This was published 3 months ago
Opinion
Why a guilty verdict won’t dethrone King Donald
Peter Hartcher
Political and international editorThe guilty verdict pronounced on Donald Trump is a triumph for the principles of a democratic system governed by the rule of law. Where no one is above the law. Even a rich and powerful leader of a great political party, even a man who has shown that he’s prepared to employ mob violence to get his way against the law and the constitution of his country.
A timely metaphorical punchline followed immediately after Trump left the courtroom to go home – his motorcade was stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic, just like everyone else trying to get through a Manhattan peak-hour muddle.
Illustration by John Shakespeare
Of course, the US court system doesn’t observe the principle of impartiality in the way that Australia or other English common law-based countries do. The prosecutor in the Trump case got his job by winning an election for the post. He campaigned as a Democrat political candidate who was keen to go after Donald Trump. Alvin Bragg described Trump’s term as president as “a parade of horribles” and his policies as “criminal”. The former president returned the favour by calling Bragg a “degenerate psychopath”.
It’s hard to pretend it’s a professional prosecution; it’s glaringly political. There always will be suspicion of political bias against a Republican in this kind of system. Even though, in the ultimate verdict of guilt or innocence, it was a decision by a citizens’ jury.
If China describes its economy as “socialism with Chinese characteristics”, we could call this “judicial impartiality with American characteristics”.
It’s not new, but it is a contributing factor to the crisis of over-politicisation afflicting America, a country whose Congress is so riven that it hasn’t been able to pass a normal federal budget on time for the past two decades.
“Rigged″: Former President Donald Trump speaks outside the courtroom after a jury convicted him of felony crimes.Credit: AP
Yet, in spite of its design flaws, the US judicial system has just been through an intense pressure test, and triumphed. But this is only a precursor to the much greater test for the world’s most important power.
As Trump said outside the courtroom after denouncing the verdict as rigged and the judge as corrupt: “The real verdict is going to be November 5 by the people, and they know what happened here, and everybody knows what happened here.”
Exactly. Because now the presidential election is guaranteed to be a vote not only on Trump and Joe Biden but on the entire US system. Which suits Trump perfectly. From the outset, he has campaigned as an implacable opponent of the US system. And as a martyr for change – “make America great again”.
In his very first speech in 2015 announcing his candidacy, after descending the golden escalator, Trump said: “Our country is in serious trouble. We don’t have victories any more. We used to have victories, but we don’t have them.” And: “The American dream is dead ... The US has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems.”
On the day he took office he promised to end a state of “American carnage”. Yet he implicitly admits to failure because recently, he described an American hellscape of “bloodshed, chaos and violent crime”.
He’s called himself a “political dissident” struggling against an illegitimate “deep state” and a corrupt elite which is leading the US into “servitude and ruin”. He compared himself to the martyred Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny, murdered in a Putin gulag.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg speaks to the media after a jury found former president Donald Trump guilty.Credit: AP Photo/Seth Wenig
“The sudden death of Alexei Navalny has made me more and more aware of what is happening in our Country,” he posted in February. “Open Borders, Rigged Elections, and Grossly Unfair Courtroom Decisions are DESTROYING AMERICA. WE ARE A NATION IN DECLINE, A FAILING NATION!” he wrote. He speaks darkly of “the enemy within” as a greater danger than any foreign foe.
Even more extraordinary, he’s compared himself to Jesus Christ, the ultimate martyr to a pure cause.
And after his conviction on Friday (Australian time), he described himself as a “political prisoner” suffering for the American people: “In the end, they’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you – and I’m just standing in their way.”
Trump’s former campaign strategist Steve Bannon stated his aim succinctly in 2013. Declaring himself a Leninist, Bannon said: “Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”
The president of a Democrat think tank, Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute, says: “Like Lenin on the eve of the Russian Revolution, Trump evidently believes the worse conditions in the country are, the better for him. Give him credit for being a radical political innovator: no one ever ran for president before by bemoaning how rotten America has become.”
Don’t just listen to the rhetoric – look at the actions. By urging the mob to descend on Capitol Hill to disrupt the certification of the 2020 election, Trump sought to overturn a fair and legitimate election. He’s been charged with four criminal offences over this, but any trial won’t begin until after the November election, if ever.
And the future? Would he condone the use of violence once more to try to overturn an election? A reporter last month put to him: “You said, ‘I think we’re going to win and there won’t be violence.’ What if you don’t win, sir?”
Trump: “Well, I do think we’re gonna win, and if we don’t win, you know, it depends. It always depends on the fairness of an election.” He said nothing to discourage violence in the event he were to lose.
None of this has done anything to diminish his appeal to the electorate. He has remained consistently competitive in the polls. Polls half a year away from an election have little predictive value, but they do attest to the devotion of his followers. His hold on them is cult-like. If anything, they make him the frontrunner, ahead of Biden in the election-deciding “battleground” states.
If the American people elect Trump president for a second term, they will be doing so very deliberately, in full knowledge of the man, his character and his record. The self-described “very innocent”, “very stable genius” is intimately familiar to the electorate.
Now that he’s been convicted of crimes in a courtroom, fraudulently concealing a hush-money payment to a former porn actor, will it make a difference to his support base? If anything, his MAGA base will see it as confirmation of the elite conspiracy against him, and it will arouse them.
Remember he’s survived two impeachments and four sets of criminal indictments without any appreciable damage to his support level. Although he is well behind Biden in the fundraising stakes, the guilty verdict on Friday appears to have prodded some big donors into opening their vaults to him.
Trump boasted in 2016: “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” It seemed outlandish at the time, but every development since makes it less so.
He has survived every imaginable scandal and outrage from grabbing women “by the pussy” to exploring bleach as a COVID cure and praising some neo-Nazis as “very fine people”, even suggesting that the police shoot Black Lives Matter protesters in the legs.
The criminal conviction over the hush-money case could well deter some centrist or independent voters from flirting with the idea of a vote for Trump. But it will not discourage his base.
How can this be? Do they support his plan to overturn the American order, perhaps even endanger the very survival of democracy? The emerging answer seems to be “yes”. He’s running as a revolutionary radical in a country where a record three voters out of four say it is heading in the wrong direction.
And the MAGA movement is with him all the way. They’ve lost hope in an America that no longer offers a dream for ordinary working people; they are invested in a vengeful destroyer who promises to inflict a nightmare on a despised elite. Why would they be upset that he’s been convicted as a criminal by a system they want him to destroy?
Trump is, of course, eminently beatable. He lost the last election, after all. But if the American people turn out for Trump in full knowledge of who he is and what he represents, they will be wittingly voting for a criminal committed to reshaping American democracy in his own autocratic image. The image of King Donald.
In which case, today’s triumph for the democratic rule of law could be a mere way station to tomorrow’s Trumpian tyranny.
Peter Hartcher is political editor.