Functioning democracies depend upon trust: we, the people, must have faith in the powerful individuals to keep us safe and treat us with dignity. Whether we are the accused or the victim, we expect those in authority to act with apolitical decency which would protect any person in the eye of a judicial storm.
Trust in powerful bodies and their actors was already at an all-time low, but Trump’s guilty charges have left millions of Westerners with a dizzying sense of vertigo. It is terrifying to feel the ground of corruption and injustice come hurtling towards you.
We easily take for granted the fact that police officers, teachers, doctors, lawyers and politicians must work together, bound by a set of shared values so that the social fabric upon which we rely does not tear.
But thanks to divisive pandemic policy in the USA and the UK; politicians corruptly profiteering with impunity and the sheer indifference of monolithic corporations and utility providers to regulatory bodies or – heaven forbid - the mere customer, this trust had already been stretched gossamer thin. Now we are left asking, if even mega-star Donald Trump is vulnerable to an orchestrated plan of political castration, how powerless are we all?
When this social contract rips beneath society the hammock upholding the Nation State snaps and we fall towards a destabilised, embittered future of nihilism – a country characterised by angry cynics; divided finger-pointers and eye-rollers.
There will be two camps: the Davids who still want to slay Goliath but are so demoralised that they can’t be bothered to pick up a rock. And the Davids who are so angry they throw rocks in every direction. Taken to its extreme, therein lies civil war.
This ‘accountability deficit’ in public life, arguably started with Tony Blair and the Iraq invasion. In February 2003, in 600 cities across the planet, millions of protestors urged Bush and Blair not to act on their threat to invade Iraq.
The outpouring of fear and rage from the single biggest mobilisation of people in history was ignored - but those protestors have been proven right. Under Biden we now have a destabilised, chaotic and violent Middle East: when the US withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021 over 7,000 of its service members, more than 8,000 contractors and 177,000 uniformed allies had died. (Plus 30,177 US veterans of the post-9/11 wars took their own lives).
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The Taliban regained control of the country, women’s rights have been obliterated and the twenty-year conflict has created a global refugee crisis that is still felt on British shores.
Furthermore, $14trillion of tax-payers money was spent on Pentagon contracts with one-third to one-half of the total going to just five major American corporations. Today, shareholders and politicians with no effective strategy or clear objective continue to turn a blind eye to the 500,000 dead Ukrainians and a city under rubble. Regardless of your take on the rights and wrongs of that conflict, the complete lack of effort to establish peace should raise suspicion about the motive.
It is no wonder that we little people look at world leaders and feel fury.
This week, when he wasn’t eating popcorn watching the Trump trial, President Biden gave Ukraine permission to use American-supplied weapons to strike targets in Russia. The drumbeat of war is yet again growing louder and those of us who wish to silence it were pinning some hopes on Donald Trump.
People who despair about Trump-the-man because of childish tweets or because he once privately bragged about “grabbing women by the p****ies” or paid a porn star to avoid some bad publicity need to wake up and grow up.
In 2020, over just four months, Trump achieved four peace deals between Israel and Arab states — twice the number achieved by all his predecessors combined.
In March this year he is reported to have told Hungarian PM Viktor Orban that he would not “give a penny in the Ukraine-Russia war” and Orban – an ally of Putin – claimed, “That is why the war will end.” Trump pledged that he would end the conflict “within 24 hours” if elected.
It might seem unlikely that a man who appears to have no eye for detail would grasp the complex, historical geopolitics of a10 year feud between ethnic Russians in the Donbas and the Ukraine administration, but with Putin recently proposing the resumption of peace talks, it is clear that where Biden’s response is a hard no, Trump would – at least – want a strategic off-ramp. If for no other reason, than claiming credit for the win.
He is, of course, no saint. In 2020, he famously urged Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to find enough votes to change the electoral college outcome in his favour in Georgia. But Raffensperger and other senior Republicans stood up to Trump. The US power paradigm was tested and it proved resistant to manipulation. But not anymore…
President Biden, alongside Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, has weaponised politics – via his Democrat lackeys – so that Trump will be convicted on tenuous charges. He morphed a minor misdemeanour of falsifying ‘hush money’ records into a felony claiming that it was designed to interfere in the 2016 election.
There are parallels to be drawn with President Hilary Clinton’s use of a personal email server whilst Secretary of State in 2009. FBI director James Comey concluded in 2015 that while, “there is evidence of potential violations” covering the mishandling of classified information, “our judgement is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.” And in 1998 President Bill Clinton reached an out-of-court settlement with Paula Jones, agreeing to pay her $850,000 to drop the sexual harassment lawsuit. The protagonists of this 4-year ordeal made no effort to conceal the agreement and the money made the story go away. How times have changed.
Democrats – specifically the Biden family – appear to operate with impunity. It remains unfathomable to any right-minded person how no ‘reasonable prosecutor’ has not pushed harder for the president’s son, Hunter, to end up in court given his laptop included images of him taking Class A drugs and reclining naked with numerous pre-teen girls. Despite long and complex investigations into Hunter’s Ukrainian and Chinese business dealings, nothing illegal has stuck.
With Trump’s guilty verdict, the gloves may be off. If Trump goes on to win an election, Republican forces may fight fire with fire. First in the legal crosshairs will be the whole Biden family.
Despite the best efforts of some left-wing media outlets, it is too simplistic to cast Biden as good and Trump as bad. The Guardian’s headline celebrating Trump’s conviction reads, ‘Karma always get you,’ quoting one hand-picked Manhattan onlooker. Presumably, the publication misses the irony that at the foot of the page is the request for money with the statement, “Teams of lawyers from the rich and powerful are trying to stop us publishing stories they don’t want you to see.”
It is America’s left-wing rich and powerful who are applauding this dereliction of democratic duty and downright dishonesty. Democrat prosecutors, a Democrat judge in a Democrat jurisdiction versus the Republican presidential favourite in an election year was only ever going to end one way. This is nothing but the sort of political persecution that we might expect from a small, corrupt, developing nation. America was already divided. Now it is on fire.
