brought by Trump and Giuliani and his supporters were either thrown out of court or found to be unfit. They were not clear cases. There was no substance to them. It was a free and fair election, but the president himself did everything possible to stoke the belief, the false belief that the election was stolen.
And therefore, that Biden is not the legitimate president of the United States, so much so that you now have millions of Americans, tens of millions of Americans that believe that Biden is not their president, millions of Americans that believe that Trump should be installed as president by force. And this would be legitimate. This is unprecedented in our lifetimes, in the United States. We're going to have midterms coming up in November and the Republicans will almost surely win the House. And you see with all of the Democrats, some 25 Democrats in the House say they're not going to run again far more than Republicans, including some committee chairs. They all see the writing on the wall that they're going to lose. The Senate may well flip to Republican. That's a closer call. Many of the key swing states that are critical for certifying a 2024 election, the gubernatorial elections, the state legislatures are likely to be in the Republican hands on the back of 2022 elections.
In other words, we are set up for the 2024 election to be a step change even worse than 2020, which itself was a step change even worse than 2016. This is not normal in a democracy. This is an enormous challenge for the United States. And indeed, this could not happen in other advanced industrial democracies around the world. In the past few months, we've had elections in Canada, in Japan, in Germany, free and fair, peaceful transfer of power. We're going to have elections in the coming months in South Korea and in France. They will be free and fair, peaceful transition of power. We can no longer say this about my country. A fundamental part of a representative democracy are legitimate free and fair elections accepted by the citizens of the country. The United States no longer has that.
And so it's not a question of, can we keep democracy? It's a question of, can we rebuild some of the democracy that has eroded? Can we change the course that the United States is on right now towards a hybrid system, a system that no longer reflects and represents the interests of the average American voter? Unfortunately, right now, the answer is no. There is nothing that you can see in the near-term political future of the US that would imply that this is going to be fixed. It doesn't make me despair, but it certainly makes me want to work harder. And I hope that that is the reaction of most of you who are watching this today. It's something we're going to be seeing much more of as we get closer to the '22 midterms, which are the most important midterm elections in American history for all the reasons I just described and which will drive so much political danger and uncertainty as we get closer to 2024.
So that's a little bit for me on this rather disturbing anniversary, one year anniversary of the events of January 6th, I hope everyone's well and I'll talk to you soon.
A year after Jan. 6, U.S. democracy is in more trouble than ever
A year after Jan. 6, U.S. democracy is in more trouble than ever
Today marks the one-year anniversary of the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol.
This unprecedented act of sedition was the worst attack on US democracy since the Civil War. It was the first disruption of the peaceful democratic transition of power since 1876, and the only one to be instigated by a sitting president. I’d argue Trump’s role in it constitutes the gravest violation of the oath of office by any president in the history of the nation.
Thankfully, the insurrection failed to stop the certification of the vote and subvert the democratic order. It was destined to fail—and was not, indeed, an attempted coup—because the military, the courts, then-VP Mike Pence, former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, key state and local officials, and a majority of GOP senators ultimately sided with rule of law and the Constitution. Most of our key institutions held firm. We should be grateful for that.
But just because Jan. 6 failed, it doesn’t mean it didn’t cause lasting damage. The event shattered democratic norms, fueled tribalism and polarization, deepened our crisis of truth, normalized political violence, delegitimized our system of governance, and pushed us closer to democratic failure than we’ve been since, well, the Civil War. Recent polls show that majorities of Democrats and Republicans doubt the other party will accept negative election results in states they control in the future, and 64% of Americans now believe US democracy is “in crisis and at risk of failing.”
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More importantly, the fact that Jan. 6 failed doesn’t mean that it can’t happen again. Quite the opposite, in fact. Most Americans expect it will. The response to Jan. 6 has revealed just how fragile and broken our polity is. Perhaps that’s why 68% of Americans see the insurrection as a harbinger of increasing political violence rather than an isolated incident.
Far from repudiating the events of Jan. 6 and Donald Trump for his role in them, polls show that the Republican base has embraced Trump, excused the insurrection, and doubled down on the myth of the stolen election. Despite President Trump getting impeached for an unprecedented second time, and despite an ongoing House select-committee investigation into his role that day, 72% of Republicans think the former president bears little responsibility for Jan. 6, 67% want Trump to stay on as a national figure (up 10 points since last January), and 54% say they are more likely to vote for a GOP congressional candidate if they questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 election. Recent polling also found that 6 in 10 Republicans believe Mike Pence should’ve used his role to overturn the election and over 7 in 10 are convinced that Biden stole the election.
