A double trial of the president, Donald Trump is called upon to mark the year 2020 in the united States. One will open the course in the Senate, and the other close in the polls. The first, the vote on his impeachment, which is expected to start in the next few days, everything indicates that it will come out unscathed. The outcome of the second, in the presidential elections of 3 November, is a mystery that will keep the world in suspense.

Shaken suddenly by the recent escalation in the middle East, Washington is awaiting the president of the lower House, Nancy Pelosi, delivered the articles of impeachment, which continues to hold in a pulse by obtaining assurances that the republican majority will respect certain requirements. When Pelosi proceed, Donald Trump will become the third president in the history of the country to submit to a trial on his impeachment. It will be for the charges, approved by the House of Representatives in December, abuse of power and obstruction of Congress stemming from his alleged pressure on Ukraine to investigate his political rivals.

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the republican majority in The Senate virtually guarantee the absolution of Trump. The democrats would have to convince a dozen republican senators to reach the required two-thirds majority that would lead to the impeachment of the president, something that has never happened, and everything indicates that not now happen. One of the successes of Trump in these three years has been to achieve the closing of the ranks around him in a party that four years ago I saw him, at the very least, with suspicion.

so the main question will be the role of the process in the November elections. Because Donald Trump will be, except uppercase surprise, the first president of the history that will come up for re-election after suffering an impeachment (in the above cases happened during the second mandate of the presidents, when they could no longer go to the polls).

If the tone of the campaign of 2016 was more rough than usual, everything indicates that the 2020 will be the most tense of the country’s recent history. The very process of removal is the traumatic culmination of a presidency extremely aggressive and divisive, that has deepened the trenches of the extreme polarization that already lastró the previous contest. In November, millions of voters go to the polls in a shared sentiment: that what is at stake, for some or other reasons, it is the own american democracy.

after that experience at the Capitol, or in the middle of it, depending on the terms, the policy action will move immediately to Iowa, where on the 3rd of February marks the first big event of the democratic primary. The candidates fought for months, a battle of ideological and generational for the future of the party, centered in up to where it will try to expand the role of the State in ensuring the well-being of its citizens. The debate is more to the left than usual: even the candidate is more centrist, Joe Biden, manages proposals more progressive than that of Hillary Clinton four years ago.

The contest includes a writer of self-help, successful businessmen, a tycoon millionaire, communication, veterans, senators septuagenarios and an inexperienced mayor treintañero of a small town in Indiana. By the way there have been high-profile low (the exciting Beto O’rourke, the good senator Kamala Harris, or, just this week, the latino Julian Castro) but also additions are surrounded by unknowns, like Michael Bloomberg, who threw his millions into the arena in mid-November and is already the fifth most supported of the 14 liza.

Four candidates have separate ostensibly of the pack, in this order: vice-president Biden, who does not awakens passions but promises a hoped-for return to normality; senator Bernie Sanders, a “socialist democracy” that has already made things more than difficult to Hillary Clinton in the primaries of 2016; the also-leftist senator Elizabeth Warren, that promises to combat inequalities but not to bury capitalism, and, finally, the pragmatic Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend and only the poker of the candidates in head that has not yet fulfilled the 70 years (missing 33).

The substance of programmatic debate, the candidates with the most left-wing promise to ambitious plans of universal health care or the fight against the climate crisis, is perhaps not the most relevant thing that is in play in the primaries. It happens that, although are also chosen in November 33 Senate seats, the most in the hands of the republic, it is not likely that the democrats will be the majority in the upper House. What is expected is that Congress will continue to split, making it difficult to undertake reforms of draught and wishing the other hoarse legislature.

Will be the discussion of tactical underlying the that will have profound consequences. This year, the Democratic Party will decide whether to turn to the left to mobilize young people (more than half of the democratic youth supports Sanders) or to the center for fishing in the cauldrons of undecided. The advocates of the first option argue that little hesitant it is for fishing in a country so polarized; the supporters of the second point that a radical candidate will mobilise the young people, yes, but also the most conservative in the opposite direction.

In the ranks republican, the margin of the low rates of popularity of the candidate, the worst enemy of Trump is the cooling of the u.s. economy. It is usual for presidents to win re-election, and none in the modern history of the country has lost a strong economy. The united states has so far resisted the slowdown in global growth, but the trust can fall in 2020, and the americans go to the polls with the fear that the longest period of economic expansion since records began is about to end.

all in all, the polarization of the country is such that Trump is so difficult to increase their base as the democrats erode it. What becomes a likely scenario that, as four years ago, the elections are decided by a few thousand votes in a handful of States particularly disputed. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won nearly three million votes more than Trump. If the republican re-elected with a minority of the popular vote, arreciarán criticism of the legitimacy of the electoral system.

But the start of the year has entered into the equation a new variable that can change everything. The promise of Trump to look into has not made the less likely a war, but rather the opposite. The events of the past indicate that the foreign policy will have a decisive importance in the year of the double trial of the president Donald Trump.