No rest for political cartographers. It turns out that what lay beyond America’s uncharted waters was some more uncharted waters. The unanimous verdict in Donald Trump’s hush-money trial found the former president guilty, making him the first US president to be convicted of a crime. Forgive me: 34 crimes. A potential bar to security clearance, voting and owning a gun – but not, apparently, a bar to running for president. “I am a political prisoner,” ran an instant campaign fundraising message from Trump, probably typed on the same gold toilet he once pretty much ran the world off.
And might well again. Previous polls have indicated some Trump voters would switch in the event of a guilty verdict, but this morning the betting markets had Trump’s chances above 50% for the first time. On the other hand, if criminal trial verdicts going the wrong way for you is such great news, how come Trump is trying so hard to stall the other three cases he’s facing? By way of a reminder, those involve mishandling classified documents, trying to change the outcome of the election, and fomenting the 6 January attack on the US Capitol. He’s already been found liable for sexual abuse and defamation in another trial last year, and impeached twice. Take in his thousands of business-related court cases and he’s a one-man law degree.
That the import of Trump’s conviction is even debated highlights the extraordinary loss of ideals we have lived through in a single decade. It is simply impossible to imagine a world where, even 10 years ago, any president being convicted of 34 crimes would be regarded – including by many of his detractors – as quite possibly good for his electoral prospects.
The ability to make people believe the opposite of the things they see with their own eyes is not a new political trick, and even the version that defines this looking-glass era was perfected by Vladimir Putin long before Trump ever produced his own knock-off model. Perhaps Trump’s most original achievement is to harness conspiracism, one of the great currents of the age, in his favour. I will never get over the vast irony of the fact that conspiracy theorists love this guy – when he embodies and proves so many of their worst fears. He ran, and may run again, a government that lied to them. He was head of a state that disappeared key documents, evidently into some of his own bathrooms. Every day he pulls a political false-flag attack of one kind or another. He was, and is, involved in any number of conspiracies. He really was out to get them. Yet their paranoia bell doesn’t go off.
So free-speech nuts decline to see that this is a case in which Trump clearly sought to suppress free speech and consequently democracy. This is what authoritarians do. They decide what the “truth” is going to be, and they manipulate events into making it so. Dissent is silenced. The people are judged too worthless and troublesome to be allowed to make up their own minds (all populists actually hate their people, even as they tell them they are just like one of them). Ideals we might consider the cornerstone of a democracy – free speech, the rule of law – are regarded as things that need to be got around, subverted and ultimately crushed. Democracy, really, is the enemy. Control is the goal.
And if you’re good enough at it, as Trump and Putin surely are, your former critics become your fawning court, to the point that no one can even imagine your successor, certainly unless you anoint him (and it will be a him). To watch previous Republican scourges of Trump such as JD Vance or Marco Rubio fawning around him is to imagine a mirror of events that played out inside the Kremlin many years ago. And, indeed, during a succession of earlier Russian presidencies. Even Nikki Haley has recently folded and says she’ll vote for him, and she didn’t even need to be tacitly threatened with nerve-agent poisoning to do it. A bunch of Wall Street big hitters have come around – maybe Trump will gift them some mining concessions or an oil company, like proper little oligarchs.
Right after the verdict, his ghastly strongman son Donald Jr popped up to declare, again, that America was turning “into a third-world shithole”. To which the reaction of many oversea observers will have been: you said it, mate. Good of you to be so open, at least.
Naturally, I am not being entirely serious. But for many around the globe, the former US president has become like the country’s gun laws – a situation of such glaringly objective negativity that they honestly don’t need some angry native to explain to them how actually it’s all an aspirational local custom that they, an outsider, could never understand. Most people feel they understand it pretty well. No country is immune from making itself a joke – certainly we Brits have had a few really determined goes at it down the years – and the US is currently the world’s leading exporter of mirthless laughs.
Even those die in the throat when you consider that far from having been always there, full American democracy is less than 60 years old. And if its betting markets think that a former president being convicted of multiple crimes is a boost to his prospects, then the world must be drawn to the conclusion that it is currently very sick, and quite possibly without health insurance. You can only wish it well.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
