Boris Johnson and Donald Trump going down in flames together, but this is an abuse of process
They rose in tandem and now they are sinking in tandem, the two flame haired flame throwers of trans-Atlantic politics, Donald Trump and Boris Johnson.
Both have more than a touch of political genius. Both offered their respective parties similar paths to similarly new majorities – the Republicans taking back the rust belt states in the industrial heartland of America, the Conservatives winning northern working class seats for the first time In Britain.
Both Trump and Johnson lost high office for similar reasons, a complete lack of personal discipline, continual administrative chaos, and an almost sublime indifference to the truth. They both deserved to lose office.
But here’s the rub. The latest persecution of both men, designed in part to make sure they never come back, are shocking abuses of process in which their opponents are doing as much damage to their countries’ respective political systems as anything alleged against Trump or Johnson.
Trump has been indicted on 37 charges arising from his keeping hold of a number of documents from his time in the presidency. Johnson is apparently to be condemned by the privileges committee of parliament in such a fashion that he would be suspended from the House of Commons for more than 10 days, which triggers a process that leads to him having to face a forced by-election in his seat.
Both men have responded in characteristic ways. Trump will fight the charges and double down on his campaign for the Republican nomination for the presidency. Johnson will not be abused by this committee of pygmies, but has resigned from the parliament forthwith.
Trump’s actions after the November 2020 elections, in which he baselessly claimed the election was stolen and tried to get vice-president Mike Pence to refuse to certify the results, render him unfit for the presidency. And Johnson legitimately lost the confidence of the Conservative parliamentary party.
But the electoral future of both men rightly belongs to voters. They should be judged by their respective electorates, not cripplingly disadvantaged by tendentious legalisms designed to prevent a legitimate democratic contest.
The prosecutions launched against Trump are a disgrace and a clear misuse of legal powers. He is facing charges in effect for allegedly paying off former porn star Stormy Daniels so that she wouldn’t talk about their alleged affair. There is no way on God’s green earth that should constitute a criminal charge against a presidential candidate.
Now he’s been charged with keeping a trove of documents from his time as president in his Mar-a-Largo home. Every former president has kept documents from their time in office. Joe Biden kept national security documents from his time as vice-president in his garage. Barack Obama kept such documents. There’s often a lot of argy-bargy between former presidents and the Archives authorities about the custody of such documents.
It seems that the Espionage Act, which is never invoked against former presidents, conflicts with the Presidential Records Act, which allows presidents to use such documents.
I’ve read every book of the great reporter Bob Woodward. Half their content seems to be national security secrets given to him by presidents, former presidents and their senior officials. Theoretically, almost every one of them could conceivably have led to a prosecution of somebody.
But that’s not the way democracies work. When Hillary Clinton was secretary of state she kept a private email server, against the rules of the State Department, and when she was later called out for this her staff deleted 30,000 emails she decided were not relevant before she handed over the email collection. Many of the emails on her insecure private server contained classified or confidential and related to security. James Comey, the then director of the FBI, criticised her severely for this but said no reasonable prosecutor would take the matter to court, so her let her off with a warning.
This judgment, no reasonable prosecutor would take the matter to court, is in a sense the underlying compact of American democracy. Because a prosecutor can, if they wish, take almost anything to court.
Politicians in power don’t use the state forces to prosecute their political opponents for essentially political actions. Of course Trump behaved like an idiot regarding the documents. If he’d just given them back, or engaged in better faith negotiations about the subject, he would have avoided this problem.
And of course no one has done more than Trump to trash democratic conventions. But Trump seems to have broken the minds of his opponents, and they now seek to defend the village of democracy by burning the village to the ground.
Joe Biden is now using the power of the state to criminally prosecute his most likely opponent.
The various Democrat prosecutors taking or lining up cases against Trump are profoundly damaging American democracy and changing it forever. Even Trump as president did not launch prosecutions against Hillary Clinton. But you think Republicans won’t retaliate in time? And all the shenanigans established against Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, and alleged against Biden himself, could easily lead to politicised prosecutors having a shot. That doesn’t mean any of the Bidens are necessarily guilty of anything, but a prosecutor determined to do the Biden family damage could certainly tie them up in process and damage their reputations.
This is an appalling way for American democracy to go.
If anything, the Democrats are even more cynical. While decrying Trump they desperately want him to be the centre of attention, and to be the Republican nominee in 2024. Democrats hope these court cases will be a magic double for them, roiling up defiance among Republican activists to ensure Trump is the nominee, while further damaging his standing with independent and centrist voters so that he loses the general election.
The treatment of Johnson is equally ridiculous. Parliamentary systems are perverting themselves by increasingly instituting measures in which they can suspend or even expel MPs they don’t like.
This is intensely undemocratic. If members of the House of Commons think Johnson has behaved badly they should move a motion of censure. They should rely on the moral force of this motion, if successful, to influence voters in Johnson’s constituency at the next election.
But of course the House of Commons itself now has no moral force. Instead, Johnson’s many opponents want to bureaucratically rule him out of politics. This is a perversion of democracy.
The rule should be that if a serving politician is convicted of a serious criminal offence, defined by a potential length of imprisonment, they are then disqualified from parliament. Anything short of that is a gross interference in democracy.
Both Trump and Johnson got some big things right in office but each also made a mess. They’re not identical. Unlike Trump, Johnson never trafficked in hate, nor sought to overturn a legitimate election, and unlike Trump, Johnson became deep green in his net zero policies.
But both of them should be judged by voters, not by scheming politicians misusing the legal system or parliamentary rules to prevent democracy. Their opponents should not be scared to trust the voters, they should not declare Trump and Johnson so dangerous that electors cannot be exposed to them as candidates.
The actions against Trump and Johnson are assaults on democracy in two of the world’s greatest democracies. That’s a bad day for all of us.
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