The Arraignment of Donald J. Trump by the Coward Jack Smith

Yesterday, while I was on the train to Leipzig, former US President Donald J. Trump was arraigned in Washington D.C. on four federal charges of conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 election. It is his third round of criminal indictments. He also faces 34 felony charges in New York related to alleged payoffs made to buy the silence of Stormy Daniels, and another 40 federal charges related to his alleged retention of classified documents in violation of the Espionage Act.

I’ve said before that American politics are the business, most directly, of Americans, but as the United States is also the centre of empire, and American foreign policy matters overwhelmingly to Germany and all of Europe, I hope you’ll allow me to say at least a few things here.

Beginning with the financial crisis of 2008, and accelerating after the collapse of the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011, the political order of the United States and the entire West entered a period of serious transition. A gradual evolution in the forms and orders of power – underway already for many generations – suddenly accelerated, as the ruling classes took a series of drastic self-conscious steps to consolidate their own ranks and attenuate the political voice of the rabble. Major corporations, academia, the press, and the political establishment set aside their few remaining differences and worked to establish a new impenetrable system of rule. Many former oppositional leftists joined them in this project, after agreeing to exchange their economic critiques for a new programme of identity advocacy. Woke capital, the rise of critical race theory, radical climate policies, escalating mass immigration, and the ascendancy of the rainbow brigade are the dubious fruits of the new regime. Because they arise from the near-total assimilation of the left with the ruling class, anyone who objects to any element of this novel and quite bizarre political programme is now a right-wing extremist.