Another deranged episode of pointless partisan hatred

Donald Trump.

On the eve of Donald Trump’s second Senate impeachment trial in 13 months, US politics is set to prove that both its major parties are still in the grip of Trump madness as it embarks on another deranged episode of pointless partisan hatred.

Trump’s behaviour after Nov­ember 3, when he decisively lost the US presidential election, has been contemptible and was the lowest point of his presidency. He bears moral if not legal responsibility for the shocking mob attack on congress on January 6. He flouted the most basic tenet of democracy, that the loser accepts the democratic verdict and peacefully transfers power.

Yet this impeachment trial is an abuse of process and an act of partisan incitement and hatred by the Democrats. It can serve only to deepen rancorous divisions in the US, convince Trump’s rusted-on supporters that the system was indeed rigged against him, make any kind of normality in politics still harder to achieve and prolong all the hatreds.

The Democrats actually want the Republican Party to be a Trump party because they think that means they will win every election. They want Trump to remain the centre of attention.

The second trial will result in Trump’s acquittal, just as the Senate trial of Bill Clinton resulted in his acquittal (even though the vote was 50-50 on one of the counts) . A conviction needs a two-thirds majority in the Senate and there is very little chance 17 Republican senators will join the 50 Democrats to vote for conviction.

America will thus get the worst of everything. Trump will be able to claim he was wrongly tried but acquitted anyway and therefore was completely innocent, while in fact he was morally guilty.

And those on the left of politics who think Trump got away with murder will think he still got away with murder.

The reason the trial is such an obvious abuse of process is that impeachment is designed to remove an unfit president from ­office. Richard Nixon resigned in 1974 to avoid impeachment. Once he had resigned, there was no move to go on with impeachment.

If there is really a case that in a legal as well as a moral sense Trump incited violence, then charges should be laid against him in a criminal court.

No one could object to that, but it is just because that case is so weak that it can’t be pursued.

The Democrats have contributed their full share to the madness of US politics over the past four years. At every point, they’ve lost faith in their ability to deal with Trump politically — the Senate could quite legitimately pass a resolution criticising him for January 6 — and have relentlessly tried to criminalise politics, even when that’s plainly unjustified.

For their part, the Republicans have become just as deranged over Trump. Two of their most impressive elected representatives, Liz Cheney in the House of Representatives, and senator Ben Sasse, from Nebraska, have been ­condemned by their respective state Republican parties for criticising Trump’s most reprehensible statements.

This in a party constantly complaining about cancel culture and championing free speech.

Yet the unbelievably odious, nearly deranged congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene — who thinks forest fires are caused by space lasers linked to the Jewish Rothschilds family and who previously argued there was no evidence a plane hit the Pentagon on 9/11, that some high school gun massacres were hoaxes and other weirdness too astonishing and ­revolting even to recount — merely apologised for the embarrassment of her past views and was given an ovation by the Republican congressional caucus.

So Cheney and Sasse are un­acceptable, Brown gets a round of applause. Both sides of American politics are in need of urgent ­remedial treatment.