This is mass delusion. There is zero evidence that the 2020 election outcome was in any way rigged, stolen, or conditioned by widespread fraud. But tens of millions of Republican voters believe this fiction, in large part thanks to the efforts of right-wing media outlets, influencers, elected officials, and Trump himself to perpetuate the Big Lie and deny, equivocate and excuse what happened
The problem doesn't begin and end with the Big Lie; what's troubling is how vulnerable they were to buy into this fiction in the first place, and how ready they are to treat their political opponents as mortal enemies. As Fiona Hill put it to me in an interview for the upcoming episode of GZERO World:
In many respects, [January 6] was just one episode in an ongoing struggle that we're in the midst of right now on the societal-political level about the future of the country. It was a manifestation of the deep divisions, the partisan infighting, the polarization within our society.
That’s why there’s every reason to think something resembling the Jan. 6 insurrection can and will happen again in the near future, because the conditions that led to it are still present and growing.
What happened at the Capitol wasn’t really about Trump. It was the result of decades of growing anti-establishment sentiment boiling over, a product of declining equality of opportunity, of a weak safety net that lets so many of our fellow citizens fall through the cracks, of political institutions that are widely seen as rigged, and of the wholesale loss of faith in the system’s ability to self-correct.
Don’t get me wrong, Trump was the perfect foil to tap into this anti-establishment sentiment. But if it hadn’t been him leading the charge, it would’ve been someone else. As I said on the day of the insurrection, Trump is but a symptom of something much deeper. What ails our nation long pre-dates him and will surely outlast him.
It pains me to write this because I love my country, but we as a nation haven’t done a great job at protecting our people from the vagaries of a government that no longer works for the average American. The US is richer and more powerful than ever, but it’s also the most divided, unequal, dysfunctional, and politically delegitimized it’s ever been. The forces that led to January 6 had been a long time coming. Containing them is a generational challenge.
If we don’t get serious about fixing our social contract and our politics, the next time someone tries to overturn an election—and there will be a next time—they may actually succeed. There’s no guarantee that the military, the courts, state and local officials, a future VP and majority leader, etc. will stand firm with democracy again. If there’s something the Trump presidency should have taught us, it’s that guardrails work until they don’t.
This could happen sooner than you think. Just look at the GOP’s efforts to take control of the electoral mechanisms and Trump’s ongoing campaign to purge the Republican Party of anyone who doesn’t support the Big Lie. Given how things are going now, the 2022 midterms are increasingly likely to leave Republicans in control of the House and the Senate at the federal level and with unified control of government in precisely the six states that decided the 2020 election (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Pennsylvania).
🔔 And if you haven't already, don't forget to subscribe to my free newsletter, GZERO Daily by Ian Bremmer, to get new posts delivered to your inbox.The Graphic Truth: Dem/GOP voters' very different views of Jan 6
One year after the insurrection at the US Capitol, how do Americans reflect on that event and its aftermath? Has it brought people together from across the political divide who collectively regret this stain on American democracy? Nope. Surveys show that Republicans, and GOP-leaning voters, overwhelmingly think that former President Trump is not to blame for what went down on January 6,2021, and that pursuing the rioters now is not a priority. Democrats, on the other hand, firmly disagree. We take a look at voters’ views taken right after the insurrection as well as nine months later.
Marjorie Taylor Greene support in House shows Republican Party tilt
Get insights on the latest news in US politics from Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington:
Lots of drama to start the year on Capitol Hill. First, you had an insurgency on January 6th, followed by an impeachment of the President of the United States, accompanied by magnetometers being installed on the floor of the House of Representatives because the Democratic members thought the Republican members were trying to carry in guns with which to hurt them. Accusations that some of the Republican members may have been aiding the insurgents in that 6 January riot. Not a lot of evidence for that, but it does show there's a lot of bad partisan will between the two parties, right now. And that is culminating this week with a vote to potentially expel freshman member Marjorie Taylor Greene from her committee assignments in the House of Representatives.
In previous instances, where members of Congress were outspoken and used rather inflammatory language, the Republicans voted to strip former member Steve King of his committee assignments on the basis of him using some inflammatory language about white supremacy. But in this case, the Republicans argue that Marjorie Taylor Greene's comments on social media before she was a member of the House of Representatives don't quite rise to the level that she should be stripped of her committees. The reality is, she's an ally of the <former> President Donald Trump and the Republicans want to stay in his good graces in order to help them in the 2022 midterms. So, the Democrats are taking matters into their own hands, setting up a vote to strip her of committee assignments, which potentially could lead to a path, if Republicans take the majority in two years, where they retaliate against Democrats that they don't like. You're already seeing some Republicans talk about that.
