Indictment makes things stormy for Trump
AMERICA loves spectacles and scandals. Former US President Donald Trump provides a bit of the first and a lot of the second. The Manhattan grand jury has indicted Trump over the payment of hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels — in the run-up to his presidential campaign of 2016 — through his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, who has already been convicted and sentenced. The man behind the indictment is Alvin Bragg, a Democrat and an elected attorney.
The story becomes complicated and a bit ominous because it comes a year and a half before the 2024 presidential election. Trump is no Gary Hart, the Democrat who was staked for his outing with Donna Rice, a model, in the run-up to the 1988 presidential election and just dropped off the political map. But Trump is not a politician, but a socialite who has courted glamour, glory, scandal and infamy without batting an eyelid throughout his life. So, Trump is not really ashamed of the Daniels connection, though he denies it vehemently; and he had denied any payment was made even in the face of hard evidence — Cohen’s confession.
The challenge before attorney Bragg is to prove that the payment to Daniels violated campaign finance laws — that the money was paid from Trump’s campaign fund. The payment seems to have been made by Trump Organisation, set up to fight the presidential election. Conservative legal experts in the US think that it might be difficult to establish the linkage. It is a matter of forensic detail more than a question of morality.
The more important aspect of the Trump case is the political fallout in a country deeply divided between liberals and the liberal-left on the one side, and the conservatives and the far-right on the other. The liberals would not want to pick on the ex-President if they could help it because they know it would push the conservatives, who are ill at ease with the Trump phenomenon, into the Trump camp. This is what has happened since the indictment of Trump. The Republicans who are opposed to Trump were forced to express solidarity with a man with questionable social credentials. There is an invisible class system in America, where the parvenus are distinguished from the well-heeled ones, and the strutting Trump clearly falls in the parvenu class.
Trump has been a vicious phenomenon in American politics; he follows no rules and understands no conventions. He is the narcissist with money and now with power over the Republicans because there is a large section of deprived white Americans who see in him a hero speaking their language of anger and resentment against the domineering liberals. This is a bad time for liberalism and liberals in America. The people of America distrust liberals because they see them as the privileged lot, and the liberal idealism and its rhetoric are perceived as hypocrisy. The question is not whether it is true or false. It is a widely prevalent perception in a large section of Americans who are the have-nots in the system.
And Trump is aware of this deep disillusionment with liberalism. He has no role to play in exposing the limitations and double standards of American liberalism. He does not have the intellectual wherewithal to do it. But his instincts are right. The 2016 presidential election result was not a mandate for Trump’s populism but a rejection of the liberalism of the Democrats represented by Hillary Clinton. Joe Biden is not an American liberal in the Clinton sense, and that helped him hugely in his 2020 presidential win. And it is expected in many quarters that Biden might pull off the 2024 election too because he is a Democrat and not exactly a Democrat liberal.
Trump, without being aware of it, and it will never be the case that he will ever be aware of it, is losing steam. His rant against the liberals and the leftists is wearing thin, and even the hardest of anti-liberals have not forgiven his role in the January 6, 2021 mob attack on the Capitol, provoked by his incendiary speech. That he is not a politician becomes a liability for Trump because he does not understand institutions and processes which underpin American democracy. Americans do not like anarchy and Trump’s rage only points to a breakdown of the system. The fear on the conservative side is that if liberals like Bragg were to stretch the American system to nail Trump, the faith of the people in the system will further erode. And Bragg, the argument goes, has to stretch and bend the provisions of the law to get Trump convicted. But they are sure that Trump cannot use the victim card to win the Republican presidential nomination.
Trump has controlled the Republican Party caucus even after he lost the presidential election. He used money power to get his people on to the Republican national committee, and he exercised a stranglehold over Republican senators and Congressmen and Congresswomen. But after the November 2022 mid-term Congressional elections, his sway over Republicans weakened because most of the candidates he supported did not win. He has become a diabolical manipulator and his self-indulgent rhetoric is proving to be destructive. He is not a charismatic leader like Franklin D. Roosevelt or John Kennedy. And he is not even a wily politician like Richard Nixon. Trump remains the playboy of his early life, and a political playboy is not acceptable to Americans.
More than his lack of ideology, it is his lack of character that will be his undoing. But before the Trump flavour of the hour fades away, American democracy will go through a period of crisis as it did during the Joseph McCarthy period of demented anti-communism. Trump’s politics is one of irrational excess and it cannot last, no matter whether he wriggles out of the indictment by the Manhattan grand jury.
