The Democrats had a trump card in 1988. Senator for Colorado Gary Hart he had a Kennedyesque charisma, was a masterful speaker, and looked like a Hollywood actor. That allowed him to seduce Dona Rice, a stunning model. And it was that extramarital relationship and having lied to the press about its existence that, when made public, destroyed his aspirations.
The Democratic Party ended up nominating Michael Dukakis and the soulless governor of Massachusetts was defeated by George Herbert Walker Bush.
At that time, the tradition originated in the Quaker and Puritan pioneers who disembarked from the Mayflower, put the electorate’s magnifying glass on the private lives of the candidates. It was understood that if a politician was capable of deceiving his spouse, he would also be capable of deceiving his voters and the rest of the people.
But that tradition began to weaken at the dawn of the 21st century and became a double standard of the hard conservatism that Donald Trump adhered to. Millions of those who asked for Clinton’s head because of his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, forgive the New York millionaire for the accusations he accumulates for sexual harassment, his misogynist bragging and his infidelities with pornographic actresses.
It is not the only case, nor is politics the only area. Many of the Argentines who are horrified by Jey Mammon’s relationship with a minor say nothing about the relationship that Maradona had with the minor that they had given him in Cuba.
Infidelity to his wife Melania in a “touch and go” with the voluptuous Stormy Daniels is not what will prevent Trump from returning to the presidency. What could close the door of the Oval Office for him is the conviction of Tuesday the 4th for the crime he committed after bribing the actress so that she would not air the relationship to the press with a payment of 130 thousand dollars, which would have been hidden by masking the expenses of election campaign.
The crime is not in what he did with Stormy Daniels being alone, but in a derivation of what he did with her through his lawyer, Michael Cohen, to hide that extramarital affair that was about to impact the 2016 electoral campaign.
That was why he Manhattan District Grand Jury, upon evaluating the evidence presented to him by the prosecutor, he decided that there are grounds to prosecute Trump, making him the first former president to be criminally charged and convicted. He surrendered to Justice.
That decision raises disturbing possibilities. Like all presidents and former presidents, left and right, who have been prosecuted for corruption or other crimes in different countries, Trump says he is the victim of a conspiracy (in his case, from the left) to prevent him from returning to the presidency. , that is, to proscribe it. A speech in total harmony with that of Rafael Correa or Cristina Kirchner, as well as with the justifications given Benjamin Netanyahu about his onslaught on Israel’s judiciary.
The most serious thing is that the former president is trying to generate a wave of massive protests that would make the ghost that has been hovering over Israel since the beginning of the right-wing government’s onslaught against the Supreme Court hover over the American sky: the civil war.
The case that makes him prosecuted is an anecdote when compared to the most serious cases that, at some point, will also lead to criminal proceedings. For example, having put pressure on the secretary of Georgia State, Brad Raffenspergerso that he alters the scrutiny by making the 11,780 votes he needed to turn the result around and keep the fifteen voters of that state appear in any way.
The phone conversation was recorded and released by the southern state official and it is impossible not to consider it evidence of a felony.
Nor can a Democratic conspiracy be argued, because the Georgia government was Republican and Raffensperger was a recognized Trump supporter.
Even more serious is the crime of inciting the attack on the Capitol and doing nothing to stop it even when the extremely violent mob, determined to prevent the legislative certification of the ballot that gave the winner to Joe BidenI was looking for the vice president Mike Pence and the head of the lower house, Nancy Pelosi, with a lynching attitude.
Trump is already in the dock and for one of the less serious causes of those that dance around him. The Stormy Daniels Case it would be the “Trump version” of what was the tax evasion that led Al Capone to Alcatraz prison. But hard conservatism and the radical right insist on believing that everything is an invention of the “Marxist left” that “Leader Biden” to get him out of politics and “turn America over to communism.” A delusional argument but defended by millions of Republicans and members of groups that postulate white supremacy, identify patriotism with the free possession of weapons of war or adhere to fundamentalist evangelical pastors.
In the United States, the worst crimes were committed by the extreme right. The Davidians who caused the 1993 Waco massacre were an ultra-religious, ergo, ultra-conservative sect. Timothy McVeigha young fanatic of the far-right militias who accuse the federal government of being managed by the UN and “international Zionism”, planted the bomb that in 1995 destroyed the state building Murrah, in Oklahoma, killing more than a hundred and a half people.
The external attacks on North American territory also came from extreme conservatism. That was the Japanese empire that attacked Pearl Harbor and also the Al Qaeda network, author of the attack that brought terrorism to a genocidal scale with the planes that fell on 9/11 in Washington, New York and Pennsylvania.
The most criminal attacks did not come from the left. The greatest attack on American democracy came from extreme conservatism: the assault by a mob on the Capitol for which Trump will also have to answer in court.
The chapter of history that began in the Manhattan courthouse could include further attacks on democracy. Also old ghosts of American political violence. From the defendant’s bench in which he will have to sit, Trump will encourage violent groups, while he continues to describe Biden as the “agent of communism and George Soros” to destroy freedom. In other words, putting the Democratic president in the telescopic sight of potential assassins.