https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2023/03/31/could-trumps-indictment-could-work-in-his-favour/

The former president’s arrest will whip up his base – but most Americans will be turned off.

For the first time in US history, a former president will face criminal indictment. The grand jury convened by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg on Thursday voted to indict Donald Trump regarding hush money payoffs to an alleged former paramour.

Mr Trump has shattered so many norms in his political career – including being the only president to have been impeached twice and to have refused to recognise his electoral defeat and instead attempt to overturn the constitutional system to remain in power – the political and historic significance of this latest breakthrough may be lost in the shuffle. But that would be a significant mistake.

2023 had been acquiring a powerful odour of 2016 regarding Mr Trump’s latest bid for party leadership and a third consecutive Republican presidential nomination. But the indictment adds a very different dimension.

The former president reportedly welcomes the indictment and has even contemplated the televisual optics of surrendering to the traditional Manhattan “perp walk,” in which the indicted individual is paraded, handcuffed, before the media and marched into the courthouse. Cooler heads in his own camp, and certainly in Mr Bragg’s office, will undoubtedly prevail, and he is likely to have an uneventful surrender and quick processing next week.

Nonetheless, Mr Trump is undoubtedly convinced that this indictment, which he appeared to welcome in numerous statements in recent days, will strengthen him politically. And this highlights the noteworthy elements of 2023 that are arguably similar to and distinct from 2016.

Once again Mr Trump appears to be the unstoppable candidate despite obvious trepidation from party leadership. He has been consistently gaining ground against his only plausible opponent thus far, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

Mr DeSantis, who has not even announced his candidacy, has demonstrated the impossible dilemma facing Republican leaders who wish to defeat Mr Trump but feel unable to directly criticise him by name because of his deep popularity with the party faithful. So, while the former president has been criticising and mocking Mr DeSantis, the Florida governor has barely uttered Mr Trump’s name. Therefore, Mr Trump’s lead has been consistently extending.

Overt opposition to his candidacy is coming from two very weak sources. Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie is unabashed in bashing Mr Trump, but he is not exactly a potent political threat. Similarly, some programmes and hosts on Fox News Channel have proven distinctly hostile to Mr Trump, but others remain loyal. And the channel as a whole has proven more than willing to ultimately give its audience what it wants, including if that means consciously, deliberately and systematically lying to them. Again, Mr Trump has little to fear.

The Trump campaigns in 2023 and 2016 both pulled the party to the right, or at least exposed and empowered an ultra-right-wing faction that had been leaderless and largely powerless since the end of the Second World War. But in 2023 clearly Mr Trump is pulling his party in a much more dangerous direction, one overtly hostile to the American political system and democracy.

He has openly called for the “termination” of the Constitution to allow him to remain in power, has fully embraced the January 6 prisoners awaiting trial for sedition and other offences during the assault on Congress, and has vowed “retribution” against all those he feels wronged him or his followers.

Trump 2023 is considerably more radical than Trump 2016 or 2020. And he appears to be pulling the Republican Party with him, particularly in the House of Representatives. And he not only faces no significant opposition, he appears to be pulling away with the nomination at this extremely early stage with no plausible obstacle in his way.

It is into this morass that the criminal indictment comes. He has threatened “death and destruction” if he is charged with a crime, but that is empty hyperbole. Given the aftermath of January 6, only lone wolf terrorists, not furious mobs, are imaginable albeit highly unlikely.

Instead, what he hopes to do is use this indictment and other possible charges – for election tampering in Georgia And at the federal level for prolonging documents and attempting a coup – to amplify his victimhood and intensify his supporter’s hatred of the government and all major US national institutions.

There is every danger this will indeed work within the Republican Party base. But it will surely further alienate him from the suburban and swing voters who decide national elections. It is yet more good news for President Joe Biden’s re-election chances.

For far-right wing Republicans who already despise government, these probably multiple indictments and forthcoming trials will solidify rancid narratives about a non-existent corrupt “deep state” and various “rigged” systems. And it will probably spread and deepen those paranoid delusions within the party itself, including both the base and elected officials.

But as the 2000 general election and, even more, the 2022 midterms demonstrated, running on these narratives can win a lot of votes but not a lot of elections.

As for the charges themselves, the hush money payment plot doesn’t seem as strong as the Georgia election interference or January 6 coup plot cases. But Mr Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen who actually made the payments at his behest pled guilty to virtually the same charges and was sentenced to three years in prison. So, the case is clearly both precedented and plausible.

If Mr Trump and his supporters imagine that it will strengthen his image with the general American public to be put on trial for having authorised and subsidised hush money payments to an “adult film actress” for a sexual liaison, they are delusional.

It doesn’t help that Mr Trump denied any affair with Stormy Daniels on the grounds that she “wasn’t his type”. Or that he claimed he didn’t know anything about the $130,000 payment. Or that he then said that perhaps he did know about it, but never ordered Mr Cohen to make the payment, despite having secretly and allegedly unlawfully reimbursed him.

Mr Trump likely faces at least one or two more indictments in the coming months. The Republican base may rally around him, but most Americans are unlikely to be impressed with the facts of the hush money case, whatever the trial’s outcome. And Mr Trump will be remembered, on top of everything else, as the first former US president to face a major criminal indictment.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2023/03/06/email-leaks-in-the-american-media-underlie-the-absence-of-moderate-republicans/

Fox deliberately lied to its audience, but that same audience isn’t hearing anything about the emails proving it.

