Today Zuma, tomorrow Trump
Sooner or later ex-U.S. president Donald Trump is bound to be indicted for some crime.
It doesn’t matter which — it could be a fraud or corruption charge, or a sexual offence, or incitement to violence, or even just tax evasion. And it doesn’t matter whether he’s convicted, either; the real drama will come before that.
Under no circumstances will Trump tamely show up in court to fight his case, agreeing to testify under oath. He has given too many hostages to fortune, and once that process gets underway his ultimate destination is probably huge fines and/or prison. So he must find another way to respond.
We have a very recent example of what a ruthless, trapped ex-president will do to avoid that fate. Jacob Zuma was president of South Africa for nine years, and his behaviour in power gave the world a new phrase: “state capture.” His friends and business partners prospered mightily, and their activities cost South Africa an estimated $83 billion.
Zuma has also faced rape charges, and is dealing with 16 criminal charges of fraud, racketeering and money laundering. Or rather not dealing with them: he has repeatedly refused to appear in court and answer the charges. Eventually, the Constitutional Court sentenced him to 15 months in jail for contempt of court.
Zuma duly handed himself in a week ago and is now in jail, but he knew what would happen next and was counting on it to free him of all his legal troubles. And it did happen: the parts of South Africa where there are large populations of Zulus, Zuma’s own tribe, exploded into violence.
In KwaZulu-Natal, the Zulu homeland, and in South Africa’s biggest urban area, the Johannesburg region, there were violent mass protests demanding his release (almost exclusively Zulu), which morphed into mass looting (any thug can join). Around 200 supermarkets and many other businesses have been pillaged and burned, and 75 people are dead, 1,700 have been arrested.
Zuma’s game was clearly to frighten the South African government into dropping all the charges, and it might have worked. But President Cyril Ramaphosa put the army on the streets and faced him down. The riots have ended except in KwaZulu-Natal, and are now dwindling in size and number even there. Zuma’s future does not look bright.
Now, what has all this to do with Trump? Quite a lot, because he has made himself the figurehead and alleged champion of the interests of the biggest American minority, the nonmetropolitan whites of the United States. They make up about 30 per cent of the U.S. population, they are angry and frightened about their gradual descent into being just one interest group among many, and a significant proportion of them are prepared to follow Trump anywhere. They willingly ignore all his sexual and financial peccadilloes and they have even swallowed the Big Lie: that he really won the 2020 election.
The mills of American justice grind even more slowly than those of the South African courts, but the time is coming when Trump will be charged with a serious offence in one of the several domains where he is highly vulnerable. Will he tamely submit to the judgments of the court? Of course not.
Excitable pundits talk about a second American Civil War, and it’s true that Trump could persuade hundreds or even thousands of Americans to kill and die for him. But Trump’s first tentative use of this strategy failed on Jan. 6, and Zuma’s resort to similar tactics is currently failing before our eyes.
A last-ditch Trump attempt to terrorize the courts into submission is also almost bound to fail — but that doesn’t mean he will not try it.