Never before has the United States had so dysfunctional an administration. But that is just a bad record and the incumbent was defeated in a Presidential election and denied a second term by a majority of voters, by a margin of six million. The outgoing President also lost in the Electoral College by a convincing margin. The two candidates each won 25 States. Each gained a record number of votes. So far, so good. Democracy is alive and well in the USA.
Then Trump starts declaring not only that he won, but by a landslide. He refuses to concede. He accuses the democrats of cheating with fraudulent votes. His lawyers mount sixty lawsuits all across America and lose every single one. The Supreme Court refuses to intervene. The reasons for this universal rejection of the legal challenges to the outcome of a meticulously observed and monitored national election are actually just one. Not a single scrap of credible evidence was presented to back up these wild claims, by anyone, anywhere.
But Trump continued and continues still, to pedal and promote preposterous lies which not only seek to undermine confidence in America’s democratic processes, they also cause incredulity across the world. It does not end there. No. He holds a rally of his supporters outside the White House and incites them to march on the Capitol when Congress is sitting and size it in an violent unprecedented in even America’s violent history. His defence is Free Speech.
If you believe in that absolute interpretation of this basic freedom, no matter the consequences, you will want his Impeachment Trial to end in acquittal or not to happen at all. If you believe that with power comes responsibility, you will want Trump to be prosecuted by every means available and to be banished from holding public office for life.
Either way it was the whole event of this challenged election, which happened, is on the historical record and will never go away, which has done huge and lasting damage to the world standing of the United States. There is just too much that is not a road other democracies want to follow. The image is tarnished forever. It may be polished up and the ruptures in the architecture of the Union may be repaired for the moment, but they are too fundamental to resolve.
Soon or later they will bust open again.