Opinion | Prosecute Trump—Lock Him Up

By Philip Yeung, university teacher

PKY480@gmail.com

2023 is the year of reckoning for Donald Trump. The evil deeds Trump has done are finally coming home to roost. After years of lying about his taxes being under audit and therefore unable to be made public, he has come to the end of the road. This self-proclaimed “stable genius” is neither stable nor a genius. Instead he has been exposed to be a habitual tax cheat who paid zero taxes in 2020, and just $750 for each of 2016 and 2017. Financially, he is reduced to selling NFT digital trading cards in guises as a superhero. This is the ridiculous act of a con artist. This is the picture of a man without morals.

Legally, his jeopardies are closing in on this sociopath. The January 6 Committee has referred him to the Justice Department for four criminal charges related to the Capitol riots including fraudulently undermining due process and government functions. Now, after losing 60 court battles to challenge the legitimacy of the 2020 elections, he has outrageously called for the termination of the US constitution. In short, he wants to see the total destruction of the American democratic system. That is why his Republican nemesis Liz Cheney has declared Trump to be “unfit for any office”.

And yet, with the long arm of the law reaching into his numerous illicit business transactions, Trump, incomprehensibly, still enjoys 30% support from his Republican base. He has become the “Teflon Don” for his ability to escape personal accountability.

This is a man who is anti-science, a climate change denier, an ignorant man who suggests the injection of disinfectant to beat coronavirus and clean the lungs. Trump doesn’t read books or reports more than two pages long. He can’t spell and doesn’t know his grammar. With no interest in the nitty-gritty of government, he has the attention span of a gnat. He is a racist, a misogynist, facing a lawsuit over his alleged rape and defamation of his alleged victim’s character. People who have kept a tally of his lies have calculated that he has racked up over 30,000 falsehoods and fabrications. He insults and intimidates his opponents and weaponizes law enforcement agencies for his nefarious purposes. Yet he was once the leader of the most powerful nation on earth. Despite the litany of misdeeds, Trump still commands loyalty from one third of Republican supporters. What does this say about American democracy? That his supporters are violent political low life, cut from the same cloth. A big chunk of America is in thrall to an unhinged and uneducated man.

Make no mistake. We are witnessing the death of democracy in America. Bipartisanship is history. Trump has spawned many ugly imitators, from Kari Lake who likewise claimed election fraud after losing the Arizona governor’s race to Congressman-elect George Santos whose electoral profile is a total fabrication to Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil whose supporters advocate riots to overturn election results, much like Trump did. The Republican universe is becoming amoral, putting personal and party gains over the greater good of the country. Trump is like a cancer who is eating into the body politic. Internationally, his America First policy is a train wreck for key relationships with China and Europe. He is the bulldozer in the global order.

The prosecutorial recommendations of the January 6 riots congressional committee to the Justice Department are not legally binding. But the evidence is incontrovertible. If Trump is allowed to escape scot-free again, he might incite an encore if he loses again in 2024. And this time, he might succeed. Trump maybe a serial electoral loser, but his grip on his base is such that no rival challenger to the Republican nomination is likely to triumph over him, meaning that Trump will once again be the Republic presidential nominee, and headed to another defeat. People no longer know what the Republican Party stands for anymore. Its leaders all look the other way while Trump drives the party over the cliff. They fear his wrath more than the wrath of the almighty.

The only thing that seems to undercut Trump’s authority is the disastrous performance of the Republicans during the mid-terms. Trump’s endorsement of its candidates turned out to be the kiss of death, with most of his loyalists going down to ignominious defeat.

With its own house in total disarray and lurching from crisis to crisis, how can America still claim moral leadership of the world? America’s tech and trade war with China run counter to global stability and prosperity. Isolating the middle kingdom and using China as a whipping boy doesn’t even serve America’s own national economic interest. Clear-eyed Western leaders such as the German chancellor Olaf Scholz have warned that China’s rise does not justify isolating it and that the world must not be divided into blocs that careen into armed conflict. American exceptionalism has lost its moral justification. Splintering society into political tribes may be the American game, but breaking the world into blocs is bad for humanity. 2023 may be the year for a saner multipolar world not driven by toxic domestic political expediency. Take Trump out of the political equation and reduce America’s footprint in global affairs. There is no other path back to sanity in a post-Trump world.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.

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