Though I often write about Trump in the U.S., I generally avoid that subject here because Trump is so profoundly misunderstood and discreditable motives are often imputed to me. I am generally supportive of him despite his infelicities, because I believe the United States was terribly misgoverned in the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama years and in policy terms Trump was a very effective and successful president and will probably be so again. He was also a very congenial business associate and cordial acquaintance and we have long shared, from experience, a dislike of the ability of American prosecutors to abuse the plea-bargain system, to extort and suborn false inculpatory evidence with impunity and grant immunity from perjury charges to “cooperating witnesses,” as they confirm Lord Acton’s famous aphorism that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
I will write no more today about his record as president. What an astonished world is watching is a double drama. It is the predictable conjunction of the irresistible political temptation in the United States to criminalize policy differences with the cold terror of the OBushinton establishment which misgoverned the country for over 20 years, that the ultimate political outsider they thought they had dispatched is almost the presumptive next president, unless they can derail him by manipulating the rancidly corrupt American criminal justice system. The first half of the drama is the now familiar technique of trying to destroy an American politician by prosecutorial abuse and the second is the spectacle of a political establishment that retains the energy to defend itself fiercely, but is so paranoid and cowardly that its methods are finally provoking the puritanical conscience of America. That conscience is invisible most of the time, under the endless venality, hyperbole, coarseness, and hucksterism of the American system. But at a certain point, that profound attachment to the American mythos of truth and virtue always returns to protect America from the less salubrious traits of its nature.--
More...
