Donald Trump faces a fight he knows could knock him out for good

When Nixon got his comeuppance, his opponents were thrilled. With Trump, the primary emotion is foreboding

After the private jets, the motorcades, the elevators up and down to the Manhattan apartment made of gold, there were only three full seconds of recorded history to place in the archives. A thin orange mask of rage, walking through one door and turning left into another. That was it.

There was a photo, too. Puffy eyes, heavy jowls, pursed lips. The jaw was fixed and clenched. The heavyweight champion of the world, going through the grandstanding motions at the press conference for the big fight that, deep down, he knows will knock him out for good.

Justice must be done and must be seen to be done. It was the American example that persuaded British courts to finally allow the cameras in, only in very recent years. The murderer of Olivia Pratt-Korbel, Thomas Cashman, had his 42-year sentence read out on live TV on Monday.

And yet the indictment of a former US president, the reading out of fully the criminal charges against him, happened behind closed doors. We know that Trump pleaded not guilty and that he insisted it would be him, not his lawyer, who would stand and say the words. The show must go on, even when the curtain doesn’t even go up.

For hours, the world fixated on a corridor outside a courtroom that could only have been more obviously New York if you could see the Empire State Building rising up behind the door onto the street. Cops chewed gum and paced about in their steel-capped boots. Men who carry gun belts as heavy as that every time they go to work do not look the type to be weighed down by the moment they found themselves in.

The district attorney has brought 34 criminal charges against the former president. He denied them all. Each will fuel his industrialised grievance machine, his now carefully honed methods of distortion.

If this moment marks the final downfall of Donald Trump it delivers an unusual feeling. When Nixon got what was coming to him, his opponents were thrilled. This time, the primary emotion is foreboding.

This court case, and the other three invesigations that surround him – which are arguably more serious – all feed back to one simple question that hasn’t changed for a while and continues to define American politics, and it’s this. For more than two years now, a majority of Republican voters continue to believe the 2020 election was stolen.

A large proportion of that majority may never recover from their delusions, but until that majority becomes a minority, American politics cannot be fixed. America is still a two-party democracy, and for as long as one party rejects democracy itself, it will remain broken.

It does not need, frankly, fresh grievance, fresh ammunition to be loaded into the system.

“They’re not after me, they are after you,” Trump said, in his specially made little graphic for social media. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s bog-standard conspiracy theory stuff. They’re after Trump for very specific reasons. And they’re only after you if you have paid more than $100,000 in hush money to a porn star, and then put that payment through your company accounts, saving you tens of thousands of dollars in taxes.

All this stuff, the talkers on the US TV news channels say, is free publicity. It’s airtime and ad space they haven’t had to buy. For as long as the helicopters are hovering above his car driving him to and from court, he’s being talked about, and Ron DeSantis isn’t. It’s a strange old politics, but it is the politics of the moment.

The Trump cronies that appear on the same news stations, like Roger Stone, the former Trump aide who was sentenced to three years in jail before his boss weighed in to pardon him, all say the same thing. Stone, appearing on Sky News under about an inch of fake tan and looking precisely like what you’d expect to see if you asked an AI bot to draw you a picture of a cartoon spiv, said them too. Inflation’s out of control. Gas prices, food prices, the billions spent on Ukraine.

Will these things be sufficient to make America decide it got it wrong in 2020? That the guy who did the coup in which a police officer was killed and who now sits scowling in the dock is the guy they really want? It seems unlikely, but then, no one can say that stranger things haven’t happened. They happen all the time these days.