US election race needs new blood
Given that he won in 2016 despite the tape recording in which he boasted of grabbing women by their genitals, there is no certainty Donald Trump’s sex abuse and defamation conviction by a New York jury will damage his run for another presidential term. But it should. The US, when it votes in November next year, deserves far better than either Mr Trump or Joe Biden, not only because of his age and obvious infirmity, but because of the unfolding scandal over his troubled son Hunter’s laptop. So do US allies as they look to Washington for strong and reputable leadership in a world threatened by Chinese and Russian malevolence.
Character should matter greatly in any candidate to become US president. In the debased and polarised world of current US politics, the reality may be it does not matter that much, especially when it comes to Mr Trump’s frenzied Republican supporters. Like him, they believe the civil charges on which the federal jury of six men and three women convicted Mr Trump on Tuesday were a stitch-up aimed at destroying their hero. It is impossible to know what really happened in the dressing room of a New York department store in the 1990s when journalist E. Jean Carroll says Mr Trump raped her. But it is no small matter that a jury of his peers, after three hours’ deliberation, found against Mr Trump. It rejected her charge that he raped her, but found it more likely than not that he sexually assaulted and defamed her. It awarded Ms Carroll a civil penalty of $US5m ($7.3m).
As fresh claims emerge of his inappropriate behaviour towards women in the White House, Mr Trump did not help his own defence in a videotaped deposition. His response to claims he said Ms Carroll, now 79, found rape “sexy” was to remind the New York court of the attitude he expressed in the notorious Access Hollywood tape that emerged in October 2016, on the eve of the presidential election; saying that as a “star” and “famous” man he could get away with kissing women and grabbing their genitals: “When you’re a star, they let you do it.’’
As The Wall Street Journal said, a modicum of restraint, or twinge of regret about Ms Carroll’s accusations, might have put some doubt in the jury’s mind. Instead, it turned out to be yet another case of Mr Trump’s ego subverting his political ambitions. The trial was a sharp reminder for voters of what they rejected in 2020 when Mr Biden beat Mr Trump.
It was also a reminder of the views of Mr Trump’s former attorney-general Bill Barr, who knows him better than most. In Cleveland a week ago, Mr Barr warned that Mr Trump is “a horror show when he’s left to his own devices. Trump will not deliver Trump policies. He will deliver chaos”. This from a man who worked closely with him for almost two years of his presidency. A return to chaos and scandal is the last thing the US and its allies need.
Pointing out Mr Trump’s flaws, however, is not a justification for a second Biden term. The President’s dotage and increasing senility are obvious. So are his deepening woes over the business and personal scandals surrounding wayward son Hunter. Yet only last week Mr Biden insisted: “I have faith in him, and it impacts on my presidency by making me proud of him.”
More allegations of scandal await Mr Trump. The sooner he and Mr Biden leave the field to new blood untainted by scandal, the better it will be for the US and the world.