The Global Times describes how the indictment of Donald Trump signals the weaponization of the legal system in America has become all but the norm.
“The Trump show has again turned into a historical scene in the U.S. when Donald Trump became the first former U.S. president to face criminal charges in New York on Tuesday. Chinese observers opined that although it is too early to predict the indictment's impact on Trump's road to the White House, the drama has opened the norm of ‘weaponizing legal affairs’ in the U.S., which will certainly usher in a more toxic trend in U.S.' already chaotic political circle.
Not only the unprecedented indictment against a former president is turning the White House into Cheong Wa Dae, or the Blue House presidential building of South Korea, it also revealed rifts of two different types of economies in the United States. Experts warn that such lethal conflicts will bring catastrophic consequences for the country.
In a grievance-filled speech on Tuesday night from the ballroom at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, Trump lashed out not just at Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney who has brought the case, but also at prosecutors investigating him across the country from Georgia to Washington. ‘Our country is going to hell’, he said.
He has launched a blistering attack on ‘election interference at a scale never seen before’ in the U.S., casting himself as a victim of political persecution after he became the first former president to face criminal charges.
Trump's appearance capped a day of drama that started in New York when he was arraigned in a Manhattan courthouse and pleaded not guilty to 34 counts of falsifying business records. The charges carry a maximum sentence of 136 years in prison, though the actual sentence will likely be far less than that if he is convicted on any or all counts, Fox News reported.
The incident is a little bit of both the ‘politicalization of legal affairs’ and the ‘legalization of political affairs’. For the Democrats, they are trying to pressure for the legal punishment for Trump via political means, thus to deprive Trump the candidacy of U.S. president, Li Haidong, a professor at the China Foreign Affairs University, told the Global Times on Wednesday.
If Trump is found to be guilty before the 2024 election, although it won't block his way to the election (as U.S. president must be at least 35 years of age, be a natural born citizen, and must have lived in the U.S. for at least 14 years), it will still exert a huge impact on his political career, as Americans are not likely to choose someone behind bar as their president, Lü Xiang, research fellow at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times on Wednesday.
U.S. media CBS quoted legal experts as saying that Trump's conviction is far from assured, saying it will not be easy for Manhattan prosecutors to prove the former president committed a felony.
Yet Li predicted that the sensational courtroom drama of Trump won't be concluded easily. For Trump, the show could save him a lot of election campaign fees, as it will drum up his fans to vote, said Li.
As Trump is a (former) president who has made so many firsts in U.S. history, the indictment won't be the last time he makes history, said the expert, noting that the show opened another ‘Pandora's box’ of political melee in the U.S. before the election.
Trump has raised more than $4 million in the 24 hours after news of his indictment in Manhattan became public, according to figures released by his campaign on Friday, NBC news reported. The Trump campaign said that more than 25 percent of the donations came from first-time donors to the former president, ‘further solidifying President Trump's status as the clear frontrunner in the Republican primary’.
To some extent, the upcoming 2024 election will again become one that is ‘pro or against Trump’, said experts. They also noted that the first Republican nominating contests are nearly one year away, so it's impossible to judge how GOP primary voters and a national electorate might react to any indictment of the ex-president”. -Global Times
The English-speaking mouthpiece for the CPC is right in that the legal system is being used as a weapon in the American political arena.
It’s difficult for many in the West with liberal sensibilities to accept that the United States is more preoccupied with global conquest through their third-world proxies than the CPC and that Chinese politicians and authorities are less criminal and corrupt than their American counterparts.
Not only that, but there is almost certainly a higher percentage of Chinese citizens that wish to be governed by Beijing than Americans that want to be governed by Washington, D.C., and fewer Westerners that want to live under the hegemony of the neocolonial West than those who would willingly live under the conditions imposed by the BRICS alliance.