Indictments score political points

Although it is Donald tramp the first former US president to run for office while facing charges of criminal activity, he is not the first political candidate in American history to be indicted, convicted or even imprisoned. Trump's energy secretary and former governor of Texas Rick Perry was, for example, accused of abuse of power when he briefly tried to win the Republican Party's presidential nomination in 2016.

Then there's the Eugene Debs, who ran for president in 1920 from the Federal Penitentiary in Atlanta, where he was serving a ten-year sentence for violating the Sedition Act in 1918 after giving a speech opposing the United States' involvement in World War I. Running under the Socialist Party, Debs did not win the presidential election, but he won nearly a million votes - the most a socialist has ever won in a US presidential election.

Some convicted candidates even managed to win. Marion S. Berry Jr. won a fourth term as mayor of Washington DC in 1994, despite spending six months in prison for drug possession four years earlier.

Although it is not common for candidates who have previously been indicted or sentenced to prison to reach prominent positions in the governments of democratic countries, it has happened. Sometimes, it is part of the democratization process.

Nelson Mandela won South Africa's first free elections in 1994 after being imprisoned for 27 years by the apartheid regime. More recently, the Brazilian president Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva he won the 2022 election after being sentenced to 12 years in prison for corruption, of which he served less than two years before the conviction was overturned.

Others benefited politically from their time behind bars, the most famous example Adolf Hitler. Before his failed coup in Munich in 1923, Hitler was a relatively unknown beer hall agitator with a criminal record. He was sentenced to five years in prison for the Beer Hall Putsch, but not before he made national news as an extremely lenient judge allowed him to present his political arguments. Hitler ended up serving only nine months in Landsberg prison, during which he wrote the anti-Semitic manifesto, Mein Kampf. When he got out of prison, he was already famous. Less than a decade later, the former restless agitator became the German Führer.

Former Japanese Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke, grandfather of the late prime minister Shinzo Abe, is another example. Unlike Hitler, Kishi was a member of the bureaucratic elite of his country. After graduating from the Royal University of Tokyo at the top of his generation, Kishi quickly rose through the ranks of the government bureaucracy. Amazingly, he was still in his thirties when he was entrusted with overseeing the economy of Manchukuo, Japan's puppet state in Manchuria, where he ran an industrial empire built on Chinese slave labor. During the Pacific War, Kishi was the Deputy Minister of Munitions. Rain can be compared to Albert Speer, Hitler's architect and minister of munitions, who was sentenced by the Nuremberg Tribunal to 20 years in prison, mainly for the exploitation of slave labor. However, despite being arrested for war crimes in 1945 and imprisoned for three and a half years, Kishi was never formally tried and never convicted. During his time in prison, Kishi planned his political comeback with other inmates, including a notorious gangster and a well-known Japanese fascist. After the Americans decided that opposing Chinese and Soviet Communism was more important than prosecuting Japanese war criminals, they decided that Kishi was just the man they needed.

Running for the highest office shortly after his release, Kishi repaid the Americans by consolidating Japan as America's staunch anti-communist ally. He served as Prime Minister of Japan from 1957 to 1960.

Trump is neither a dictator nor a war criminal.

He is a malicious self-promoter who tries to use his troubles with the law for political and financial gain.

As a self-proclaimed outsider, he turned the indictments to political advantage, presenting himself as a martyr persecuted by a privileged corrupt elite. At least for now, his strategy seems to be working. Each new indictment boosted Trump's popularity with Republican voters and increased donations to his presidential campaign. With his car rallies and inflammatory speeches in which he attacks and mocks judges and prosecutors, Trump's public appearances are sensational media spectacles. When he steps into the courtroom — particularly in Fulton County, Georgia, where the election meddling trial will be broadcast live — Trump will no doubt use the opportunity to campaign from the dock.

This does not mean that Trump will succeed. Hitler, for example, lost the presidential election in 1932 to the respected but temporary Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg. At 84, Hindenburg somewhat resembles the American president Joe Biden at least in one respect: moderates and leftists voted for him only to prevent his demagogic opponent from coming to power. However, the Nazis became the largest party in the Reichstag, and conservative politicians, industrialists and businessmen made the fatal mistake of supporting Hitler as the new chancellor in 1933.

Their mistaken belief that they could contain Hitler's ambitions hastened the demise of German democracy.

Of course, today's USA is not the Weimar Republic, and Biden is not Hindenburg.

Trump's aggressive rhetoric and threats against opponents are worrisome, especially if it is known that most of his supporters are armed.

However, without the support of the armed forces, as well as Wall Street, it is difficult to imagine how he could seize power by force. In a fragile electoral system that favors rural over urban America, it is of course possible for him to win enough votes to become president, even if he campaigns from a prison cell.

A Trump victory would be nothing like Hitler's coup in 1933, but it would be bad enough, and certainly much worse than Japan under Kishi in the late 1950s. Relying on impeachment to prevent Trump from winning is as wrong as when German conservatives thought they could contain Hitler. As history has shown, crime sometimes pays.

The text was taken from the Project-syndicate.org portal

Translation: N. Bogetić