Even out of office, Trump is wrecking America’s standing in the world
Dan Hannan
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All my life, I have had a certain idea of the United States. It was not like other places. It drew people’s loyalty, not on grounds of blood or speech, but by the power of its ideals. Those ideals called millions of settlers from every continent. They built the world’s most inventive nation, and planted its flag on the moon. They inspired others to throw off tyranny in their own countries.
Yet that America seems very suddenly to have disappeared. Constitutional liberty, the thing it was best at, no longer matters to its people. The problem is not that there is a dotard in the White House. Such things can happen in any country, and America has backup systems in place.
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No, the problem is that millions of Americans — very possibly an electoral majority — are set to support someone who refuses to recognize that the country is bigger than he is, someone who makes no distinction between the national interest and his personal needs, someone who boasts of wanting to use office to go after those who have crossed him, telling his supporters, “I am your retribution.”
Can the United States, a nation founded to forestall arbitrary rule, truly be about to prostrate itself for a second time before a two-bit Caesarist of the kind the founders warned against? Is the land that embodies justice not deterred by the prospect of nominating a presidential candidate who, by then, might very well be a convicted felon?
Sure, the indictment against Donald Trump adds little to what we already knew. But to read all the charges set down in one place is devastating.
There was a time when Republicans loathed anything that looked like arbitrary or monarchical government. But that went out of the window eight years ago, and it was no surprise to see the other candidates for the GOP nomination — Tim Scott, Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy — lining up to condemn the indictment. (Honorable mention, once again, to Mike Pence, to whom it fell to make a point that would once have gone without saying, namely that placing yourself above the Constitution should render you unfit for office.)
Republicans who want to get ahead have accepted that Trump is needy and egotistical, that he demands to be followed on his own account, that he expects his supporters to switch their views whenever he does. Yet the United States exists because its architects were determined to keep such men from power. How depressing — no, how despicable — to see grown-up politicians licking the boots of a man who recognizes no constraints, moral or political, on his appetites.
It did not occur to the founders to bar criminals from high office, because they thought a free people would not vote for one. In theory, Trump could fight the election from behind bars.
“Yes, Sean, it’s a great prison, a very very beautiful prison, I’ve got yuge support here, a lot of people giving me their phone privileges so that I can talk to you….”
Since 2016, a chunk of the conservative movement has refused to apply its usual standards to Trump. Foreign policy hawks were happy to see him sucking up to Vladimir Putin. Tea Partiers had nothing to say about his trillion-dollar deficits. Evangelicals went along with his lies, his vindictiveness, his adulteries. So it is no surprise that law-and-order types now attack law enforcement.
The tragedy is not so much Trump’s as his apologists’. Trump sees a presidential bid as a way to fend off the legal charges, or at least to rally support against them. No doubt he hopes to win so as to pardon himself if necessary. But doesn’t it strike you as odd that the party supposedly dedicated to republican principles is backing one man’s attempt to bend the legal order to his convenience?
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This is not some technical infraction, like, say, paying off a porn star and then lying about it. Trump is accused of attempting, in a persistent and determined way, to overturn an election. That is about as serious as it gets. The inviolability of the democratic process, and the allied notion that the people in charge cannot do as they please, is what makes America America. It was what millions sought to emulate when liberated from fascism after 1945, and millions more when liberated from communism after 1989. It is what Ukrainians are fighting for now.
I know Trump couldn’t care less. He has always been utterly focused on himself. But in all honestly, cousins, your friends overseas expect better from the rest of you.