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American political conflicts increasingly resemble the power struggles that are routinely visible in banana republics. The unprecedented indictments of Donald Trump in New York and Florida portend a future marred by lawfare as Democrats seek to use the justice system as a means of ensuring political supremacy and Republicans respond in kind.
The Democrats want to permanently remove Trump from the political scene by locking him behind bars for the rest of his life.
In American politics, involvement in a sexual scandal was typically enough to remove a prominent politician from power, as in the cases of former Senator Al Franken, former members of Congress Blake Farenthold, John Conyers, Tim Murphy, and Anthony Weiner, and New York Governors Elliott Spitzer and Andrew Cuomo, to mention but a few.
Not willing to let an opportunity pass, the Democrats tried to derail Trump’s first presidential campaign by enveloping him in a sex scandal involving lurid stories of relations with Moscow prostitutes gleaned from the discredited Steele dossier. The attempt failed. Trump went on to defeat the miserable warmonger Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, a crime for which he would never be forgiven.
Next, supported uncritically by their friends at the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other corporate news outlets, the Democrats and operatives in the National Security Autocracy manufactured the Russiagate scandal to delegitimize the Trump presidency. Results of the Mueller investigation released on April 18, 2019, failed to establish evidence of electoral collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians, imposing yet another failure upon the party whose symbol is a jackass. The report of Special Council John Durham, published in May 2023, demolishes the Russiagate fiction categorically.
Undeterred, the Congressional Democrats mounted two attempts at impeachment, the first to remove him from office and the second to ensure he could never become president again. Both Senate trials ended in acquittals.
Now, becoming increasingly desperate, they go to court. A Democratic District Attorney in Manhattan and a Special Counsel appointed by a Democratic U.S. Attorney General have leveled charges of violation of campaign finance (hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels) and unauthorized possession and conspiracy to withhold classified documents (stored at the Mar-a-Lago Palm Beach estate) against Trump. Indictments for election interference in the State of Georgia and incitement to insurrection in Washington, D.C., after the 2020 presidential election are almost sure to follow.
Like self-righteous and narrow-minded Lilliputians, the Democrats hope to ensnare the ever-menacing Trump in so many legal ropes that he will be eliminated as a political opponent, one who is almost certain to defeat them in 2024.
The Democrats are no doubt aware that such strategies have proven wildly successful in the Global South.
Brazil’s left-wing political leader Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was eliminated as a candidate for president by the country’s right-wing in 2017, one year before a 2018 election where he hoped to win another term in office, having previously served from 2003 through 2010. He was investigated, indicted, tried, and convicted in a corruption scandal. Lula was sentenced to 12 years in prison. He was later exonerated by the Brazilian Supreme Court and released from jail. He serves as Brazil’s current president, having won the election in 2022 against the Trump-supported Jair Bolsonaro, proving once again that history is replete with savage ironies.
Lula’s successor as president in 2011 was Dilma Rousseff, who, not coincidentally, was removed from power through impeachment in 2016 as she sought to continue his policies of fighting poverty and social injustice. The charge against Rousseff was, once again, corruption. Rousseff’s successor, Michel Termer, paved the way for extreme-right President Bolsonaro, who implemented the neoliberal agenda with a vengeance, much to the delight of the Brazilian rich and their American counterparts.
The removal of Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff from power constituted judicial coup d’états of working-class presidents. Both leaders were innocent of the corruption charges leveled against them. Both coups were fully approved in the United States.
Christina Fernandez de Kirchner is another example of a left-wing political leader who, along with her husband Nestor, opposed the rape of their country by the International Monetary Fund by repudiating Argentina’s debt to the parasitical financial institution. President of Argentina from 2007 to 2015, then Vice-President in 2019, Christina Kirchner was convicted of corruption charges in December 2022, sentenced to 6 years in prison, and forbidden to hold public office by what she contended was a parallel state led by a judicial mafia. She was, in effect, removed from power in a judicial coup d’état after having survived an assassination attempt in March 2022.
The right-wing in America is getting a small taste of its own bitter imperial medicine as the political struggle for supremacy is rotting the core of power at the center of empire. It should not be forgotten that the Trump regime tried and failed to engineer a coup d’état in Venezuela by replacing leftist President Nicolas Maduro with a right-wing nonentity, Juan Guaido, in 2018. The chickens, as Malcolm X would say, are coming home to roost.
In prosecuting Trump, the Democrats claim to be supporting democracy and the rule of law, neither of which they have done at home or abroad for over a century, dating back to World War I and the passage of the Espionage Act, the notorious piece of legislation used as a tool of political repression in the cases of Eugene Debts, Daniel Ellsberg, Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden.
The irony is that if the Democrats actually respected democracy and legality, Bernie Sanders would have been their party’s nominee in 2016 and 2020 and would have beaten Trump twice, as he spoke convincingly of the need to alleviate the economic misery of the American people. But Sanders’ support for a Keynesian New Deal in an era of neoliberal economics was not acceptable to the members of the party establishment, who serve the American ruling class no less so than their Republican counterparts. Hence, Bernie Sanders was reduced to the role of pied piper for the Democratic Party of American imperialism, an ignominious position he occupies today.
