Perhaps it was, as
some around Trump like to believe, an act of deliberate sabotage when that escalator
ground to a halt; perhaps it was an accident – an aide or a member of the
press corps running on ahead and accidentally triggering the emergency stop. My
own alternative theory is that Trump was feeling thirsty, saw a big red button,
and thought that if he pressed it, someone would bring
him a diet coke. Stupidity usually beats both accident and conspiracy.
Trump’s Press Secretary’s
response to the incident was to say
that “If someone at the U.N. intentionally stopped the escalator … they need
to be fired and investigated immediately.” The order of events there is
important: start with assumed guilt, implement the punishment, and then
investigate to determine the facts. It’s very much a Queen
of Hearts approach to justice. It’s certainly an approach that Trump has
adopted elsewhere. He’s regularly declaring the guilt of people without having
a shred of evidence, and demanding that they be punished immediately and then
prosecuted. And if the prosecutors can’t find any evidence, then they should be
fired
and replaced with people who can. The evidence is probably hiding in the same
place as those 11,780
votes that Trump demanded that Georgia’s Secretary of State should ‘find’
after he lost the 2020 election. When you ‘know’ that someone is guilty of
breaking a law that you’ve just invented, it surely can’t be that hard to prove
it.
The Queen of Hearts
was, of course an absolute monarch. ‘Off with their heads’ was an instinctive
response to just about anything. To date, the formal written constitution of
the US has not proved to be the barrier which I had naively expected that it
would be. Partly, that’s because Trump has managed to capture all three branches
of government power; and partly because the US system of law grinds exceedingly
slowly and no legal ruling ever seems to be final until an overwhelmed supreme
court, tilted heavily in one political direction, eventually gets round to
ruling. Maybe a written constitution doesn’t provide the protection that some
of us might have imagined. On the other hand, just imagine how much more
freedom a Trump might have in the UK where so many of the ’rules’ depend simply
on precedent, the assumed good character of the incumbent, and the royal prerogative. The same applies, of course, to any Trump surrogate who might happen to come along.
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