‘Trump’s unelectability will be palpable by the time the (Republican) Party chooses. We all know that he’s much more likely to lose the White House than anybody else running for President,’ said former Republican House Speaker, Paul Ryan.
It’s been a terrible week for former President Donald Trump. On Monday, the House Select Committee released their report on the events of 6 January last year, in which they recommended that Trump should face criminal charges. Then on Tuesday the House Ways and Means Committee voted to make public Trump’s tax returns, which will show how he avoided paying taxes for many years and fooled the American public. The coming months will see Donald Trump facing a plethora of criminal investigations and, following the catastrophic results of the recent midterms for which he is largely blamed, he is now politically vulnerable. Especially as the Governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis is breathing down his neck for the Republican nomination.
But first, listen to the words of Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney in her blistering speech against Trump on Monday during the final meeting of the House Select Committee investigating the 6 January Capitol riots. “This was an utter moral failure and a clear dereliction of duty, the first time an American President refused his constitutional duty to transfer power peacefully to the next,” she claimed. Then, referring to the tens of millions of Americans who had been persuaded by President Trump that the 2020 election was stolen by “overwhelming fraud”, Cheney said that “we also knew this was flatly false. Dozens of state and federal judges have addressed and resolved all manner of allegations about the election.”
“Our legal system functioned as it should, but our President would not accept the outcome”, continued Cheney. “Among the most shameful of this committee’s findings was that President Trump sat in the dining room of the Oval office watching on television for hours the violent riot at the Capitol. He would not issue a public statement instructing his supporters to disperse and leave the capitol, despite urgent pleas from his White House staff and dozens of others to do so,” added Ms Cheney. “No man who would behave that way at that moment in time can ever serve in any position in our nation again. He is unfit for office,” she concluded.
After one of the most exhaustive and aggressive congressional probes in memory, with more than 1,000 interviews conducted and a million documents examined, the nine-member panel, consisting of seven Democrats and two Republicans, recommended that criminal charges be made against Trump and those associates who helped him launch a wide-ranging pressure campaign to try to overturn his loss in the 2020 presidential election. The charges include conspiracy to defraud the United States; obstructing an official proceeding (the certification of Joe Biden’s election victory); conspiracy to make a false statement; and inciting or assisting an insurrection. Although it’s now the US Department of Justice’s responsibility to decide whether or not to prosecute Donald Trump, the committee chair, Democrat Bennie Thompson, claimed that “we have every confidence that the work of this committee will help provide the road map to justice”.
Trump, who routinely reiterates discredited claims that the 2020 election was stolen and should be invalidated, a constitutional impossibility, spent last weekend railing against the select committee, which he described in his usual elegant way as a group of “misfits” and “thugs”.
The DOJ has yet to bring any charges against Trump, although it is already conducting two probes against him for his involvement in 6 January and his handling of classified documents he kept at Mar-a Lago after leaving the White House early last year. An FBI raid of Trump’s Florida residence in August had discovered thousands of pages of government documents, more than 100 of which were marked classified or highly classified. The DOJ is also investigating Trump’s possible obstruction of justice in connection with efforts by federal authorities to recover these documents. A US appeals court on 1 December also dealt a blow to Trump, reversing a judge’s appointment of an independent arbiter to vet the documents seized by the FBI in the August raid, thus allowing all of the documents to be used in a criminal investigation of the former President.
As if this wasn’t enough, early this month the first significant legal blow on the Trump business empire was landed, with a criminal conviction of 17 counts of tax fraud, grand larceny and falsifying business records against two corporate entities that bear the Trump name. The four-week trial provided an unflattering glimpse into the inner workings of the real estate empire that helped Trump amass wealth, fame and political clout.
October next year will see the start of a trial in which the New York Attorney General, Letitia James, will allege that Donald Trump, three of his adult children and the Trump organisation have been involved in expansive fraud lasting over a decade. James alleges the fraud touched all aspects of the Trump business, including its properties and golf courses. According to the lawsuit, the Trump Organisation deceived lenders, insurers and tax authorities by inflating the values of properties using misleading appraisals. Trump has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.
Then there’s the claim by prominent magazine columnist, E. Jean Carroll, that Donald Trump allegedly raped her in a New York department store dressing room in the mid-1990s and defamed her when he denied the rape, saying that she was “not his type”. The judge overseeing the lawsuit has set a trial for early February next year. Trump’s attitude to women was exposed in a 2005 recording, which he thought was a private conversation, released in 2016. “You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful women—I just start kissing them,” he said in the now-infamous Access Hollywood recording. “It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait.” He then boasted of the norms of being a famous man: “They let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the p***y.” It’s no wonder that over the past twenty years or so, dozens of women have come forward accusing Trump of sexual misconduct, which he has always vehemently denied. Despite all this, his most faithful voters have always been white born-again Evangelicals and Catholics.
With all this baggage, will Donald Trump be the Republican Party’s nominee in the 2024 election? “I don’t think so,” said former Republican House Speaker, Paul Ryan recently. “Trump’s unelectability will be palpable by the time the Party chooses. We all know that he’s much more likely to lose the White House than anybody else running for President on our side of the aisle, so why should we want to go with that?’, said the lawmaker from Wisconsin. Former Republican Congressman Carlos Curbelo from Florida agrees: “The end is near for former President Donald Trump. He is in deep trouble as criminal referrals mount up,” he said on a morning TV show last Sunday.
During the recent mid-term elections, Donald Trump received a blow when he was publicly criticised by the Fox News chairman, Rupert Murdoch, for his backward-looking obsession with 2020. “A political loser”, Murdoch warned. As it turned out, the newspaper entrepreneur was prophetic. Election denial, as the results clearly illustrated, is not a winner. Looking to past grievances rather than the future has never been a winner in American politics. But Trump is unrepentant and is determined to stay the course, results be damned. He has repeated his lies over and over again, and it’s likely that he always will.
Murdoch’s media empire, once his biggest supporter, embarked on a brutal campaign hitting Trump. The New York Post, Murdoch’s tabloid and formerly one of Trump’s biggest boosters, savaged him with a cover depicting him as “Trumpty Dumpty”. The editorial in Murdoch’s flagship Wall Street Journal asserted flatly after the mid-terms: “Trump is the Republican Party’s biggest loser.” On Fox TV, Republican guests blamed him for defeats in key races. And the network captioned him with headlines such as “Democrats See Trump as Easier to Beat”, which ran for hours before Trump’s announcement that he would stand again.
With so much imminent litigation and the loss of a loyal press, it’s hard to see how Donald Trump could be selected again as the Republican candidate. We are witnessing the end of Donald Trump.
But then, the irrepressible Trump could well paraphrase Mark Twain’s famous quote on seeing reports of his demise in the newspapers: “Reports of my (political) death are greatly exaggerated.”
John Dobson is a former British diplomat, who also worked in UK Prime Minister John Major’s office between 1995 and 1998. He is currently Visiting Fellow at the University of Plymouth.