DONALD TRUMP’S indictment for trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election will only emphasise the US’s ongoing crisis of legitimacy.
Given the dominance of the United States over the political West — which has grown stronger even as its global clout has waned — there will be consequences this side of the Atlantic too.
The US state is understandably keen to thoroughly discredit an out-of-control ex-president who showed scant regard for political conventions or the law, national or international — and, much worse, was open about it.
US presidents routinely break international law — through invasions, illegal sanctions, murder by drone — but none but Trump would casually mortify the whole Nato establishment by admitting that oil interests were the sole reason for military intervention in Syria, and for Washington’s obsession with regime change in Venezuela.
Trump’s ongoing denial that the 2020 election result was valid strikes at the heart of the US political system. The evidence that he was consciously trying to subvert it is strong. On those grounds his prosecution makes sense.
But that doesn’t mean it will work.
Trump’s large and angry fan base was maintained through a disastrous presidency. He remains by far the favourite to be Republican candidate for president next time — a New York Times/Siena College poll this week put him on 54 per cent support among likely voters in that contest, with the second-placed candidate Ron DeSantis on 17 per cent.
Since his defeat it has been difficult for Republican candidates to win nomination if they distance themselves from him, or express scepticism about his stolen election narrative. One of the two main parties of US capitalism has been taken over.
That points to the scale of resentment across the US at perceived political elites — and at the left’s failure to mobilise it in a socialist direction.
There was a time when the Trump-Bernie Sanders polarisation seemed analogous to the Boris Johnson-Jeremy Corbyn divide in Britain.
Those days are gone. Sanders and the “squad” of left-wing congresswomen have been incorporated into mildly critical support for the Biden presidency, something made easier by their general support for US imperialism abroad.
Here, Corbyn’s own consistent anti-imperialism rules out any such accommodation, but a similar process is evident among those of his former supporters who remain in Labour.
The main difference between Britain and the US is that here the insurgency has been quashed on right and left. But even that is misleading. If the “centrists” are back in charge, they have become a lot more like the far right in the process.
Rishi Sunak might present himself as a sober-minded manager of the status quo — as does Keir Starmer — but in ripping up long-accepted rights to protest or to strike and casting aside international conventions on refugees, he is fronting a hard-right assault on democratic rights more thorough than Trump’s.
And that vicious, hate-mongering, uber-authoritarian Tory Party is the one whose policies Labour shadows closely.
A Labour that says it will allow Tory policing laws to “bed in” and scaremongers over boat arrivals does not promise even a Biden-style shift. If Trumpism remains a force in US politics, something with many of its worst features now dominates at Westminster, where the priority is not exploiting popular discontent but silencing it.
Even if jailed, Trump could still run again for president. The implications for US stability are hard to assess, and may make the state even more erratic and aggressive on the world stage.
Britain’s tragedy is a cross-party political elite who could follow a Trump Take Two presidency as easily as a Democrat administration. All the more reason a real, left opposition must be built — not just to privatisation and pay cuts at home, but to our servile relationship with US imperialism.
