The charges against a former Trump election aide have brought deafening cheers from the US president’s vocal opponents, whose social media disparagement of virtually everything he does now borders on the unhinged.
But truth is the first casualty of every war, not least the political civil war around President Trump, which threatens to tear the country apart. Paul Manafort, who briefly led the president’s election campaign, is simply accused of 12 instances of tax fraud, which relate to the dealings he and a business partner had with individuals in the Ukraine.
Probably more serious for the administration is the case against former Trump adviser George Papadopoulos, who has admitted he lied to the FBI, denying links with Russians who said that they possessed “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. In the hue and cry of the political elite’s hunt for Trump’s scalp, from the very moment American voters chose him as their president, little attention is being paid to the nature of the “dirt” that the Russians were apparently offering the Trump campaign.
Indeed, little attention is being paid to the sheer hypocrisy of this outrage at the idea that an outside power should have been interfering in the US democratic process. Including the 1953 overthrow of Iran’s elected prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, Washington has been interfering regularly in the democratic affairs of other countries.
As part of the Cold War, the Americans had no compunction about undermining, smearing and organizing the overthrow of foreign governments that were not deemed to be friendly to the United States or were considered too close to the then Soviet Union. Throughout South America and the Caribbean, the CIA or even US troops have acted against democratically elected states. And this has not simply been in Third World countries. The CIA funded Italy’s Christian Democrats with millions of dollars and mounted a dirty tricks campaign to besmirch the reputation of left wing opponents.
The politicians on Capitol Hill currently baying for President Trump’s blood will protest that this was all yesterday. The world and the United States have moved on. Well maybe. But this is still a country that could ride roughshod over international law and conduct its campaign of secret rendition of terrorist suspects, seizing individuals and holding them in secret camps in Europe before transferring them to the legally dubious detention center at Guantanamo Bay. And it was at Gitmo that prisoners were waterboarded and otherwise tortured to get confessions and information.
It was over another questionable election that US president Richard Nixon was brought down. Though he resigned before he could be impeached, the 1972 break-in at the Democrat party campaign headquarters in the Watergate led to two years of probes and leaks which steadily paralyzed the Nixon administration.
Those who now dream of driving Donald Trump from office should reflect that the world is arguably in a far more dangerous place than in 1972. Even allowing for the very real possibility that the destruction of another president could seriously damage the US political process itself, this is surely not the moment for the United States to pass up on its world leadership role and turn to deadly political infighting. The obsessive desire of the US political establishment to wreck Trump and his already troubled administration is not simply both boring and unedifying, it is also surely downright dangerous.
