They Call it Stormy Tuesday

Is Trump’s Court Case the Beginning of the End or the End of the Beginning?

To everything there is a season, as Ecclesiastes has it, and this may or may not have been the week in which the political fortunes of Donald J Trump finally entered the bleakest of midwinters. In a historic twist that one might expect to find in a Netflix series - let’s call it The Toxic Whale, Trump slouched moodily into a Manhattan court to have his fingerprints taken, before facing charges of making illegal payments to buy the silence of a porn star with whom he once had ‘intimate relations’, insofar as a narcissistic psychopath can ever have intimate relations with anyone.

Trump’s appearance was a suitably sordid moment in a very sordid career, and it raises the question whether this most unpresidential of all US presidents is dead in the stagnant water in which he has splashed around for so long, harpooned – or should it be pin-pricked? - by his inability to keep his dick in his trousers.

That, in itself, is not a reason to stop him becoming president for a second time.  If it was, then quite a few former US presidents would never have made it to the White House in the first place, or would have been forced to leave it early.   And Trump’s karmic encounter is not due to his tawdry moral failings, but to his potentially illegal attempt to cover up a cover up, in a ludicrous attempt to maintain, during the 2016 election, that he was the kind of family man that American presidents are at least expected to pretend to be.

In the now distant days  when a sitting US president could resign because his bumbling hirelings were caught trying to  break into the campaign headquarters of the opposition on the orders of his equally inept subordinates, the words ‘Stormy Daniels’ ought to have marked the end of Trump’s political career before it even began.  But these, as we all know to our cost, are new times, when Christofascist evangelicals can hail Trump as ‘God’s flawed vessel’ and remind their congregations that King David once slept with Bathsheba, even as their fake-tanned messiah breaks every moral code that they or the Bible supposedly believe in.

Because we now live in a world where Trump could have sex with a goat on top of the Empire State Building, and these Christians would still vote for him as long as he promises to stop women having an abortion, prevent children from reading To Kill a Mockingbird, and allow their parents to open carry.

These are new times, when the Republican Party and more than seventy million voters simply don’t care if their president is a liar, a philanderer, a rapist, a crook, or a gangster.  Some of them do this because, as they used to say about the dictator Somoza of Nicaragua, he may be a son of a bitch but he’s our son of bitch.  Others see Trump as their revenge against the US political class, or the ‘establishment’, or the ‘libs’, or ‘wokeism’, or whatever shibboleths their lazy, rage-filled imaginations can conjure up.  

And others genuinely see this ridiculous and depraved reality tv-star-turned-clowncar fascist as the Chosen One.

It will take more than a porn star to change that.  Even if Trump is punished for what is clearly one of the least of his potential crimes, millions will drone on about ‘witch hunts’ and ‘Hunter’s laptop’ and the ‘deep state’ while they continue to mainline bullshit from God’s flawed vessel until they turn purple.

But the problem for Trump, and for his cultists, is that there is so much more to come. Legally-speaking, things may be stormy now, but there is a legal hurricane brewing off the shores of Mar-a-Lago that threatens to tear up Trump’s gilded chandeliers and send his golf carts all akimbo.

Attempts to overturn elections nationally and more specifically in Georgia; possible incitement in the January 6 assault; tampering with classified documents; numerous financial malpractices – all these and more legal possibilities are oozing up around God’s flawed vessel, and may land him with serious jail time.

For those who loathe Trump and everything he stands for, there will be a lot of schadenfreude to go round if this happens, because rarely has humiliation and ignominy been so richly deserved.  Once again, in the world that we once thought we knew, the mere fact that a former president is even facing such possibilities ought to be a career-ending scandal in itself.  

But so far it has barely made any impact on a Republican Party that long ago took its moral compass, trod on it, then ground the pieces into dust, before reforming the remnants into the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, Lauren Bobert, Josh Crawley and more recently, the insanely dishonest charlatan George Santos.

These grotesque but dangerous political piranha are Trump’s toxic spawn.  They owe their careers to him, and they feed in in the same waters that he once befouled. And these mini-Trumps, Walmart Nazis, off-the-shelf secessionists, white supremacist frat girls and brazen grifters, were enabled by far more powerful politicians than they are, who embraced Trumpism either out of craven cowardice or self-interest, to the point when they are still barely able to raise their meek little voices to condemn a president steeped in scandal, deceit, and outright idiocy who has now become the first former president to face criminal charges.

A party that allowed this to happen is not a party given to self-reflexion.  Nevertheless, the law is the law, and its wheels will grind on, as long as its institutions have the courage to act on what they know. And if the new King David eventually appears in an orange jump suit, even his most avid followers will have to either accept the outcome or engage in armed ‘resistance’ – something that is difficult to imagine from the likes of Gaetz or Taylor Greene, however much they might threaten it.

Some of Trump’s followers who can remember back that far may take inspiration from Silvio Berlusconi, who back in the 1990s pioneered the populist/millionaire template that brought Trump to power.  Berlusconi came to power following the ‘tangentopoli’ - Bribesville - scandals that toppled the post-war political establishment in Italy.  

Berlusconi was part of that establishment, and he led a counteroffensive by the dregs of the Italian political class, as he raged against the ‘leftwing’ and ‘politicised’ magistrates who were attempting to bring charges against them. Berlusconi may well have been the first politician who became head of state specifically in order to save himself from criminal charges.  

These charges were as serious as the charges directed against Trump, and included money-laundering, tax evasion, bribery, Mafia involvement and much else.  Berlusconi was able to avoid them all, through his successive presidencies, either by changing the law when he was in power or by outrunning the statute of limitations.

Today Berlusconi is still in power, botoxed to the eyeballs, and it has been left to leukaemia to do what the law and Italy’s voters were unable or unwilling to do.  Trump may well be hoping to achieve the same success, and his impending ‘legal woes’ probably explain his refusal to accept Biden’s victoryin 2020

But Berlusconi, unlike Trump, had an enormous media empire and a virtual monopoly over Italy’s television networks.  The flawed vessel doesn’t have that. He does have Fox News, at least he did. And even though he has the Republican Party, that support cannot be guaranteed, if the charges mount - and stick - and the politicians who came to power on his greasy coat tails conclude that it is no longer in their interest to be associated with him.

Even if this happens, Trump’s downfall is unlikely to lead these erstwhile disciples to the path of political virtue. Whatever happens to the flawed vessel himself, Trumpism has broken the mould of American politics, and shown that dishonesty, depravity, brazen racism,extremism and mad incompetence is no barrier to political advancement, on the right at least.

That will only change when Trumpism is politically defeated, when millions of voters turn away in horror and disgust from the monstrosity they helped create, and from all his would-be imitators.

At present we are nowhere near that point. The law may help bring about that outcome, or it may not. It may reinforce the whining victimhood on which Trump and his movement thrive. So, as satisfying as it is for the rest of us to imagine that Trump, to paraphrase the old blues song, may be meeting some of the people he met on the way up on the way down, this tragedy is by no means played out, and we can’t say yet it’s coming to an end, or whether it’s just getting started.