“You’re fired,” the short and blunt phrase, these two bitter words became the hallmark of the character Donald Trump was playing on the reality show “The Apprentice” in which he summoned a group of young people who, with rascality, vision and a little talent struggled to win $250,000 and a contract to run one of his companies. For 13 years and 14 seasons, the image of a triumphant, brave, first-class businessman Trump paved the way for him to be the forty-fifth president of the world’s first power.
Five days after the year’s most-expected election, former Vice President Joe Biden beats current President Trump eight points in the intention of voting nationally. While historical trends indicate that 40% of the electorate stays home because of indifference and contempt for politics in general.
These elections, for many reasons, are the most momentous for the world and for the country itself. On issues such as multilateralism, the New Yorker’s contempt for international organisations is well known: he has withdrawn from the UN Human Rights Council and from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, UNESCO; he has stopped funding the UN agency for Palestine refugees; and, finally, he has begun withdrawing from the World Health Organization, the most important agency for the current health crisis.
Another reason to vote in this election is for a climate change denier to complete next month the withdrawal of the Paris climate fighting agreements, for Donald Trump, the economy must be protected above the environment. His most famous phrase to justify the departure from the Paris agreements: “I was chosen to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh (us city famous for its steel industry), and not those of Paris”
The racial issue, an argument that accompanied this election campaign from the beginning, the assassination of George Floyd and the “BlackLivesMatter” movement have marked the social agenda of the united states, the arc of the moral universe as Martin Luther King called it will move up or down from next week. Cohabitation is at stake for the first time in America.
A few days before the vote, states such as Florida and Texas, governed by the Republicans, and Pennsylvania are working flat out to turn the polls around; meanwhile, Russian hackers are flooding social networks with false information, and white supremacist groups such as the “Proud Boys” are also stoking tension over what may happen on 3 November, in order to create post-election chaos to be decided in the Supreme Court, with its “Republican majority”. In the face of all this, only an overwhelming turnout at the polls will be able to shout at Donald Trump: “You’re fired”.
Editor’s note (October 2026): three passages of the original version have been corrected; in addition, a paragraph that appeared twice in this version has been removed and the final paragraph, which was missing, has been restored. The unsupported claim that the United States had the lowest turnout of any democracy has been removed. The sentence on international organisations has been reworded to distinguish withdrawals from the halt in funding: in the case of UNRWA, the United States did not withdraw from an organisation but stopped funding it in 2018, and the withdrawal from the WHO, notified in July 2020, had not yet taken effect. In 2020 Pennsylvania had a Democratic governor. After publication, the United States reversed its withdrawal from the WHO in January 2021 and rejoined the Paris Agreement on 19 February 2021; in January 2025 it again announced its exit from both. The rest of the text follows the original published on 29 October 2020.
