Donald Trump using his police mugshot to promote himself is a terrible indictment of US politics

Editorial: There have been morally corrupt presidents before, but there has never been someone so deliberate in the manipulation of untruths

(The Independent)

It is a measure of the degenerate condition of American politics that a possible presidential candidate expects to gain from being charged with attempting to overturn an election, and from having his post-arrest mugshot broadcast across the nation.

But Donald Trump was never a great advertisement for what Abraham Lincoln called the “better angels of our nature”. Where some presidents drew the best out of the American people, Mr Trump appealed to their less noble side.

Fortunately, the American constitution was strong enough to bend without breaking for almost all his four years in office; it was only in the dying days of his administration that Mr Trump crossed the line into inciting violence to overthrow the rule of law.

Of course, the accused is presumed innocent unless proven guilty, and the specifics of the case relating to the 2020 presidential election in Georgia, to which these charges relate, need to be tested in court. But there is on the public record a telephone recording of Mr Trump urging the Georgia secretary of state to “find 11,780 votes”, which looks incriminating enough to most outside observers.

And we know, in any case, that the former president is guilty of a greater crime.

We know, because we saw and heard it, that he encouraged a mob to storm the Capitol in Washington DC on 6 January 2021, in an attempt to prevent a joint session of Congress formally recording the electoral college votes that would confirm Joe Biden as president-elect.

There have been morally corrupt presidents before. There have been presidents who have rigged elections. But there has never been someone so deliberate in his manipulation of untruths in the White House. There is a straight line from Mr Trump’s promotion of the conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was born outside the United States to his insistence that the 2020 election was “stolen”.

A democracy can tolerate a certain amount of falsehood. It can even tolerate the passive withholding of the loser’s consent. What a secure democracy should not tolerate, however, is an attempt to overturn an election by force. In any secure democracy, Mr Trump should be disqualified from taking part.

In the United States, by contrast, the machinery of enforcing the law and upholding the constitution is being weaponised by Mr Trump to promote his appeal as a pretended outsider. His arrest, his police mugshot, and all the paraphernalia of a criminal court case have been turned into symbols of his persecution by the liberal establishment.

He should not get away with it, but the opposition is weak. It is telling that the Democratic Party has been unable to find, three years on, anyone other than Mr Biden – who would be 82 at the start of his second term – who can credibly stand against the threat of a second Trump presidency.

But it is the miserable cowardice of Mr Trump’s own adopted party that is most striking. We saw that at the first presidential TV debate on Wednesday, which Mr Trump dominated without even taking part.

We leave the last word on this subject to Liz Cheney, a decent Republican and former member of the House of Representatives for whom the Trump-addled party now has no room: “I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible. There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonour will remain.”