At the other end of the spectrum, you've got Representative Liz Cheney, daughter of the former vice president and a rock-solid conservative by any metric, who voted to impeach President Donald Trump, and now there's members of the Republican conference that want to see her pay a price for that. I think ultimately, she probably ends up keeping her job with the support of leader Kevin McCarthy. But the fact that this division is happening, where Republicans are rallying around Marjorie Taylor Greene and potentially want to take the leadership position away from Liz Cheney is an indication of where the Republican Party is going. And it looks like it's going in a more Trumpy direction even after former President Trump is out of office.
Quick Take: Myanmar’s military coup is nothing like the US insurrection
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take:
Hi, everybody. Ian Bremmer here. I've got your Quick Take kicking off the week. Plenty of things we could talk about, but I thought we would actually discuss Myanmar, because it's not generally something in the news. And yet just this weekend, we had a successful military coup and immediately of course you see Americans say, "Hey, that's just like what happened in the United States, could have been us." And the answer is no, no. What happened in the US was an insurrection that failed, but it was not a coup and the reason it was not a coup is because the military played absolutely no role. In fact, all of the former secretaries of defense said that Democrat and Republican, that it was a free and fair election, and that Biden was going to be president. That needed to be respected. The joint chiefs wrote their letter together saying that it was critical to stand for the constitution.
No, not only did the military not play a role in undermining the transition, it actively stood up and the professionalization and the independence of the military, ultimately reporting to the American people, serving the American nation is a big piece of why the US political system retains its resilience, despite all of the erosion of institutions, all of the delegitimacy. That is not the case in Myanmar, where until 10 years ago it was a military dictatorship. There then was a transition that was imperfect. And now we are back to military dictatorship once again, as the military took over everything. Now it's worth going back to 10 years ago, when the transition of power that, that ended up with Aung San Suu Kyi being released, the incredibly well-known opposition figure who was under house arrest and ended up being allowed to functionally run the country. That agreement was with a new constitution.
That allowed the military ... it was a compromise. It allowed them to still have a fair amount of power. So for example, they still control the security ministries directly, unlike the civilian control in the United States. And they were guaranteed 25% of all seats in parliament, no matter what. And then you have elections on top of that to determine the rest and the military can stand their political figures in those elections as well. So, despite the fact that here's a woman that had been under house arrest and was allowed to come to power and you move towards civilian rule, it wasn't full civilian rule. The military still played a very significant role. You'd call it a hybrid system and look, the economy was in horrible shape. There was hope on the part of the military that by allowing a transition, that the country would do better economically, and they could also make more money themselves and there would be some liberalization.
So, all of that is what we saw over the last 10 years, generally welcomed by the United States and the Obama, Biden administration at that point. Now a new military leader right now, who really wants to hold onto power, but had no good way to do it. they tried to reform the constitution to provide additional safeguards and benefits for the military last year, that failed. They had elections recently. They really underperformed in those elections. They said it was a fraud. They had tried to delay the elections because of coronavirus, no dice, the Supreme Court threw out the claims of fraud there. That's obviously a equivalent to what we saw in the United States in terms of the judiciary and they were threatening, if you're not willing to compromise with us in particularly let the military leader who was about to retire, become the president, or otherwise have power, that they were going to change the constitution by force.
And they were engaging in some ... you saw tanks rolling around in major cities over the last few days, that kind of thing. Well, they didn't come to a deal. And as a consequence of no deal, the military swooped in. Now, Aung San Suu Kyi is yet again being detained. She has told the people not to tolerate this, functionally to revolt. But the other leaders of her party also being detained. So too, many members of the local media has been taken over by the military. Means of communication, temporarily shut down. In other words, this was well-planned and the military is in charge of everything now. So, what are the implications of this? First point, Aung San Suu Kyi, she won the Nobel Prize. Everyone knows her. She's no hero. After being in office, you probably one of the things Myanmar also famous for aside from her is this incredible ethnic cleansing that occurred against local Rohingya.
As a consequence, you had villages that were burned to the ground. Thousands of people killed, massive numbers of refugees streaming into Bangladesh as a consequence, other places. And she supported that. She supported the ethnic cleansing. It's a nationalist position, having nothing to do with her interest in democracy away from the military. A little bit like Navalny and his Russian nationalist position against Central Asians or Ukrainians or Georgians for example. Even though he's pro democracy, not someone I think should get the Nobel Peace Prize. In the case of Myanmar, much bigger deal because she was so well-known internationally, so revered and then became such a disappointment in such a massive human rights disaster debacle. Having said that, she still is the strongest voice for democracy in the country. And so the fact that she's now being detained, absolutely falls against everything that democracies in the world should want for the future of Myanmar.
