Will We Ever See an End to the Donald Trump Show?

In a perverse way, the wave of indictments against Donald Trump is a win for both Trump himself and for his so-called progressive tormentors. Trump can use the indictments to stir up his rabid base, and Joe Biden can do the same for his equally blinkered supporters.

But, in doing so, they both do great damage to America’s tottering democracy. After all, neither side is offering what most Americans are looking for. Just 35 per cent of all voters want to see Trump’s name on the ballot again. And fewer than half of Democrats, and only one-quarter of all voters, want President Biden to run for another term.

Trump has always been a moral reprobate, an unapologetic liar and an at-best dodgy businessman. Yet he does have an instinctive feel for the mood of largely neglected blue-collar Americans and the denizens of Main Street.

To be sure, Trump performed a service by giving voice to the long-ignored concerns of America’s working class. According to the less-than-sympathetic Guardian, the vote for Trump in 2016 represented a ‘rebuke to an economic system’ that has left workers ‘humiliated and hopeless’. Or as the American Mind recently put it, he has served as a kind of ‘wrecking ball’ to the political establishment.

In 2016, Trump focussed on popular concerns, like border control, the loss of jobs to China and keeping energy prices low. But now the indictment drama takes focus away from these issues, placing attention simply on Trump. He no doubt revels in this, but it does little good for anyone else.

Republicans aren’t helping themselves either. Many in the party dismiss Trump’s numerous indictments as utterly baseless. So instead of using the legal storm to challenge Trump’s attempt to become the Republican presidential nominee, they are encouraging his efforts. In reality, they are setting the stage for his nomination and more-than-likely loss in the 2024 election.

There is some truth to Trump’s charge that the FBI and the Department of Justice are all too often working as tools of the White House. This is a sad tendency that goes back at least to the Woodrow Wilson administration’s ‘red scare’ tactics of the 1920s. Some of the indictments – particularly those concerning the hush-money payments to pornstar Stormy Daniels – were hardly worthy of a criminal case. In contrast, the charges relating to Trump’s retention of hundreds of classified documents, including highly sensitive materials concerning nuclear weapons and other national-defence secrets, do raise serious questions. More critically, so does the inquiry into his alleged attempt to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results.

Read the rest of this piece at Spiked.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Homepage photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.