the brilliantly leaping gazelle

Is it just me or does the conviction yesterday of Donald Trump remind anyone else of the show trials in the Russia of the 1930’s under Stalin? Where the charges, such as they were, were incidental. The main purpose of his trial, as I understand it, was to put Trump on trial for something, find him guilty and thus scupper his chances of being elected as President in November.

The more that I learn about the whole sordid affer, the more sordid it becomes. Yes paying a porn star to keep quiet about an alleged affair is sordid, but much more sordid is a prosecutor using frankly inconsequential misdemeanour and somehow turning into a serious felony to bolster his own electoral prospects.

Donald Trump isn’t by any stretch of the imagination a proponent of any kind of politics I’d defend, he is a rabble rouser who exploits peoples fears for his own ends. But isn’t that what politicians do, what they’ve always done and what this trial is about? 

I imagine that a fair amount of Trump opponents may have at best a few of the talking points that the media has relentlessly repeated over the last eight years to affirm why they revile him so but doesn’t this echo the constant lambasting that Boris’s Johnson has been subjected to?

Like I wrote, sordid and like it as not, this kind of of lawfare – the weaponisation of the law to achieve political ends – is already here and only going to get worse.