The United States is lurching towards civil war
When the news of the Trump verdict came on the car radio, I almost had to pull over. My thought was: “This is Fort Sumter.” Just as when the South decided to shell a Northern-held fort in 1861, it felt like the no-turning-back, first shot fired in an inevitable civil war.
Why was I so shocked? We’ve known this was coming for weeks and the trials of Donald J Trump have barely moved the polls. But the American public has always said a conviction is important, for it changes the nature of the election.
Two horrible things can be true at once. Trump governed intemperately, lost the 2020 election, refused to concede and, at the very least, was the inspiration for an insurrection on January 6, 2021.
But it’s also accurate to say he’s been the target of a conspiracy to deny him office. The Democrats had every chance to nominate a competent alternative in 2020. Instead they chose Joe Biden, a zombie who they couldn’t persuade to stand aside in 2024. Far from uniting the country, he has put Trump back into contention.
Uncertain they could beat him at the ballot box, the Democrats turned to the courts, attacking every conceivable aspect of his career – from sex to business to his mishandling of White House paperwork – across several states. The strategy was absurd. It’s usually reserved for gangsters like Al Capone.
So, no, I wasn’t psychologically prepared for a conviction in New York because the case should never have been brought; tampering business records shouldn’t have been linked to election influence; and Stormy Daniels should never have given testimony irrelevant to the case.
It all seemed so preposterous. Legal experts now say it’s highly unlikely that the sentence, to be handed down on July 11, will include prison – but if prison is possible, I’d put money on it happening. It’s clear that the goal of this exercise isn’t to prove the banal point that no one is above the law. It is to stop Trump serving another full term.
His campaign won’t end; he might wind up running for president while being barred from voting. Trump has pledged to appeal: if he makes it to the White House, he cannot then pardon himself as this is a state case, not federal. By that point, Ms Daniels will be the least of his problems anyway. Three fresh criminal trials will probably have started. Trump is hoping the Supreme Court will excuse him from one; his powers of presidential self-pardon will be tested in the others.
Either way, given how easy it was to convict him in New York on such silly charges, we can expect him to face ongoing, aggressive legal jeopardy.
In short, the November election is crystalised in the mind as not about jobs or war, but a referendum on whether or not Trump should be in prison. Whatever the outcome, America will lose. Either it gets a president with a rap sheet, which would be a national humiliation, or Trump is defeated, cries fraud, does time and there is violence from his supporters. Those who think you can restore normalcy by locking him up are deluded.
There was already a riot on January 6, which cast minds back to the worst of the 1960s or the racist Red Summer of 1919. Four presidents have previously been assassinated. White supremacists have blown up buildings and shot school kids.
By comparing 2024 to the civil war of 1861-65, I risk not only hyperbole but sacrilege, for the great cause of slavery abolition is absent – and the conflict is more difficult to define than Confederate v Union. But it is rural v urban, blue-collar v educated, Christian v secular, with issues – such as abortion or immigration – that determine identity and defy compromise. The two parts of the nation hate each other.
Blame Trump for that, fine. But the Democrats have raised the stakes by calling him a wannabe dictator, implying that a second term would mark the end of the republic. And by now labelling him as a criminal, they’ve put him totally beyond the pale.
Why there’s this special hate for him escapes me. The deadliest thing a president can do is go to war, yet Trump avoided it – while George W Bush declared two, killed millions, and is apparently the acceptable face of the Republican Party. Reality is less important than perception. Trump’s people attack Biden as a far-Left failure, yet he’s copying Trump’s policies at the border and the economy is going well.
An irrationality is entering Western politics. A recent movie by Alex Garland, Civil War, depicts a United States torn into several factions – and has been criticised for failing to say how the conflict started. But the fight is the point. All our mindless anger has to go somewhere, looking for the release valve of sanctioned violence, directed by the logic of wild rhetoric. In the 1850s, America witnessed prophetic killing at John Brown’s raid or Bleeding Kansas, but it was the election of 1860 that triggered all-out war – because the South believed Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln was the devil and his victory an existential threat.
Lincoln would have despised Trump, but also recognised in the present danger the death-wish that has haunted his country since its birth. Abe once observed that a country so blessed by geography and talent could never be conquered by outsiders. “As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
