Trump’s January 6 antics don’t just damage democracy – they threaten the economy

Trump’s lies about the election make it harder for people to have faith he will be a faithful steward of the economy

(Getty Images)

After the third indictment against Donald Trump came down on Tuesday, the former president raged against the fact that the charges came more than two-and-a-half years after the January 6 riot and his scheme to try and steal the US presidency.

While Mr Trump’s Republican allies have called this a targeted assault on a current candidate for president, nobody compelled Mr Trump to seek the White House a third time in as many election cycles. And for all of their talk about a two-tiered justice system, the fact that a former president can be indicted actually shows that everyone must be held accountable by the law, no matter their status.

But on the same day as the indictment, an equally momentous announcement came that did not garner as much headlines. Fitch Ratings – one of the big three credit rating agencies in the United States – downgraded the US credit rating. To boot, Richard Francis, a senior director at Fitch, told Reuters that political polarisation reflected by the January 6 riot contributed to the agency changing the rating from AAA to AA+.

Mr Trump has frequently invoked how well the economy performed during his presidency – excluding, of course, the effects of the sledgehammer that was the Covid-19 pandemic. Mr Trump deeply desired to see a return to normalcy during the pandemic likely as a way to boost his numbers before the 2020 presidential election.

“It was something that we highlighted because it just is a reflection of the deterioration in governance, it’s one of many,” Mr Francis told Reuters in reference to January 6. While Republicans might object to the idea that something like a political riot would factor into the US’s credit rating, in another way, it makes perfect sense; if half of the United States cannot agree on who is a legitimate president, that makes handling the nation’s fiscal issues all the more complicated.

By the same token, continued crises of democracy where political riots and attempted coups are a staple in American politics make the US a less reliable creditor and country worth investing in. Undermining the role of democracy turns out to be bad for the US economy.

In fairness to the GOP, Mr Francis said that both parties shared plenty of blame, saying that “the Democrats have gone further left and Republicans further right, so the middle is kind of falling apart basically.”

But a core distinction does exist between the two parties; despite the fact that the Democratic Party has indeed become more liberal, its elected officials have mostly rejected attempts to say that elections are illegitimate and do not incite their supporters to overthrow the government.

Indeed, the fact remains that even after the riot, 147 House Republicans decided to continue with their objections to the 2020 election results. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy went from saying that Mr Trump bore responsibility for the riot to flying down to Mar-a-Lago.

At this point, the Republican Party’s continued defence of the former president all but guarantees that these types of political crises will continue to happen.

Of course, Republicans will probably pay no mind to any of these warnings, given that in their mind, the credit downgrade came under the watch of President Joe Biden and they will see it as a sign of his fiscal irresponsibility. It also will not likely move many voters, as many are already unsatisfied about a Trump-Biden rematch to begin with.

Still, the fact the indictment came the same day as the credit downgrade served as a simultaneous diagnosis and remedy. The former president’s repeated lies pose a mortal threat to so much about the country but holding him accountable might be the way to return the country to a more amenable route.