The US is being rocked by one of the worst political scandals in its modern history, yet the essential constituency remains blissfully unaware. The trove of Fox News emails uncovered in the lawsuit by Dominion Voting System, the election technology company, as I recently explained in these pages, reveal, apparently irrefutably, that Fox News Channel’s executives and star personalities deliberated and consciously misled their vast audience about the outcome of the 2020 election.

While privately mocking the notion that US President Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump through massive fraud, both hosts and guests insisted – and still maintain – that the outcome is in serious doubt. The rift between Republican “red” and Democratic “blue” America is being severely exacerbated as right-wing audiences remain largely unaware they have been systematically deceived.

Although this is an unparalleled media scandal, Fox has refused to cover it at all, implicitly because anything it says can still be used against it by Dominion. But that ensures that at least a large part of its own audience remains unaware of being intentionally misled, as the overwhelming evidence seems to prove.

And it’s not just Fox. Its right-wing cable television competitors – the very upstarts that Fox apparently feared could capture its market share if it did not feed its right-wing audience the disinformation they apparently believed it craved as a matter of “respect” – aren’t covering it either. Newsmax and One America News, and most major right-wing websites, are avoiding the topic altogether. In the right-wing echo chamber, only the upmarket and well-informed readers of the Wall Street Journal – also owned by News Corp, Fox News’s parent company – are being entrusted with these revelations.

This episode is not merely illustrative of the bifurcated landscapes – informational and imaginary – and presumed baseline realities, cleaving right and left America. It is deepening it considerably. A victory by Dominion is likely to be regarded as rigged and phony, much in the same way that Mr Biden’s election was, by the rank-and-file of the political right, if they ever hear of it at all.

Considerable ink has been spilt explaining the proactive ways in which political disinformation, particularly on the right, beginning with the talk radio craze of the 1980s, shattered a supposedly shared set of fundamental political reference points defined, above all, by the network evening news programmes. As channels and programming proliferated in the US, it is widely and convincingly argued, audiences have been increasingly self-selecting and self-segregating into homogenising echo chambers. The internet proved the last straw, as algorithms – which are designed to maximise user engagement by social media platforms – fed viewers increasingly shrill propaganda, rewarded with ample jolts of dopamine.

That might be a cliched narrative, but it accurately summarises what happened. And by now the US news media and audiences are divided neatly in twain. One giant camp is not only being lied to but, Fox apparently believed, is demanding to be aggressively misled as a form of twisted political representation but is not hearing anything about how and why that happened. Meanwhile, the rest of public-affairs consuming Americans are looking on in dismay.

Most analyses of how and why the Republican Party has become so extreme in recent years have focused on the takeover of the party by traditionally fringe elements. But the Fox scandal suggests that an even more significant factor has been the concomitant disappearance of liberal and even centrist Republicans.

The key inflection points were probably the failed effort to impeach former US president Bill Clinton and the “tea party” response to the election of former US president Barack Obama. The mainstream of the party leadership, and Fox News itself, enthusiastically promoted the growth of such extremism for political and financial profit, only later to discover it was and remains completely beyond their control.

They couldn’t stop the presidential nomination of Donald Trump in 2016, although they tried, and their increasingly ham-handed efforts to promote Florida Governor Ron DeSantis as an alternative to him for 2024 have yet to look any more effective.

All this created a reactionary echo chamber in which populist outbidding, pandering and absurd theatrics are automatically rewarded, so that in merely two years a talentless mediocrity such as Republican congresswomanMarjorie Taylor Greene could rise to power, prominence and prestige in the House of Representatives purely on unmatched stridency.

Because there have long been no rewards for Republican moderation, especially on Fox programmes, it now no longer exists. As the emails demonstrate, Fox ended up chasing the audience it created down an endless rabbit hole of reactionary disinformation and extremism.

Lowest common denominator appeals of the Republican right have been consistent since at least the end of the Second World War. The first is sexual and gender anxieties, currently expressed through book banning and outlandish fears of “grooming” in public schools. The second go-to is racial hysteria, now embodied in campaigns to police the teaching of history in the name of opposing Critical Race Theory.

That’s very old wine in slightly updated bottles. But what’s now missing is any discernible voice of centrism and moderation.

The contrast with the Democrats is striking. Under Mr Biden, the party centre has fended off continuous efforts by the progressive left to push the agenda too far, most recently with his pledge not to veto a Republican-led effort to overturn changes to Washington’s criminal code. And by sticking to the centre, Democrats are consistently winning.

Conventional wisdom held that only a series of dramatic political defeats could rescue the Republican Party from its freefall into ever greater extremism. But despite exactly such a cascade of debacles following 2016, no self-regulating moderation is emerging. But if Fox and its right-wing media competitors and Mr Trump and his Republican opponents insist that the 2020 vote was “stolen,” the most significant of those defeats can be dismissed as “fake news”.

In his first two years, Mr Biden accumulated legislative victories that will allow him to spend the next two years of his presidency cutting ribbons at major infrastructure and other spending projects creating new working-class jobs and opportunities. He will be making the case, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, that he’s really delivering on the renewed “greatness” Mr Trump only promised.

He’s betting Republicans can be won over through good governance despite appeals to sexual or gender phobias and cultural anxieties. The 2024 election should prove a fascinating test of Mr Biden’s theory, but only if mostRepublican voters ever learn about any of it. Don’t bet on that.