UGLY MONEY AND SEISMIC CORRUPTION ARE KILLING DEMOCRACY

THE Trump presidency, dogged by scandal from its first day, reels before charges brought against three of Trump’s past associates, related to their links with Russia.

This week, special prosecutor Robert Mueller indicted Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort, his lobbying partner Rick Gates and a foreign policy adviser called George Papadopoulos.

The first two stand accused of having worked for the pro-Kremlin Ukrainian government that fell in 2014, while the latter has admitted lying to the FBI about his role as a conduit between Russians and the Trump campaign he advised.

The Democratic opposition and East Coast establishment, which have always loathed Trump and crave his impeachment, see the hounds closing in on a badly wounded president, glimpsing a tantalising vision of his expulsion from the White House.

I am not so sure. For reasons we shall consider below, there still seems a long day’s march between where we are now and Trump’s recall to the TV reality shows from whence he sprang.

What is hard to dispute, however, is that the status of the U.S. as the world’s greatest democracy, which we have taken for granted for so many decades, is no longer assured.

The shortcomings of our own Parliament — and its current preoccupation with sexual harassment by its own members — pale into insignificance alongside the troubles of the U.S. Congress.

Both houses of U.S. government are almost paralysed by divisions that have become much more complex than those between Democrats and Republicans. Ultra-conservatives, informed by social media, Far-right websites and their own TV channel, Fox News, terrorise Republicans on Capitol Hill who refuse to embrace their potty agenda.

The President, though himself nominally a Republican, is at war with the best and brightest in his own party, and fights his battles by direct appeal on Twitter to a populist constituency which is still loyal.

The Democrats, having suffered a nervous breakdown about losing the 2016 election, show no signs of recovering their senses. Many are lurching to the Left, a place where they have less chance of regaining power than I do of winning Wimbledon.

WORSE

still, the extent of the corruption of U.S. politics by money — truckloads and container-loads of it — is making New York’s old Democrats, whose 19th- century scandals turned their Tammany Hall headquarters into a byword for bent politics, seem almost saintly by comparison.

The President notes that his former campaign manager Paul Manafort has been indicted on charges relating to alleged offences that took place long before he became Trump’s campaign manager. But the case against him cited by the special prosecutor is amazing. Manafort is alleged to have laundered more than $18 million from pro-Russia groups in Ukraine through a labyrinth of offshore accounts.

If these charges stick against Manafort, who advised the presidential campaigns of Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George Bush Senior, then this may become America’s biggest- ever corruption scandal ( shrinking into insignificance the £4 million or so — in modern money — that the then U.S. Secretary of the Interior was bribed with to dish out Wyoming oil rights in the infamous 1922 Teapot Dome affair).

The President has attempted to compare this week’s accusations against his former staff members with the actions of the Democrats in the 2016 election, when a Clinton campaign lawyer hired a firm called Fusion GPS in search of dirt on Trump.

This resulted in a dossier compiled by a former British intelligence officer which made allegations about Trump’s links to Russia. But the President’s efforts to claim there is a moral equivalence between these matters do not deserve to succeed, as there is no shred of evidence Fusion GPS had links to the Kremlin.

What the Fusion story does emphasise is how rough U.S. politics has become. The two 2016 candidates spent three-quarters of a billion pounds on their fight, while a staggering £2 billion was poured into all U.S. campaigning last year. A substantial portion of this may not be dirty money, but is certainly ugly money. It is used to buy advertising and support divisive, single-issue campaigns.

Much of this is paid for by tycoons, abusing their wealth to influence the democratic process. Consider the ultra- conservative Koch brothers, whose industrial fortune ranks them 8th on Forbes Magazine’s list of the world’s richest people.

In 2016, their political network spent almost £ 600 million on promoting assorted causes, including tax cuts for the rich, and abolition of the Democrats’ Obamacare health programme.

Lobbyists working for them make an estimated 10,000 phone calls a year to lawmakers’ offices. Although they did not back Trump last year, they share many of his enthusiasms, and Vice-President Mike Pence is to shortly deliver the keynote speech at the annual conference in Richmond, Virginia, of their organisation, which critics call ‘the Kochtopus’.

While the philanthropy of billionaires like Bill Gates and the Amazon boss Jeff Bezos shows not all rich men are solely self-interested, the technology companies that made the ‘virtual’ emperors filthy rich fight like tigers, in Congress and out of it, to preserve the global tax avoidance deals that cost the rest of us so dear.

Trump’s strategy for repelling the barrage of charges against his past associates is to counterpunch with allegations against Hillary Clinton, notably that as Secretary of State she allowed American uranium to be sold to the Russians at fire- sale prices. This is nonsense, and gets a hearing only in the parallel fake-news universe Trump often inhabits.

He was on stronger ground last year in highlighting the excesses of the Clintons’ own financial affairs. The family’s greed has caused them to take money — a lot of money — from some pretty unpleasant people.

The days are long gone when Harry Truman, president from 1945-1952, could retire to the life of a relatively poor man. A large portion of the people in American politics today take for granted their right to enrich themselves on the back of what only satirists can now call ‘careers in public service’.

Students of modern American history know there are many giants in the history of Congress, men and women of high principle, both Democrat and Republican. Today, as is also the case in our own House of Commons, we see pathetically few who are worthy of respect.

So there we have it: a president whom much of the world believes exposes America to embarrassment and shame; a legislature of which many members are in thrall either to vociferous minorities of Right or Left, or to big donors, or both; and now a scandal over links to Russia that caused a Washington Post columnist recently to argue that we have entered ‘the crisis stage of the Trump presidency’.

We have not even mentioned the weirdness of an administration in which almost the only stable and honest figures are said to be a clutch of military generals — Kelly, McMaster and Mattis.

Can we imagine what would be said if Theresa May relied upon even one senior army or Marine officer — never mind three — as her foremost adviser?

UNLESS

the special prosecutor Robert Mueller finds direct evidence that the President himself was financially entangled with Russia — which remains possible, but wholly speculative — I believe he will escape impeachment.

His personal support remains solid, composed of people who loathe his enemies and accusers as members of the East Coast power elite, and believe nothing such people say or write.

Only if the Democrats secure a majority in the House or Senate in next year’s elections, which is still doubtful, will impeachment become a real prospect. But in the meantime, we must hope that America’s much valued system of checks and balances will restrain Trump’s worst excesses.

We should also recognise the risk that Trump will precipitate a constitutional crisis by sacking Mueller and shutting down his Russia inquiry. That would surely be a step too far even for the Republicans in Congress.

The welfare of the U.S. — the health of its democracy — is vital to its friends and allies, which makes its scandals in some degree our own.

How can we make the case that American values are superior to those of China and Russia — as some of us remain assured that most of them are — when allegations such as those aired by the U.S. special prosecutor are thrown at men who walk close to its heart of power?

We must not despair. I retain a lifelong faith in the American genius for regeneration and reinvention.

But these are dark days, unlikely to lighten as long as Trump is in the White House.