VLAD DOESN’T NEED TO DESTROY AMERICA, DON WILL DO IT FOR HIM
America today is a rich country in despair. It has never been so divided, amplified and encouraged by the antics of Donald Trump during his term in the White House.
The circus arrived in New York on Tuesday and the star attraction wallowed in the attention from his devoted supporters. Following the show-stopping announcement that he would be the first US President in history to face criminal charges, Donald Trump was once again exactly where he loves to be—the centre of a media storm with all the spotlights on him.
From the time that the former reality star was elected to the White House in 2016, after a campaign that defied norms and commanded public attention from the moment it began, so many unthinkable firsts have occurred. He stunned the political world when he became the first person without government or military experience to be elected President of the United States. Trump also became the first President ever to be impeached twice, the second time for inciting an insurrection at the US Capitol during the certification of the election he lost (Trump is a bad loser—his inflated ego refuses to accept anything less than victory). As a result, a sulking Donald was the nation’s first chief executive in more than 150 years to refuse to attend his successor’s inauguration.
Once again in the limelight on Tuesday, Trump painted a public picture of persecution, turning the arraignment into a spectacle. He had been offered the chance to surrender quietly and be charged over Zoom. Instead, he opted for a midday, high profile booking at the Manhattan courthouse, creating a scene that would galvanise his supporters. A source close to Trump’s legal team said that he wanted to “create a kind of Jesus Christ image—sending to his supporters the powerful message: ‘I’m absorbing all this pain from all around and from everywhere so you don’t have to.’”
Donald Trump, now facing 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in connection with the payment of hush-money to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels, is no stranger to criminal investigations. Over the past 50 years, these have ranged from defrauding thousands of students at his Trump University, falsely inflating assets to mislead lenders, racial discrimination, and money laundering. In 2015, having spent seven years investigating allegations of money laundering, federal regulators finally fined Trump’s company $10 million for “failing to maintain proper controls against laundering and failing to report suspicious transactions”.
In his best-selling book, “House of Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia”, the distinguished American journalist, Craig Unger, sheds some light on this investigation. He claims that Trump Tower was one of only two buildings in New York City that sold apartments to buyers who used shell companies which allowed purchasers to buy real estate while hiding their identities. This was the time, says Unger, that the gigantic power vacuum created by the collapse of the Soviet Union was filled by the Russian Mafia, many of whom were looking to transfer illicit funds into safe havens in the West. A fire-hose torrent of hundreds of billions of dollars had opened up from mobsters in Russia, and Donald Trump’s zeal to sell his high-price apartments in Trump Tower with no questions asked, meant that Russians could launder vast amounts of money while hiding their personal identity. The Financial Times noted that money laundering of roughly $300 billion per year found its way into the United States, mostly from Russia. As a result, luxury real estate such as Trump Tower provided a haven for Russian oligarchs, mobsters and even a kleptocratic President Putin, to stash away and hide billions of dollars.
Of course, cash purchases through shell companies are not illegal, nor are sellers obliged to question from where the money comes, but Donald Trump appears to have taken advantage of the weak regulations to sell en masse to Russian clients. According to a Buzzfeed investigation by Thomas
Frank, more than 1,300 apartments, one fifth of all Trump-branded apartments sold in the US since the eighties, were sold “in secretive all-cash transactions that enable buyers to avoid legal scrutiny by shielding their finances and identities”. It was this that led to the 2015 fine of $10 million.
In Donald Trump, Unger concludes, the Kremlin had discovered a man who was so intoxicated by a huge new clientele with boatloads of cash that he engaged in dubious transactions. Moreover, doing business with Trump allowed the Russian Mafia to secure a significant new foothold in the US and begin an offensive that continues to assault America’s most essential democratic institutions to this day.
And it’s the health of America’s democracy that’s on most people’s minds as the Trump saga continues to dominate politics in what still is the greatest democracy in the world. But for how much longer? After Trump’s speech on return to his home base in Florida, the Lincoln Project put it succinctly: “Tonight at Mar-a-lago we saw a paranoid and delusional speech cheered on by fanatical cult members, handpicked to enthuse without hesitation and boo right on cue, who do not care about democracy or American values. Trump got the circus he wanted. The rest of the Republican Party has fallen into line.”
The indictment has led to a surge of support for Trump in Republican polls and a gush in cash donations. He is now the front leader for nomination. By playing again the broken record that invariably presents him as the victim of a “witch hunt” and a plot by the “deep state”, Trump is forcing his camp to take his side. And he does this at the risk of unleashing the anger of devout supporters who have long been locked into a veritable cult of personality against the recalcitrants. As authoritarian populist leaders around the world have discovered, shared grievances and making everyone feel like a victim can create solidarity.
Trump’s indictment, and there are at least three more in the offing, plays into existing fears about the future of the United States, of democratic norms no longer holding, of taboos being broken, of dangerous precedents being set, and even of latestage imperial decline becoming entrenched. Many are wondering if the world is witnessing the kind of constitutional unwinding that doomed the Roman republic all those years ago, when the state became too big for its constitution. There are signs of dysfunction everywhere in America. Just as the scale of the country’s wealth and power are hard to comprehend for those outside the homeland, so too is the scale of its violent disorder and dysfunction.
Homelessness is rising alarmingly, leading to record numbers of rough sleepers. Murder rates are reaching levels never seen before. In this year alone there have been 131 mass shootings in America, on course to top the 647 last year and 690 the year before. The opioid crisis is scandalous, with more than 58,000 deaths from fentanyl overdose in 2020, compared to 97 in the European Union with a larger population. Life expectancy has collapsed in a shocking fashion for an advanced country, having fallen from 78.8 in 2019 to 76 today.
In his latest book,“the Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate and the Burdon of Power”, published in February, the distinguished American author, Robert D. Kaplan argues that America has entered a phase of its life in which it has become so big that it no longer controls its destiny. This, says Kaplan, is America’s tragedy today. “America gave up any credibility to lecture the world by electing Donald Trump”, he claims, “whose effect on domestic politics laid bare the American systems tenuousness.”
So this is America today, a rich country in despair. It has never been so divided, amplified and encouraged by the antics of Donald Trump during his term in the White House. Trump metastasized society into declarations of perpetual cultural warfare, creating an America which is not only angry, but scarred by social breakdown and skyrocketing racial and ideological violence.
With just eighteen months of turbulence until the next presidential election, the US is teetering on an historically important moment. If Donald Trump survives the legal turmoil, is nominated as the Republican candidate and wins the election, America would be saddled with a leader whose instincts and actions would be diametrically opposite to what the moment requires. With few remaining constraints, a re-elected Trump would set the trajectory of American democracy downwards to its destruction. His friend, mentor and possible controller, President Vladimir Putin, would be overjoyed.
John Dobson is a former British diplomat, who also worked in UK Prime Minister John Major’s office between 1995 and 1998. He is currently Visiting Fellow at the University of Plymouth.