DONALD TRUMP’S march on the White House in next year’s US presidential election is unlikely to be halted by the Colorado state supreme court.
Any temptation to celebrate Tuesday’s ruling against his name going on the ballot paper in the Republican primary ballot next March is misplaced.
There is no sign that Trump’s indictments in the US courts and Congress have any significant impact on his popularity among a sizeable section of public opinion on the other side of the Atlantic. Most opinion polls continue to put him in front of incumbent Joe Biden by a short head.
The Colorado judgment that Trump is ineligible to stand for public office by dint of his “engagement in” the “insurrection” of January 6 2021, when his supporters broke into and occupied the US Capitol building, is riddled with presumptions. It applies in one state only out of 50; attempts to secure similar verdicts have already failed in two others.
Crucially, the Colorado ruling will only be implemented in that state if the US Supreme Court agrees that Trump should be kept off the primary’s ballot paper. Right-wing judges wield a 6-3 majority in Washington DC, three of them having been appointed by Trump himself when last in the Oval Office.
The former president is already presenting these latest legal manoeuvres against him as an attack on his democratic right to stand as a candidate. As far as he and his disciples are concerned, this and the other outstanding criminal cases against him are logs on a martyr’s funeral pyre.
Trump is a latter-day Joan of Arc, being sent to the stake, not by the English and the Burgundians but — so he would have us believe — by “far-left” Democrats, communists and fascists.
Incredible though it might seem on this side of the pond, millions of US citizens will indeed see him in this sacred light. Where most other thinking, feeling people see a big-mouthed, posturing, rich man’s Mussolini, many of the white working poor have turned to Trump as their saviour.
Their fear of redundancy, immiseration and immigration blinds them to his history as a privileged, profligate and anti-trade union business mogul. They believe his pledges to protect them against high crime, high taxes and big government.
Even more to the point, they rally to his defence against the so-called East Coast liberal Establishment which wants to take away their traditional industries, their guns and their country.
This deep-running but misplaced concern for their lives and communities has a real material basis. Traditionally, Republican politicians are favoured by the wealthy and reactionary whites and Democrats by the poorest and by unionised workers and ethnic minorities.
But both parties are beholden to their big business sugar daddies. Like their “moderate conservative” liberal and “centre-left” counterparts in Britain and the EU, they dare not break out of their neoliberal economic straitjackets.
They offer nothing to enthuse working-class electors: no massive investment in jobs, manufacturing, new technology, housing and public services; no price controls on the profiteering monopolies; no renationalisation of vital industries and services; no meaningful controls over big business market forces.
Trump, on the other hand, tells (mostly white) working-class communities that he alone feels their pain.
His false panacea is to blame immigrants who are “destroying the blood” of the US and leftists preoccupied with positive discrimination in favour of women, gay people and racial minorities. He promises bucketloads of corporate and government investment in left-behind local economies.
The far right marches on, while liberals offer no real alternative.
