Trump voters are shameful betrayers of the ideals and ambitions of democracy

We all know that Donald Trump did his level best or worst to prevent the result of the 2020 election – which he clearly lost – from being carried into effect. The published bill of indictment on which he now faces trial by jury in Washington DC is an impressive document in terms of clarity and forcefulness. It outlines the evidence that was brought before a grand jury to seek his trial on very serious counts of criminal conspiracy and fraudulent attempts to reverse the outcome of the election – but not the detailed testimonies of the witnesses.

Trump is yelling that he is being persecuted rather than prosecuted. His allies claim that the choice of trial venue – Washington DC – has been chosen to take unfair advantage of its overwhelmingly Democrat demographic. That particular complaint is baseless.

The counts in the indictment demonstrate that he choreographed the conspirators from the White House. It was from there that he urged Mike Pence to reject the slates of electors chosen in accordance with state and federal law. It was from Washington that he urged Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” sufficient votes to carry the election in that state.

It was in Washington that his plan to file bogus challenges to individual states’ results was co-ordinated by his campaign team. It was from there that he drove his lying deception – the “Stop the Steal” campaign.

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It was in Washington that Trump and his cronies co-ordinated a campaign to create alternative lists of state electors in the hope that Republican state legislatures could create doubt over the validity of the true electors whose votes would be certified by the House of Representatives in a session chaired by Mike Pence.

It was at the Ellipse park in Washington on January 6th, 2021, that he spoke to the crowd which he had assembled, telling them that they now had to “fight” to stop the steal, dishonestly assuring them that he would join them at the Capitol.

The indictment does not actually allege that he incited them to invade the Capitol itself – he was careful to throw in the vacuous suggestion that they should act peacefully for deniability’s sake. But it is still unclear how they could possibly “fight” to stop the steal, as he suggested, by some other means which did not involve Congress’s abandonment of the electoral certification process mandated by law.

The shame of all of this now lies individually with all those Americans – each and every one of them – who ignore or refuse to believe the obvious fact that Trump did his utmost to fraudulently steal the election for himself by a concerted attempt to subvert and frustrate the rule of the US constitution and the law.

Americans who want to put him back into the White House are, in my view, shameful betrayers of the ideals and ambitions of the spirit of democracy and constitutionalism which underlies its history and greatness. He is a repugnant embodiment of all that is worst in America and all that is most dangerous to democracy in the world.

Trump often uses the term “nasty” to attack women – including Hillary Clinton, Meghan Markle, Nancy Pelosi and Kamala Harris – who get in his way. The Danish premier Mette Frederiksen had described his idea that the US would buy Greenland from the Danes as “absurd”. Her refusal was dubbed “nasty” by a miffed Trump. He railed that he would not allow her to deal with the US presidency “in the way they treated us under Obama” and then petulantly cancelled an arranged state visit to Denmark.

Contrast that with how he dealt with Kim Jong-un, the North Korean tyrant. When his own insults about the “little rocket man” and his sabre-rattling achieved absolutely nothing, Trump arranged a summit where he lavished praise on Kim. Again he fell flat on his face. The North Korean threat to the US was permitted to continue to the point that its intercontinental ballistic nuclear missiles now threaten American cities, bases and those of US allied states.

Those of us in Europe should never forget his concerted attempts to damage and fragment the EU. He strongly encouraged European politicians who proposed quitting the union.

We in Ireland should ask whether a Trump presidency would have pushed the UK to resolve its Brexit difficulties along the lines of the Northern Ireland protocol and the Windsor Accord.

Is there something dark in the American psyche that accounts for the level of suspicion, fear, gullibility and hostility that could lead a great number of Americans to wish to re-elect Trump?

One way or another he is a very dangerous and, yes, nasty man. And it will take a lot more than a bill of indictment to stop him.