Unlike even Brazil’s election and transition of power, events are going to make the full restoration of functioning democracy in the United States very, very hard and starting soon.
November 6th Donald Trump announced that he is “very very very likely” to run again in 2024 for President of the United States of America.
November 8th is Mid Term election day, with results in the week thereafter. Unless litigated. I’d put that prospect as quite likely together with white extremist mob protests.
November 14th: Donald Trump and team must produce documentation in preparation for his subpoena to the Jan 6th Commission.
This requirement to appear before the investigating committee will continue on successive days. The scope is pretty broad, He will likely ‘plead the 5th’ since he has a good lizard brain. The committee doesn’t have the power to press criminal charges by themselves but they can recommend them to DoJ.
Third week of November, Trump is likely to have to appear in front of the Jan 6th committee.
November last two weeks: Department of Justice needs to proceed with prosecution with multiple potential felonies including stealing government secret documents and not giving them back.
Stateside the New York Attorney General has a civil suit for more than 200 examples of misleading valuations leading to a variety of kinds of financial fraud. It’s a civil rather than criminal case. This case has started.
Also the New York State criminal probe into the Trump organisation. Trump business dealings are now significantly restricted as per last weeks’ ruling.
Trump’s team have already countersued.
Also on the private side there’s the E. Jean Carroll defamation case. Likely IMHO to settle with a cheque.
Then further stateside is the Georgia State election tampering probe. At least 17 people are investigation targets here, including likely Rudi Giuliani.
I see Trump nudging a few more people under the bus, but not damaging Trump himself.
But in Trump brand terms it means wall to wall Trump media coverage for the remainder of the year.
If any of those get to a conviction in 2023 there will likely be appeals through the whole of 2023.
Trump will play it like the theme song to the Dukes of Hazzard: making their way their only way their know how, n’that’s just a little bit more than the law will allow.
From mid 2023 the Republicans will be campaigning on who they will propose for US Presidential candidate. De Santis and team will considering whether conviction on any major count really dents his Republic base standing, or delivers full martyrdom. My bet is unless Trump gets big jailtime, De Santis bides his time to 2028.
DoJ is pretty shy about going after announced candidates in an election process, to avoid appearance of taking one political side against the other.
So you can see mid 2023 the great constellations of justice and politics are going to start having planets smash into each other like we have never seen before in US politics.
This is wayyyy bigger than Watergate when FBI agents established that the Republicans and the Republican President has generated a large campaign of political spying and sabotage, directed by officials of the White House and the Committee for the Re-Election of the President. August 23 1972 Nixon accepted the nomination for president by the Republican Party, while under investigation.
Trump is different to Nixon because the court cases are already underway and at least a couple are going to go for sentencing mid next year while the Republican nomination process is in full swing. And he’ll be indicted in 2023 on at least one big one.
Trump team’s general modus operandi is to delay, delay, delay all processes all the time to get Trump through just one more political decision-cycle. So he can win, and keep winning. Can he buy enough time in 2023 to win? There’s a quite good chance the law will fail.
The United States remains both the most powerful economy, military and cultural power on earth, and better or worse is its largest properly functioning democracy such as it is. So all of this matters because it will dominate our news cycles and our international relationships. 2023 is shaping to be the biggest test of the constitutional ‘checks and balances’ that the US has had since the civil rights protests of the late 1960s and early 1970s, with a strong likelihood of major civil unrest.
The test is as high as which will win: law or politics?
The question is now fully open.
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