A criminal charge, the first against any former US president, has, on the face of it, jolted Trump’s second bid for the White House. But the indictment has already been added to the list of acts of ‘political persecution’ against him by ‘liberal’ woke America, since some Democrat candidates had even made it their campaign promise to bring Trump ‘to justice’.
Using a possible ‘technicality’ to nix the electoral chances of a candidate – and even send him to jail – is not novel to the US. But to add unaccountable campaign spend (for ‘hush money’) to a longer, more serious list of offences dilutes those very bigger charges against the man – electoral fraud, and his purported role in the storming of Capitol Hill by Trump supporters. It also shows his detractors in a desperate, petty light.
While the jury is still literally out there on this one, Trump will surely use this to show how the ‘dictatorship of the Left’ is out to not only get him but also all those who don’t share the ‘liberal Left’ world view. Some commentators have used the example of the arrest of Al Capone, the Chicago mobster who was convicted in 1931 of tax evasion – and not of the many murders he commissioned.
But unlike Capone, Trump’s ‘crime’, if proven, will be a misdemeanour. More importantly, Trump is standing for elections; Capone was not. And building up a potential challenger in the presidential stakes as a martyr could prove to be a mug’s game for Trump’s critics.
Once again, his indictment and what will follow is mutually exclusive from democratic politics. But, then, politics – especially in a bipolar America – is not mutually inclusive to everything else.
