The retreat

He had already come into the sights of journalists during the G7 in Borgo Egnazia when the hostess, Giorgia Meloni, promptly went to retrieve him from the grass of the Folgore exhibition to bring him, almost absent and certainly lost, back into the group of large, but his entire staff had appealed to the effect of jet lag and the case seemed solved.

Then it was the sensational exchanges of persons, first Zelensky called Putin at the last NATO summit and then his deputy Kamala Harris called none other than Trump that put many of his unshakable supporters into turmoil, but the evidence manifested itself unequivocally at entire American and global audience during the live television debate with his enemy and challenger in the next presidential elections... Joe Biden no longer has the requirements to defeat his old adversary and continue to guide the fate of the American superpower. From the face to face (it must be remembered that Biden wanted to choose the times, place and rules) with his challenger, the president emerged politically with broken bones; in the duel organized by CNN in Atlanta only a lot of confusion, many uncertainties and little content and, in the sacred and merciless television arena, these sound like more than valid charges for an unappealable verdict of conviction.

Already the television studio in its bare linearity is somehow reminiscent of an upside-down court in which on the judges' bench we can imagine the cameras framing the two challengers, almost as if they were a sort of defendants forced to defend themselves from each other, and, in the background a large wall divided by a strip with the upper part blue with CNN ribbon logos and the lower part stars and stripes on a red background.

Donald on the left of the screen and Joe on the right, standing behind a blue podium with microphone and new CNN logo, slightly converging to be able to meet their gazes without losing sight of the viewer, both in dark suits and white shirts, open jackets with ties red for the challenger, closed with a blue tie for the president. On television everything appears normal (someone in its early days defined an open window on the world), but today, on TV, nothing is ever left to chance and the power of the cameras to delve into the smallest detail of a gesture or an invisible grimace, of a look or an impalpable indecision of the lips and then multiplying them enlarged on the screen and throwing them to the public, can go well beyond the simple documentation of facts to the point of reaching real conditioning of thought and judgement.

Television condemns, television absolves and the politicians who hold or aspire to power either possess it directly or occupy it "militarily"... history teaches. Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race on 7/21/24 with a letter to Americans.

Michelangelo Dotta
NP August / September 2024