Hello Donald my old friend, I’ve come to talk with you again

There are many obnoxious human beings in all walks of life, and of all religious, social and political persuasions. Donald Trump is, in my opinion, one of them. He’s also a special case for many reasons, though not because he is or should be above the law.

He’s special because of his malign influence over the world’s most powerful country. Over the past decade he has channeled much of the hatred and envy festering across the United States and amplified it with a witches brew of disinformation and a naked appeal to the worst instincts of his followers. If he had remained an eccentric billionaire from New York, he would deserve sympathy for his obvious mental illness.

But as a former and possible future president, he has dragged the rest of the world into his endless psychodrama. I’ve written plenty about him in the past and I was hoping that I wouldn’t want to again. He’s the reason why since 2016 I have not visited the United States. I doubt if I’ll visit again.

He’s the reason why an American friend of mine recently described his successor as the worst president in American history. Really? Worse than Warren Harding, Ulysses S Grant, Andrew Johnson and James Buchanan? Thus has Trump distorted the perception of those who have previously held relatively temperate opinions.

He’s the reason why political rhetoric, in my country as well as his, has become a battle between best and worst, between good and evil with no room for nuance in between.

And now he’s been indicted for the first but likely not the last time thanks to one of the many squalid episodes in his life. Will he get a fair trial in this and future prosecutions? Will his chances of election remain unscathed? I haven’t a clue. The US justice system is a dense and impenetrable jungle. These cases may drag on for years.

One can only hope that the US electorate tires of his relentless attention-seeking and disposes of him forever, even if the courts are unable to do so.

Sadly, even if this is the beginning of the end of Trump, the poison he’s injected will continue to pollute the politics of his own country – and by extension of the world – for some time to come. The departure of one malevolent influence potentially makes room for another. And we still have plenty of others, not restrained by their political systems as Trump has been, to worry about.

You could argue that if Trump hadn’t existed, it would have been necessary to invent him. That he was a symptom, not a cause. A useful idiot, perhaps. That may be. But though many might disagree with me, I for one would be delighted to see him shuffle off the stage, because although he may not be a genocidal tyrant or a ruthless oppressor of his people, he has tarnished the reputation of a country of which I’ve always been more than fond and set a baleful example both to demagogues and to their gullible supporters far beyond America’s shores.

It’s not good riddance yet. But if a New York jury brings that day closer, then all well and good, even if his loyal base howls with outrage like a child deprived of its comfort blanket.

In the movie The Fall of the Roman Empire, a wealthy noble, Didius Julianus, buys the throne in an auction held by the Praetorian guard, who have just killed his predecessor. The narrator solemnly intones that “a great empire is not conquered from without, but until it has destroyed itself from within.

As Trump’s followers invent all kinds of specious reasons why the law shouldn’t apply to him, what would that narrator have said about America in 2023, I wonder?