Trump’s woes grow, and so does his popularity

There is an interesting double track emerging for former US President Donald Trump. On the one track he is gaining momentum over other Republican aspirants in the race for the party’s presidential nomination. On the other track, legal cases with serious charges are mounting against him.

The latest is from the state of Georgia, where he has been indicted with 19 others for trying to influence and pressure local officials and legislators to change the 2020 presidential verdict in his favour. The indictment says that he based himself on false statements that the election was stolen while the poll result was most clearly in his favour. This amounts to indulging in fraud. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis framed the charges. Trump reacted to the charge saying that attorney Willis, an elected Democrat, was a “rabid partisan”, and that the cases against him were an attempt to suppress the voice of his supporters.

Trump has remained unflappable in the face of the four cases, including the one in Georgia, which raise serious questions about the legality of his acts as president – the incitement of the mob that attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021 and he carrying away official documents from the White House to his Florida home – and one before he became president where he is charged with paying hush money to a porn star to buy her silence. All of them are serious charges. Of the four cases, three two involve his questionable acts about his attitude towards the 2020 presidential poll verdict. Though he vacated the White House at the last minute on January 20, 2021 and did not attend the inaugural of President Joe Biden, he had been holding on to the view that he did not lose the election, and that it was stolen by Biden and the Democrats.

Trump is basically questioning the well-established American electoral process for the churlish reason that he did not win the election in November 2020. And two of his acts, one in his attempt to arm-twist Georgia officials to overturn the verdict, and the other inciting the mob to attack Capitol and force then Vice President Mike Pence not to ratify the election document, show that he would go to extreme ends when things are not going in his favour. This is the behaviour of a self-willed dictatorial type, who will not accept a democratic verdict. But the paradox is that his supporters continue to back him vigorously and they happen to be in significant numbers, capable of tilting the Republican nomination in Trump’s favour. This could only mean that the fault-line in American democracy is quite sharp, that there are enough number of American voters who seem to believe the Trump version and they are willing to support him. It is evident that many of the American voters are dissatisfied with American liberal democracy as it stands, and they are willing to support someone like Trump who would undo the established traditions.

It is not a strange phenomenon in America that every once in a while a populist comes along who shakes rather violently the American political paradigm. Trump is that populist who makes his appearance in American politics and he seems to threaten the very foundations of American institutional democracy. Trump places the Republican party in a quandary. Though the November 2022 mid-term Congressional elections showed that many of the candidates endorsed lost. But many Republicans seem to believe that Trump’s populism could win them their own elections in the next round. The party is unable to get rid of Trump’s stranglehold as it were though there are enough Republicans who believe that Trump is not good for the party, and that he is not good for America. But the dissenting Republicans are in a minority.