Votes do not clean up crimes
The attitude of an ex-president of the United States such as Donald Trump, who despises and rejects the action of justice because it condemns him, is totally unacceptable. Not just once, but 34 times. These are the charges against Donald Trump found guilty by a unanimous jury.
And most toxic and noxious to all is that he pretends that the crimes are erased by the election. The claim that the real trial is on 5 November with the presidential election is a perversion and a challenge to democracy, the rule of law, the separation of powers and the principle that all are equal before the law.
Yet Trump seeks to place himself as a dictatorial warlord above the law by tampering with the democratic system. And the separation of powers. A criminal is still a criminal and has to pay for his responsibilities, whatever they may be, even if millions of citizens vote for him. The ballot box does not clean up or excuse crimes. Principles, values, laws and institutions must be separated and respected as much as possible. The fascist state is the one he wants to impose in order to do what he wants, regardless of the costs, the dangers, the tension, the confrontation and the polarisation it provokes in society. Fateful and prescient film ‘Civil War’, in the United States.
Trump intends to use his authoritarian and cheap populism to avoid the action of justice, in this case for paying with money from his electoral campaign to the porn actress Stormy Daniels and hiding a sexual relationship with her so as not to harm him in the previous electoral campaign of 2016. The one who went on an extramarital spree and paid to hide it is Trump. Not the judge, not the jury, not President Biden.
Trump has already been convicted by the courts for manipulating his companies' accounts to get better credit from the banks. Therein lies Trump's biggest worry, in the feet of clay of his former economic empire, which has been greatly diminished and sustained thanks to his political career.
Among other cases, he also has to answer for his alleged involvement in the storming of the Capitol to prevent Democrat Biden's election victory and taking confidential documents from the White House to his home, among other causes. But Mr Trump's defiant, arrogant and unacceptable attitude remains because his promises and lies are accepted and supported by millions of American citizens.
The first thing Trump has done when he left the court is to ask for money, to ask for donations for his campaign and the saddest thing of all is that his website has collapsed because of the number of people who were giving him money, or at least that is what his campaign team is selling because lies and disinformation are the basis of the supposed success of Trump who is much more of an enemy to the United States, to Western countries, to liberal democracies than Vladimir Putin himself.
And the problem is that this kind of attitude is also registered in other countries. There are those who make amnesty laws on demand in order to win a handful of votes and remain in power. And then he launches a smear campaign against judges and journalists because his wife has been summoned for investigation in a case of alleged corruption and influence peddling. And, on top of that, he sits her in the front row of an election campaign rally to be cheered by his followers as if she were more a group of fans than a serious political party. But the really serious case that should demand all kinds of responsibilities is the so-called Koldo Case, the millionaire business with indecent masks in which high-ranking socialist officials are involved. The rest, however unworthy it may be, only serves to divert attention. Foreign policy is also used with the Palestinian issue and the president of Argentina as smokescreens that only show the degradation of this political class.
Principles and values, a deep crisis before the economic crisis of 2008 that we are paying dearly for. The trivialisation of everyone's day-to-day life, anything goes, total freebies, failing grades don't matter or the mobile phone so that children leave us alone. In short, it is an accumulation of many more elements that have placed us on a very dangerous slope because the populist caudillos who seek power at any price do so by confronting the people, polarising and generating tension and disqualifying the adversary and using junk propaganda that intoxicates everything. And, in the meantime, Putin is making moves, the other Chinese dictator is also making moves, and the situation in other countries is more than worrying, but above all in the United States and Spain.