When it comes to American presidents, I thought I’d seen it all. As a boy in 1974, I watched Richard Nixon give a defiant victory wave as he entered a helicopter on the White House lawn having been forced to resign over the Watergate scandal.
His replacement, Gerald Ford, survived two assassination attempts a year after taking office; in both cases the assassins' bullets missed. President Ronald Reagan was less lucky being shot live on television; thankfully, the old cowboy survived. In 1998 I saw Bill Clinton deny he’d "ever had sexual relations with that woman, Ms Lewinsky" only to subsequently give a groveling admission that he had lied.
In 2016, facing down odds of 100/1 against, Donald Trump managed to win the presidency. Failing to get re-elected in 2020, the truculent Trump refused to accept his defeat which led to the storming of Capitol Hill by his ‘MAGA’ supporters in 2021. Yet his indictment on Tuesday trumps all that went before.
To watch him do the perp walk into court to have his fingerprints taken was surreal. Trump becomes the first president in US history to be indicted of a crime and while America’s founding fathers exhibited almost preternatural foresight, a criminal president was something even they couldn’t foresee.
Adding to the madness is that fact ‘the Donald’ stands every chance of using his present difficulties as electoral propellant in his 2024 presidential campaign. Trump seemingly hasn’t got seven but 70 lives, having traversed a lifetime littered by scandal and litigation.
Any one of his many financial or sexual misdemeanors would have buried any other presidential candidate, which made me wonder what 1988 frontrunner Gary Hart must be feeling. A shoo-in for the Democratic nomination, his campaign was scuppered in 1987 when journalists discovered his extramarital affair with Donna Rice. Mr Hart was the US Special Envoy to NI from 2014-17, the US equivalent of being sent to Siberia.
The journalistic justification for digging into the personal life of candidates such as Hart was that it spoke to their character. Trump’s character has been clear for decades, yet he still managed to get 62 per cent of the American electorate to vote for him in 2016. Does this mean ‘character’ is of less importance to the electorate, or could it be that Trump is an aberration and symptom of a nation divided, not only politically but also socially, economically and racially?
Over the last decade there’s been a distinct political shift worldwide towards right-wing populist politics. In France, Marine Le Pen of the far-right National Rally party has steadily grown in strength while in Russia, Vladimir Putin has become that nation's de facto Tsar. Putin was supported by Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán who railed against what he called "illiberal democracy". In the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte rose to power; in South America, ex-military officer Jair Bolsonaro’s disastrous handling of the Covid crisis led to 680k deaths; and closer to home we had our own version with the great dissembler Boris Johnson and his disingenuous push for Brexit and eventual demise due to the partygate scandal.
Johnson’s acolytes in government continue to demonise asylum seekers and immigrants, this week proposing to move them on to barges off the Essex coast - this from the mother of parliaments and cradle of democracy.
Many of you reading this will no doubt be screaming, ‘what about our lot?’ I admit to needing to take the plank out of my own eye before casting it over other nations. What I will say is ‘our lot’ are more incompetent than world class despots or dictators...
Our hope of a return to sanity resides with octogenarian President Joe Biden, a man whose political career spans everything previously mentioned. President Biden won’t be attending the upcoming coronation of King Charles, sending his wife instead. When you consider his FBI code name is ‘Celtic’, this decision is hardly surprising. He will, however, attend our upcoming Good Friday Agreement commemorations.
I hope they don’t force him to jog from the helicopter when he arrives. I know they think it makes him look ‘energetic’ but he’s 80 and the grass here is still wet in April. We’ve had the grassy knoll; we don’t want the grassy slope and screams from the secret service of "Celtic's down". After all, he’s president of the the most powerful nation on earth - he shouldn’t be running to meet anyone; they should be running to meet him.