Having no substantive policy differences with mainstream Republicans on matters of concern to Wall Street and corporate America, the Democrats want to jail their leading political opponent, a routine practice in banana republics. Leaders of the Republican Party would be delighted to have Trump out of their way but would never say so for fear of alienating the party’s voting base.
The plain fact is that Trump is not being indicted for the illegalities he should be indicted for, namely, his role in perpetrating the crimes of empire. Then again, how could he when his accusers are equally guilty of conspiring to commit the same crimes.
What crimes?
Trump’s support for the aforementioned coup attempt and associated economic sanctions in Venezuela, which have cost the lives of 40,000 of its citizens and driven thousands into exile as impoverished migrants, thereby constituting a form of collective punishment of the population. Biden has eased oil sanctions on Venezuela contingent upon the Maduro government’s acceptance of democracy, meaning, legitimization of the right-wing opposition.
Trump’s missile strikes, bombing campaign, and military occupation of Syria, including the theft of its oil. The military interventions conducted under the pretext of fighting ISIS, which cost thousands of Syrian lives, amount to war crimes. Biden bombed Syria and currently supports the continuation of the military occupation.
Trump’s relocation of the American embassy to Jerusalem and support for the Zionist State’s annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights and continued occupation and brutalization of Palestine constitute crimes against humanity. Biden has not reversed Trump’s policies toward Israel and vocally supports the apartheid state and its occupation of Palestine.
Trump’s withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear agreement with Iran, the imposition of draconian sanctions, and the assassination of General Qassem Soleimani constitute crimes against peace and war crimes. Biden refuses to remove Trump’s classification of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a “terrorist organization,” lift Trump’s crippling sanctions, or reinstate Obama’s nuclear agreement.
Trump’s delivery of lethal military aid to Ukraine and the expansion of economic sanctions on Russia are crimes against peace. Biden has dramatically escalated Ukrainian aid and Russian sanctions into a full-blown proxy war with Russia.
Trump is an irrepressible con artist who stumbled into the presidency courtesy of a Democratic Party that abandoned its principal voting base: the American working class. Although he serves the ruling class faithfully, as all presidents do, his fake right-wing populist rhetoric and quirky behavior have destabilized plutocratic rule, opened large fissures in consensus politics, and polarized the electorate in a way not seen in modern times.
For example, he violated political etiquette by exposing George W. Bush’s lies that led to the Iraq war in a televised primary debate with the imbecile’s brother, Jeb. He threatened to send Hillary Clinton to jail for the destruction of 33,000 emails held on a private server in her home during a nationally televised presidential debate. He routinely refers to the corporate media, particularly the New York Times, Washington Post, and CNN, as fake news. He refused to acknowledge the results of the 2020 presidential election and did not attend Biden’s inauguration, repeating the contention that the election was stolen. Most recently and significantly, Trump has pledged to end the Ukraine proxy war and forge a diplomatic settlement with Russia, thus potentially averting a nuclear war, a prospect the fanatical Biden regime seems determined to provoke.
Of course, what Trump says and what Trump does are two different things, but the salient point is that he says them and he names the names, like that of warmonger Victoria Nuland, and that is not allowed in a permanent war economy run by neoconservatives.
Furthermore, Washington displays a spectacle of venal corruption. Disgust with politicians, compounded by a loss of confidence in U.S. elections and the justice system, has created a tinderbox of smoldering discontent in a nation further divided by the Trump indictments.
Special Counsel Jack Smith’s justification for the federal indictment of Trump, to wit: “Adherence to the rule of law is a bedrock principle of the Department of Justice, and our nation’s commitment to the rule of law sets an example for the world. We have one set of laws in this country, and they apply to everyone,” is a farcical assertion given U.S. imperialism’s lawless conduct around the world, not to mention the unindicted corrupt behavior of Trump contemporaries, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and the “big guy’s” son, Hunter. Smith’s hypocritical proclamation is one that is sure to enrage followers of the orange icon as well as fair-minded citizens who oppose the dual system of justice that prevails in America.
The specter of a violent reaction to a Trump imprisonment involving political assassination or armed revolt is a real possibility in a country that hosts a sizeable and well-armed pro-Trump right-wing militia movement that includes many ex-military and police adherents.
Conversely, a Trump legal victory in the courts does not preclude a violent resolution to the contradictions inherent in a right-wing political movement whose leader uses fake populist rhetoric to ensure his political ascendency in the face of establishment opposition.
The threat of political violence, perpetrated by the state or by an individual, is particularly grave in a country with an infamous history of attempted assassinations of its presidents as well as contenders for the nation’s highest office. Some were successful, some were not. Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, George Wallace, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan come immediately to the studious mind.
By indicting Trump, the Democrats are playing with fire. The result may be incendiary, thereby highlighting the need for progressive opposition to heightening political reaction and two-party plutocratic rule in the American banana republic.
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Donald Monaco is a writer and political analyst who lives in Brooklyn, New York. He received his Master’s Degree in Education from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1979 and was radicalized by the Vietnam War. He writes from an anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist perspective. His most recent book is titled, The Politics of Empire, and is available at amazon.com.
He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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