Before District Attorney Bragg stepped into the frame, it would have been easier for a competitor to defeat Trump, writes Prof. Madhav Das Nalapat
New York has slipped several notches down the safety ladder since Rudy Giuliani was Mayor during 1994-2001. Although a well-regarded former police officer is now holding Giuliani’s old job, robberies and murders have shot up in New York despite his efforts. New York, once an iconic city, is sliding to the depths reached by Los Angeles, a city that has become unlivable for those not wealthy.
Indeed, New York is closing in on the title of the most crime-prone metropolis in the US, if the many crimes that are by custom ignored by the police get added on to the tally. Given such a situation, it would have been reasonable to assume that District Attorney (DA) Alvin Bragg should have been spending much time on the waves of crime that are visible in New York, but the DA’s attention is instead on former President Donald J. Trump.
He has thrown almost three dozen indictments against Trump. One, details of which was leaked with the ferocity of a thunderstorm, was a payment made to an adult movie star to remain silent about her relationship with Trump during the 2016 Presidential election. Incidentally, President Biden, is still seething that Hillary Clinton lost the sprint to the Oval Office to Trump, an individual both consider to be a buffoon.
For this, Biden pinned the responsibility on Vladimir Putin, and in 2022, he finally got what he thought was a chance to humiliate the Russian leader. With the same emotionalism and lack of foresight that made President George W. Bush go after “Sad-Dam” Hussein in Iraq in 2003, Biden has turbocharged NATO’s military offensive against Putin, especially since the President of the Russian Federation launched a war against Ukraine on 24 February 2022.
Only the most gullible would believe that Putin kept information about his impending attack from Xi Jinping when the two embraced each other in Beijing just days before the Russian attack began. That list seemingly includes many of the leaders of Europe, who have been queuing up since the war started to implore Xi to get Putin to reverse course. This when the CCP supremo is the major, some would say the only, beneficiary of Putin’s war on Ukraine.
The latest pair of European leaders to make the pilgrimage to Beijing for the honour of the privilege of being ushered into the presence of Xi were Emmanuel Macron and Ursula von der Leyen. It had been assumed within the councils of NATO that the economic havoc caused by the prolonging of the Ukraine war would affect not the West but only the poorer countries, as also Russia itself. Instead, the way the war has developed has also hit consumers in the US and Europe.
Interestingly, China is visibly ensuring that Russia continues to be able to fight a long war that drains NATO of weapons, armaments the alliance may need in a future conflict in the Indo-Pacific. During World War II, the US ensured that the USSR was enabled to fight on until the German Wehrmacht got drained and defeated. Now China is assisting Russia to continue the war until NATO gets exhausted.
This would give the PLA the respite it needs to launch its plan of taking control of Taiwan. Given that Biden is paying vastly more attention to Ukraine than he is to Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Libya and the South China Sea put together, the calculation within the CMC is that the point when NATO is exhausted as a consequence of the Russia-Ukraine war will come during the third term of CCP General Secretary Xi, thereby enabling him to forcibly occupy Taiwan.
District Attorney Bragg’s team seems to have leaked information copiously about Trump and Stormy Daniels, the adult film actress. Given the conservative nature of several Republicans, it may have been assumed by Democrats that a financial transaction of the sort that the 45th President’s then lawyer Michael Cohen had with Stormy Daniels may turn several voters away from Trump and into the Biden camp.
The problem behind such reasoning is that almost nobody in Trump’s support base believes their hero to be anything other than what he has openly been all his adult life, a playboy. The Stormy Daniels indictment has instead ensured that Trump has gained on his competitors. As the Republican nominee, Trump may even choose a feisty lady of colour as his Vice-Presidential candidate, such as Nikki Haley.
The DA’s indictment has forced all his Republican competitors to revert to their pre-2021 stance of abasing themselves before Trump, a list that includes a man Trump’s backers had marked out for the hangman’s noose on 6 January 2021, Mike Pence. Over the decades, Trump had evaded prosecution for the many actions that his subordinates carried out, and it is improbable that Bragg would be able to prove in court the felony charges that he has flung at Trump.
Even if the ex-President were to be sent to prison for a while on charges that a neutral jury would be hard put to unanimously endorse beyond reasonable doubt, such travail could assure Trump’s victory in the 2024 Presidential polls. Meanwhile, his appeals would wend their way through a legal system that has been transformed in its chemistry during his four years in the White House. Before District Attorney Bragg stepped into the frame, it would have been easier for a competitor to defeat Trump. But that was before the halo of victimhood descended atop his scowling countenance.