How will it look, for the health of American democracy, if the former president Donald Trump is put in handcuffs next week over charges that he paid “hush-hush money” to the porn star Stormy Daniels?
The man himself seems to be bracing for legal persecution over what he calls “The Stormy Horseface Daniels Extortion Plot.” He says he expects to be arrested on Tuesday and blames his “sleazebag” former lawyer Michael Cohen, who claims Trump paid him $280,000 to pay off Daniels and another woman called Karen McDougal, who was voted America’s second “sexiest playmate of the 1990s.”
Trump has always denied the allegations and says the whole Daniels case is “ancient and now many times debunked.” Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg has been investigating whether Trump’s alleged payments broke state law. Trump’s campaign say that Bragg is a “George Soros-backed Radical Left Democrat Prosecutor.”
Trump has called on his supporters to “protest” — which hysterical media opponents have immediately interpreted as another call for violence à la January 6. And so the silly dance goes on.
Team Trump argue that the 45th president’s corrupt political enemies and the deep state have “weaponized” the justice system against him. The language sounds hyperbolic but it isn’t altogether wrong. What else do you call it when a political figure is prosecuted so vigorously on so many fronts, often on what seems to be thin evidence?
Trump, the American Berlusconi, has a checkered past, no doubt, and a bizarre relationship with reality. But there’s also no denying that eight years of attempts to prosecute him on manifold fronts — Russia, Ukraine, tax, incitement to violence, hush money, fraud and more — have so far failed, even if he has been impeached twice.
Yet the prosecutions and the stories around them go on and on, like a sort of tabloid Huit Clos. Porn stars! Secret documents! Attempted insurrection! And then nothing changes and Americans will probably still have to choose between Donald Trump and Joe Biden in the 2024 presidential elections.
In the coming days, further indictments and allegations against Trump are expected — chiefly over his “hoarding” of classified official documents at Mar-a-Lago. This story went strangely quiet for a few weeks earlier this year as it emerged that Joe Biden has also been guilty of hanging on to classified files he should have returned — going back to his time as a senator.
The facts of the Trump Files Story and Biden Files Story may be different, but Trump supporters will understandably feel aggrieved if their man is prosecuted over something Joe Biden did too.
The wheels of justice in America grind slowly. But they grind towards always never-quite prosecuting Donald J. Trump. But this isn’t really about justice and everyone knows that. It’s about politics. And the political dynamics of the legal “Get Trump” story are intriguing — in that they end up suiting Biden and Trump.
Joe Biden, for all his cant about Trumpism endangering democracy, secretly wants Donald Trump to run. The White House team clearly think their best chance of re-election is to face Trump again in 2024. Therefore Biden probably doesn’t want his attorney general Merrick Garland to put Trump behind bars. The ideal for Biden would be for Trump to be endlessly caught up in legal recriminations but never taken down convincingly. Which funnily enough is exactly what seems to be happening. For Trump and his fans, meanwhile, the endless prosecutions only prove that the deep state is out to get him, which is why the Donald is so keen to mention the “hoax” indictments at every turn.
It’s all theatrics, in other words, a legal shadow-play which most people don’t believe, but which helps both Democrats and Republicans validate their prejudices. Biden vs Trump, the 2024 edition, could be the most ugly and dishonest election yet.
This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.
