A shameful moment for Trump, a sobering moment for America

Editorial: Whether this case against the former president stands or falls, it is proof nobody is above the law

Donald Trump appears in court in Manhattan (AFP/Getty)

Over the years, the world has grown used to the wayward habits of Donald J Trump. He is, after all, the only president to have been impeached twice; the only one who is said to have discussed pardoning himself; and, most grievous, the only one to have stoked an insurrection against the Congress of the United States of America.

Although it was a moment of quite intense media interest, the fact that Mr Trump is now the first former president to be arrested on felony charges – 34 of them – seems almost like an afterthought. Despite his wounded and self-pitying post-hearing performance in Mar-a-Lago (which itself marks another first as a potential presidential crime scene), no one is very surprised that The Donald has landed himself in trouble. Nor do most people think the whole affair, and the other important investigations currently underway, is the product of a vast conspiracy run by “radical Democrats ... who seek to destroy” the nation.

Inured as we are to the outrages, the disregard for the constitution of the United States and the constant resort to conspiracy theories, the arrest, booking and arraignment of Mr Trump is humiliating not just for him but for his country. It speaks to a deep malaise in America’s political culture, now more evenly and bitterly divided than at any time since the Civil War. Mr Trump was part-product and part-cause of that weakening of a sense of national cohesion and purpose, because, even more than the presences of Warren Harding, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton, it eroded faith in the American system of government itself. Mr Trump challenged the legitimacy of the voting system, the independence of the judiciary, and set the people against Congress. That is why he is the subject of so many investigations around his conduct, and that is why he is the first president to face such charges.

So there is painful irony and considerable chutzpah in hearing him whinge and claim that: “They can't beat us at the ballot box so they try and beat us through the law.” The ex-president is wrong. It was he who couldn’t beat Joe Biden at the ballot box in November 2020, and who then launched a series of spurious legal claims of election abuse to try and cheat his way back to the White House. It was not President-elect Biden but President Trump who attempted to steal the presidential election of 2020. All his claims failed, his attorney Rudy Giuliani made a spectacular fool of himself at the infamous Four Seasons Total Landscaping press conference, and yet Mr Trump persists with the fiction that the vote was rigged and that, presumably, he is still the legitimate president of the United States.

All that said, the Manhattan district attorney may have overreached himself with 34 felonies Mr Trump was booked for. More serious than mere misdemeanours, they carry the theoretical threat of a jail sentence, and thus feel more vindictive than was probably necessary (and correspondingly more difficult to convict, even in Trump-hostile New York. The decision to deepen the gravity of the criminal case relating to falsifying business records may be because the crime is related to breaches of electoral law, in turn, linked to “hush money” paid to Stormy Daniels and another person – hiding “damaging information from the voting public during the 2016 presidential election”. The case may eventually turn on the legality, in these circumstances, of the “catch and kill” methods used by some media organisations to stop damaging stories being published.

The legal process is liable to be protracted, and could be punctuated by the arrival of other cases related to the count in Georgia and Mr Trump’s possession of presidential documents at his Florida home.

It will take time to see just how close to incarceration the 45th president is. Indisputable, however, is that the still images of Mr Trump sitting in a Manhattan courtroom looking a mixture of bewilderment and resentment are a shaming moment. The sole saving grace is that it also stands to remind the world that, despite Mr Trump’s efforts, in America the rule of law still applies equally to all.