You want her released, you want the civilian government to be able to come back. There will be some demonstrations, I'm sure, but domestically nowhere near the kind of capacity to undo this military rule. Internationally, the influence is mostly China and the Chinese may not like military leadership, but they certainly aren't going to undermine it or oppose it. As long as the economic relations with China continue to be stable, as they will. Furthermore, other countries with significant economic relations with Myanmar in the region, Southeast Asian countries, Japan, they all have relations with Myanmar that are based on noninterference. So, they're not going to stand for significant US sanctions. So, if the United States is saying, "You got to let her go. They've got to do something or else." There ain't much, or else. The United States is a marginal player here. And here I think it's important for us to understand that the United States increasingly frequently in a GZero world American exceptionalism, doesn't get you very far.
So, in the United States, whether it's saying the North Koreans can't have nukes or else. Or else what? Well, they're a nuclear power and the administrations on both sides of the aisle have been unable to do anything about that. Assad must go. Or else what? The United States has marginal influence over Syria. They're engaging much more closely with the Russians, with Iran, with other countries. Obama's gone, Assad is still there. The Russians must release Navalny or else. Or else what? Navalny probably tomorrow is going to be sentenced to a long jail term. The United States will put more targeted sanctions on Russia. The Europeans will be more reluctant because they trade much more with the Russians and a lot of them are reliant on energy there. What is the United States it's going to do? Myanmar, same thing. So, the United States is on the right side of these issues, but increasingly in a more fragmented world where the Chinese, the Russians are willing to say, "Screw you, we're not paying any attention." Other countries are more aligned, particularly with China economically. It's getting harder for the Americans to do that. And it's also getting harder because the United States at home has just had this horribly contested election, that delegitimizes American efforts to tell other countries, "This is what you should be doing in terms of domestic governance." All of which is to say, it's going to be harder for Biden to pull off these sorts of statements and make them stick. It makes it more compelling for the Americans to engage multilaterally and not make these announcements themselves but have a large number of allies on board. Strength in numbers, but also coordination in terms of what values really will stick as opposed to those the Americans care about but nobody else really does. And finally, this is a problem it's likely to get worse over time.
So, that's a little bit of what I think about Myanmar. I hope everyone's well, stay safe. If you're in New York, avoid snow. Snow is kind of fun actually. But avoid people. Be good. Talk to you soon.
ANARCHY! How the world covered the insurrection in DC
Earlier this week, much of the world went to sleep — or woke up — to news of an armed insurrection in the US capital. Around the globe, people saw surreal images of rioters, egged on by the president himself, ransacking the seat of government in a country that has long styled itself as both an example and an advocate of democracy. What did the newspapers around the world have to say about it? Here are a few front pages that we particularly liked.
The Kingston-based Jamaican Observer came out swinging, declaring it "ANARCHY!" Australia's Daily Telegraph quipped it was a "Capitol Offence", while the Brazilian daily O Estado de São Paulo described an "Attack on Democracy."
The Arabic-language broadsheet Al-Sharq al-Awsat, meanwhile, declared America's image "shaken" by an "invasion of the Congress", and Croatia's Večernji List went all the way, announcing: "Trump supporters attempt coup."
Leave it to the German tabloid Hamburger Morgenpost, of course, to slap "SHAME!" over a picture of "Q Shaman", a prominent pro-Trump Qanon conspiracy theorist who showed up at the Capitol in his usual buffalo-horned headdress.
Common to all of these headlines, and others around the world, was a sense of urgent disbelief — perhaps tinged for some with a sense of schadenfreude — that these scenes of overt political violence were now happening in Washington.
In the coming days, we'll take a deeper look at the global implications for US foreign policy, as well as democracy and rule of law around the world. How was it covered where you live? Let us know.
(Big shout to Newseum.org, by the way, where we found several of these international front pages. Their Today's Front Pages feature is always worth a peek.)
Quick Take: US facing domestic insurrection & terrorism
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take:
What a crazy day. A historic day and not one that you really want to have in your memory with the United States facing domestic insurrection, terrorism. Thousands of people converging on the Capitol and the seat of the legislative branch of government after having been stirred up with disinformation and fake news by the president, President Trump and his supporters this morning. I will be very clear that the violence that we have already seen is the responsibility of the president directly. And we've never in our lives, the last time you had an election like this was in 1876 and still the transition was handled more responsibly.
