Major events unfolding in the United States enthrall and engage us. This is because America is the largest economy in the world. It is one of the avatars and harbingers of Western, liberal democracy, a project which we have swallowed hook, line and sinker. And it is a lightening rod.
As the world’s largest economy, any major activity in that country has consequences for lesser denizens such as Nigeria. As a country, which Ronald Reagan touted in his 1988 State of the Union address as the “shinning City on a Hill”, we will do well to keenly observe developments in that country.
Some of the tempestuous events unfolding, pell mell, in America, and which should interest us, are the court trials of former President Donald Trump. A forerunner of the Republican Party and its most likely standard bearer for the 2024 presidential election, Trump is immersed, in four major cases involving a record 91 charges.
The indictments of Donald Trump are the first ever, of any former President, of the United States. They are therefore unprecedented. His being the most formidable contender for the presidential ticket of the Republican Party puts America on uncharted territory and puts the world in suspense and on tenterhooks about the prospects of another unpredictable Trump presidency.
Fourteen months to the conduct of the American presidential election, European capitals are said to be agog with strategy sessions as to how to deal with a likely Trump presidency. Recall that in his first term, Trump gave the short shrift to multilateralism and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization(NATO) alliance in preference for an obtuse and constricted American outlook. This alienated America and caused a near-unraveling of its transatlantic and pacific relationships.
Donald Trump is charged with both Federal and State crimes. He is facing four distinct/separate indictments as follows:1)He is accused of violating New York State law by allegedly agreeing to conceal a series of reimbursements to his former Lawyer and self-proclaimed fixer, Michael Cohen, who is a key witness against Trump. Cohen allegedly made a $130,000 “hush money” payment to adult film actor, Stephanie Clifford, also known as Stormy Daniels, before the 2016 election in exchange for her silence about an alleged affair.
2)Trump is accused of keeping classified documents after leaving the White House and storing them “in various locations in Mar-a-Lago Club including a ballroom, a bathroom and shower, and a storage room”. He is also accused of a “scheme to conceal” that he had kept those documents.
3)Trump is accused of participating in a scheme to interfere with the peaceful transfer of power after he lost the 2020 election to President Joe Biden. He and six other co- conspirators are indicted for knowingly spreading lies that there was a widespread “fraud in the election and that he had actually won”, thereby leading to the January 6 2021 attack on the Capitol.
4)Trump and eighteen(18) others are accused, under Georgia State’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations or RICO Law, of co-ordinating an effort to thwart proper certification of that State’s 2020 presidential election, which Joe Biden won.
These four major indictments, amounting to 91 counts/charges are scheduled for trial on March 25th 2024, May 2024, and March 4th 2024 respectively. It is noteworthy that the Georgia State trial has also been scheduled for March 4th 2024, a day before Super Tuesday(on 5th March 2024). Super Tuesday in the United States is the Presidential Primary Election Day when the greatest number of States in that country hold primary elections and caucuses. In Fulton County jail, where Trump surrendered and was charged for thirteen counts, his mug shot was taken, another notorious first for a former United States President.
Rather than for these record and unprecedented indictments to diminish the former President and to cast him in the mould of common criminals, to be shunned and put at arm’s length, they appear to resonate with his Republican base. As at 31st July, 71% of Republican voters stood, shoulder to shoulder, with Trump in spite of these investigations. Many Trump fanatics view his indictments as a witch-hunt, which he continues to canvass truculently. The indictments also consolidate his position as the front runner of the Republican Party for the 2024 presidential election. Fifty eight percent of likely 2,700 Republican Party primary voters are said to support his candidature. It is a measure of Trump’s sure-footedness that he shunned the first in the series of debates for Republican aspirants held more than a week ago in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. For good measure, he elected to have a pre-recorded interview with Tucker Carlson which was deliberately aired to coincide with the said debate.
And though most observers thought his mugshot, taken at Fulton County jail, will savage his standing and trigger a meltdown, it has instead boosted his popularity with his Republican base. It continues to subscribe to the warped narrative that all of Trump’s indictments are a witch-hunt and that he did nothing wrong. The mugshot, which went viral on X, formerly known as Twitter, has raked in more than $7 million for the Trump Campaign.
Though Trump has a commanding lead, compared to his Republican Party presidential opponents and has a cult-like following in that Party, he inspires a miasma of disdain among Democrats and Independents. Most Democrats and Independents view these indictments as open and shut cases. And most will not rue the day Trump is sentenced, like the mobster, Al Capone, to prison. They are quick to point at Trump’s undue pressing of Georgia Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, on January 2nd 2021, “to find 11,780 votes” to influence the last presidential election, which was captured on audio and played hundreds of times as an instance.
Like Capone before him, Trump revels in attention. More than publicity, which gives oxygen to his brazen and unblushing denials, he is desperate to secure the Republican Party nomination. He hopes to further deploy the ticket to win the presidency and to pardon himself of possible convictions. Otherwise, he is destined for prison. Republicans live in dread of a prospective Trump candidacy. Most pundits and Republican bigwigs fear that if Trump flies the Republican ticket, he will eventually lose to President Biden. This is because a coalition of Democrats and Independents, which is more inclusive and more formidable in terms of race and demographics, is most likely to outbest a narrow Republican base as happened in 2020.
As in 2020, when moderate Republicans, under the auspices of the Lincoln Project, campaigned robustly for Biden, a Trump candidature is likely to engender a re-birth or resurgence, thereby dividing the Party down the middle.
Even though a Trump candidature is, by default, a win-win for Biden, the President remains embattled. His ratings are low in spite of an uptick in the economy and in spite of his taming inflation which had reached the stratosphere under his watch. Not a few Americans are concerned that age is not on Biden’s side and that considerable verve needs to be injected into governance ahead of the 2024 presidential election. This is not to add further possible lacerations to his campaign, arising from the investigation of his son, Hunter.
Even as avid observers of the American political scene watch in anticipation of how Trump is going to meander these trials, it is clear that his antics and excesses are an indictment on America itself. The indictments are an eloquent condemnation of Donald Trump and the system that facilitated his crimes. Only a country which has come short of its claims to being a paragon and a country bereft of its moral compass will fawn over a man facing this legion of indictments. One hopes that the big wigs of the Republican Party will summon the courage to confront Donald Trump and demand that he stand down. In 1974, a Republican delegation, led by Senator Barry Goldwater, demanded that Richard Nixon resign or face impeachment over Watergate. Already, the media maven, Rupert Murdoch, who once told Trump his time is past, is said to be goading Governor Glenn Younkin of Virginia to throw his hat in the presidential ring.
To look benignly away is to allow a convicted felon to run for President. Such an Al Capone-like scenario will be the undoing of the Republican Party, the Grand Old Party(GOP) of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt.