Trump’s indictment: the real takeaway is the US is as polarised as ever

Trump’s fading appeal among all but the most diehard of supporters means he is unlikely to get another stab at the White House
With the Democrats’ path to 2024 also fraught, Beijing and Moscow are the hands-down winners amid this division in America

Robert Boxwell

Published: 1:00am, 3 Apr 2023

Why you can trust SCMP

Like an old Russian joke, the protesters didn’t show up to protest the arrest that didn’t happen. One wonders if Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping shared a laugh last week when they met in Moscow. Donald Trump, their former nemesis, facing arrest by a local prosecutor – isn’t democracy great, Mr General Secretary!

Trump’s appeal to supporters to protest against his imminent arrest by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg last month was largely ignored. Who can blame them? The last time he asked them to protest in his support in January 2021, hundreds ended up in US prisons. That he told them he would join them at the Capitol, then failed to show up, could not have inspired much confidence in those he was pleading with to put themselves in harm’s way again for him.

Add this to the mostly poor showing of his hand-picked congressional and gubernatorial candidates in the recent elections and plain old Trump weariness, and it seems a good bet – polls notwithstanding – that he will not be the Republican presidential candidate next year.

That’s good news for many Americans, Democrats and Republicans alike. It’s also good news for Beijing and Moscow. He was arguably tougher on China and Russia than any president since Ronald Reagan.

The bad news, if you like the guy’s policies, is that it’s hard not to see him running as an independent, which will almost surely return a Democrat to the White House. And now he has been indicted – for paying hush money to a porn star – he is less likely to do anything other than press forward in his attempt to regain power.

Yet any appeal that Trump may have held because of his policies is long gone for all but his diehard base, obliterated by his non-stop truculent spew.

Trump supporters protest near Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida, on March 21. The former president is accused of paying hush money to a porn actress. Photo: AFP

And there’s nothing proprietary about his policies. If you like them and thought they were largely successful – until Covid-19 devastated the US economy – well, other Republicans have much the same. Trump’s policies without Trump – it has a nice ring to it.

He is likely to go down in history as a president attacked like none before, by a coalition of Democrats, his own Republicans, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, CIA, et al, whose messages were conveyed eagerly and unquestioningly by most US media. The attacks stuck to him – still stick to him – and his response is almost always overboard.

His defenders call him a fighter, but his lack of self-awareness indicates something related to sanity is missing from that description.

Had he taken a higher road and acted “presidential”, like many thought he would once in the White House, he might not have driven off moderate supporters. But he didn’t. His behaviour now, even though he’s almost always goaded into it, is beyond the pale. He clearly doesn’t care how the US looks to the rest of the world, when that never mattered more.

After implying violence from his base of supporters should he be arrested, he published a composite picture of himself holding a baseball bat while eyeing Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, menacingly. If you thought of Robert DeNiro as Al Capone, you’re not alone. And Al Capone isn’t anyone’s idea of a US president.

His ad hominem attack style is simply worn out. The nicknames gimmick was lightly amusing the first time around. Now Trump’s like an ageing one-hit wonder reprising his 1970s song at the end of a concert in Nowhereville.

And his targets this time are decent people in the eyes of Republican voters: former vice-president Mike “Pious” Pence and Florida governor Ron DeSantis, which Trump dismissed as “Ron Sanctimonious”. Does Trump even know what “sanctimonious” means? These kinds of knocks on those guys won’t work with Republicans – those are pluses.

Complicating 2024 though, some of President Joe Biden’s fellow Democrats seem to be angling to jettison him, and a once-fawning press is slowly getting on the bandwagon.

Domestic politics, China loom large on Biden’s steep path to re-election

Likely to be prompting at least some of this, the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, now controlled by Republicans, is investigating the Biden family’s business dealings in China, Russia, Ukraine and elsewhere. If they can link Biden to some financial wrongdoing – or even just transactions that imply this – and Democrats and the press decide he has outlived his usefulness, he won’t be the Democrats’ nominee in 2024.

Which brings us back to Xi and Putin, sharing a laugh – perhaps wondering who the next American president will be, and how many social media followers he or she will have who will rile things up and make American democracy look so entertaining in Beijing and Moscow.

Few Americans doubt the worst president in US history was on the ballot in 2020 – they just disagree on who it was. Xi and Putin don’t care. They are the hands-down winners of this division and polarisation. An American president or two in legal troubles up to the neck? Fabulous! Pass the popcorn, it’s going to be a good show.

Robert Boxwell is director of the consultancy Opera Advisors