You've never had a sitting president actually work to undermine the outcome of a free and fair election. And that is exactly what occurred. And it was interesting, very late, but nonetheless, Senate majority leader McConnell came out just a few hours ago and said that President Trump's efforts to overturn the electoral vote was a threat at the heart of democracy that should not be supported. And yet, nonetheless, you could still get more than a dozen sitting, GOP senators and a majority of sitting GOP members of the house to support President Trump, knowing full well that the election had not been stolen. That indeed Biden had won a free and fair election. But because President Trump's influence over the voting base of the Republican Party so outweighs that of any other Republican figure, they were prepared to go with him even after he lost the election, even as a lame duck president. And that's the problem.
This doesn't go away. And it doesn't go away for two reasons. One, because Trump's influence will continue. He'll have access to billions of dollars and mass media and have dozens of millions of direct followers that will continue to prepare to listen to him. And it also doesn't go away because even as Trump diminishes from public view, which certainly will happen as he's no longer president and perhaps if there are legal efforts directly against him in the aftermath of the events that we are watching transpire today, Trumpism will still have political space and gravity and many will occupy it.
Trump, as Steve Bannon once said, is a vessel, a broken vessel, a flawed vessel, but for something much deeper, which is a feeling that the system is rigged against the average American. And even though Joe Biden has the instinct to reach out across the aisle and across the divide in his own Democratic party, decades of a country and a political system that makes the average American feel like it is rigged against them, creates a massive amount of antiestablishment sentiment that was tapped into by Trump, but that others will tap into as well. And in its ultimate level, you get violence. And in its ultimate level, you get what we have seen play out in Washington today.
Now, I want to be clear. I've said to all of you before that the United States is not on the verge of becoming an authoritarian regime and that continues to be true right now. But that does not mean that the United States is not deeply damaged. No, indeed. If you go to our top risks that we put out just this Monday, risk number one was the political polarization in the United States. And all week, people have been asking me, "Why wasn't it coronavirus? How can it not be the pandemic?" And the answer was, the pandemic is horrible, but at least with the vaccines, mortality is going down significantly.
The United States, the divisions in the US are getting worse. And are getting worse, vastly differentiated rate from that of other countries in the world. What we are seeing play out right now in the United States, it is inconceivable that that would have happened in Canada or Australia or Germany or France or the UK today. Historically, perhaps, today, not possible. Why in the United States? Because in the United States, so many people have fallen through the cracks. The equality of opportunity is not there. The divide is much greater.
There are some incredible things about the United States. It's very hard, very painful for me to talk about all of this, as someone who considers myself an American patriot, someone who loves my country. But the same things that created true greatness in the US economy in the past decades, the fact that we are alone, so aligned with the animal spirits of capitalism that we so provide support for entrepreneurs and the market forces. But when the market no longer works for the average person, when suddenly labor doesn't matter as much and the average American no longer has anything to offer to capitalism, and indeed coronavirus has sped that up a great deal. Well, that means that the disenfranchised in the US are going to feel uniquely disenfranchised compared to other countries that haven't done such a great job at capitalism, but they've done a better job for protecting their people. And that's all of those other advanced industrial democracies.
So, at the same time that the United States has become so much more powerful, the US has also become more politically delegitimized. And that's what today is all about. Today is, in a sense, the increasing progression of a trend that has been growing for decades and which has accelerated under Trump and has accelerated even further under coronavirus. And yes, President-elect Biden can start to try to heal and repair some of this and having probably won the two seats in Georgia that were contested that can start with a couple of trillion dollars in additional stimulus that will help to ensure that average Americans aren't evicted, don't become homeless. Can deal with having lost their jobs and the stress of the schools being closed and coronavirus continuing to affect the country. But that's a Band-Aid. That doesn't address the underlying structural challenges in the United States. That is a project for decades, not for one administration.
And until then, the erosion, globally, as the United States continues to be somewhat absent as a global leader and increasingly mistrusted as an example, not to be followed. I've said this before, but today is it not so glaringly obvious that no one outside the US would look to my country and say, "That is a paradigm for governance. That is the way I want my country to be run." In 1989 when the world fell down, we won the Cold War because people respected our system, because our government was better, because our ideas were better. You cannot say that today. And that is truly unfortunate and it's happened over a few decades.
I certainly hope that events of today and the next two weeks will be a clarion call, a wake up for Americans of all stripes and of both parties to understand that we need to work together to start rebuilding some of the institutions that have faced so much erosion and damage over the past decades. But the idea that Biden becomes president, and we can go back to status quo, anti-America is back, that our country is the world's exceptionalist power once again, indispensable nation making the world safe for democracy? You know, we've exported a lot of "democracy" over the past years. Maybe we should have kept a little more in the United States, start at home. And that is the message for today. Thank you so much. Be safe. And talk to you soon.