Donald Trump: From 'lock her up' to 'lock him up'

Donald Trump finally appears to be having his comeuppance. For a man who egged his fans on into raising the crude slogan 'Lock her up' against Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election campaign, it was a dramatic climb-down when on Tuesday he walked into the New York District Attorney's office to be arraigned on 34 charges of criminality. 

'Lock her up' had somehow mutated, for his detractors, into 'Lock him up.'

The former US President was subjected to fingerprinting and had the charges against him read out in court. There was nothing to suggest that he was being treated as an ex-occupant of the White House at the DA's office. He was dealt with like any other person accused of committing a felony and given to understand that his trial was up ahead. 

It is, of course, too early to predict whether or not Trump will be convicted. The trial will not commence until next year, at which time he may well be running once again for the Republican presidential nomination.

On a larger scale, Trump has in these past seven years brought American politics to lows never before imagined. With his fanatical supporters unwilling to abandon him and instead actually believing even now that he is the future, Trump continues to muddy the waters in a deliberate exhibition of defiance and an absence of ethics. 

He did not flinch in 2016 from hurling abuse at his rivals for the Republican nomination for President. He was crude enough to bring to a debate with Hillary Clinton some women who had earlier been sexually linked with Bill Clinton. It did not matter to Trump that his own sexual proclivities had shocked America, that he had boasted of grabbing women by their genitals publicly on television.

Questions have always swirled around the truth or otherwise of Trump's victory in the 2016 election. A finger of suspicion has always been pointed at Russian President Putin, for the feeling has never gone away that Moscow had a hand in the manipulation of the vote against Hillary Clinton. 

And speaking of Russia, Trump had no compunction in venting his anger at the Obamas. On his own trip to Russia (and that was before he became President), Trump allegedly had two disreputable young Russian women spoil the bed in the hotel room where the Obamas had stayed earlier. For years Trump peddled the notion that Barack Obama had not been born an American. Obama producing his birth certificate silenced Trump.

Donald Trump has not been averse to maligning the good men of American politics. 

He stooped low, to condemn the war hero and leading politician John McCain for being captured in battle by the North Vietnamese. As President, Trump put unethical pressure on Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelensky to dig up dirt about Joe Biden's links with Kyiv. He tore up the climate deal and went into aggressive mode against Iran. 

Uneducated in geopolitics, he naively went ahead to strike a deal with North Korea's Kim Jong Un. It did not work. In the White House, he assigned his son-in-law, far removed from diplomacy, the task of working out a diplomatic solution to the crisis in the Middle East. The mission predictably came to nothing.

Trump's misbehaviour with the media is one of the more abhorrent presidential traits in modern times. He was forever quarrelling with reporters assigned to cover the White House and at one point had the card of a CNN reporter rescinded. He was then forced to walk back on the move. 

During Covid times, he refused to accept the reality of the virus creating havoc all over America. Rather than working on the means by which the malady could be contained and rolled back, he kept blaming China for the virus. 

The man does not read books, and has little time for newspapers. He remains glued to television and to his mobile, the latter the instrument for the many times he dismissed those serving in his administration. 

On his inauguration day in 2017, he delivered a speech which spoke of carnage in America. At the end of it, he went all-out to peddle the fiction that the crowd at his inaugural had been the largest in American history. When it was made clear to him by the media that the crowds at the Obama inaugural in 2009 had exceeded his by miles, he had little to say in response.

Trump appointed people to his administration and to his staff with alacrity. With equal briskness, he dismissed them or they left of their own accord. He never had conversations with people. He shouted at them or talked down to them, keeping them in a state of fear. 

Those who did not like him or stopped liking him kept quiet, for if they spoke out they would likely be subjected to abuse on his Twitter handle. His Vice President Mike Pence and his cabinet members were fawning over people around him. Not one of them could demonstrate the freedom to assert her/his personality.

Donald Trump's refusal to acknowledge his defeat by Joe Biden in 2020 was a shame for all of America. His moving the courts in a number of states to have them invalidate Biden's victory and their refusal to do so was a slap in the face for him. 

But he was not ashamed at all, as a horrified world so clearly saw the way he instigated his supporters to storm the Capitol on 6 January 2021. He was angry that his plan to cling to power did not work, that Vice President Pence went ahead, in line with the rules, to certify Biden's election and therefore his own defeat.

The 'gentlemanly' has not been part of the Trump psyche. His bitterness at losing in November 2020 and then not being able to turn the loss into an improbable triumph manifested itself when he refused to attend Joe Biden's inauguration as President. It was a convention he broke with and was not sorry about it. He has been twice impeached but has not been contrite about the reasons that led to the impeachment.

Syed Badrul Ahsan. Sketch/TBS

Little or nothing has been presidential about Donald Trump. Demagoguery is his style, far removed from the urbanity of the Presidents who came before him. That is a reason why his predecessors --- Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama --- have always kept him at arm's length. They do not meet him or speak to him. The doors of the presidential club have remained shut for him.

And yet the Republican Party, whose politicians have turned the enlightened debate into outrageous partisanship, might give Trump a chance at the presidency again. It will be a bad move. It will be worse if Trump gets back into the White House. American democracy will then have hit absolute rock bottom.