Donald Trump’s greatest political virtue is that he is rarely boring. He shares that talent with Britain’s former prime minister Boris Johnson. If it is entertainment you want, both men deliver. Who but Boris Johnson would quote Kermit the Frog to the UN General Assembly? Who other than him would tell British business leaders how much he enjoys watching the animation series Peppa Pig? And who but former US President Donald Trump would become the only American president in history to be impeached not once but – like the re-make of a box office hit – twice?
And now we have another sequel which you can be sure will run and run. It’s “Trump – The Indictments” with the man one US newspaper columnist refers to as “The Donald” going all out to attack the various supposed conspiracies against him. It is not clear what will happen next, but to be sure, the Donald Trump soap opera revolves around a central character who loves attention. He believes there is no such thing as bad publicity.
From his early business days, Mr Trump has always, to put it politely, fought vigorously to get what he wants, often using tough lawyers to browbeat opponents into submission. At times he seems like a character from old comic books who gets into impossible situations. He’s tied to a chair when suddenly, as the old comics would say, “with one bound he was free”. He even survived a 2016 incident when he spoke obnoxiously about women in ways which would have destroyed any presidential candidate in history.
White women voters helped solidify Trump’s victory in the 2016 election. He even survived telling the world that his 2017 inauguration was the best attended in history. Anyone with access to television pictures could see that simply was not true. Washington metro figures showed the number of people using public transport on inauguration day was much lower than for Barack Obama, George W Bush, Bill Clinton or any president in recent memory.
Mr Trump has even survived the extraordinary stories emanating from leading Fox News staff, which appear to demonstrate that the Rupert Murdoch-owned TV channel publicly says Mr Trump is wonderful while privately key members of the Fox team tell each other how much they dislike him. And so Donald Trump, the twice impeached 45th President of the United States, is expected to make a great show and a potential Barnum and Bailey’s circus out of whatever happens in the US Courts and for a long time to come.
It would be unwise to underestimate him. After all, and despite the impeachments, in 2020 (when he lost the presidential election to Joe Biden), Mr Trump actually received several million more votes than in 2016 when he won the election against Hillary Clinton. His appeal to Republican voters, especially white women and blue collar workers appears to be fairly solid.
But as he takes on the US authorities, the Manhattan court system, and a case involving the redoubtable former adult film star Stormy Daniels and others, it leads to the most interesting of political questions: with all the publicity that Donald Trump's court case (or court cases) are about to receive in 2023, is it likely to help the Republican party in the presidential election of 2024?
That is the question the smartest political consultants, pollsters and potential candidates are asking themselves. Mr Trump is, as they say in show biz, box office. But the danger for Republicans is that the Trump show could make life difficult for any other Republican candidate. What should they do? As the party supposedly of law and order, should Republicans support the prosecution of Mr Trump? But since the party is also fearful of Mr Trump's destructive tantrums should they pretend, as he does, that it is all a set-up, a witch-hunt? And will all the extra publicity – negative or otherwise – mean Mr Trump is not only back in the spotlight, but that he might really emerge as the Republican candidate for 2024?
Mr Trump has already been talking in his usual fashion about the great conspiracies against him. Having survived his well-documented examples of crass behaviour, perhaps he will astonish us all once more. But whatever potential circus unfolds in the courts, like a TV series which goes on for one season too long, we might be about to see the entertainment value of Donald Trump diminishing in the eyes of American TV viewers. They might possibly think that the script has become a bit stale.
And how much does Fox News really matter? In February 2023, it was billed as the "most watched” cable news network in the US. But because American audiences are hugely fragmented at primetime, “most watched” means only 2.2 million Fox News viewers when there are 170 million registered voters and 350 million US citizens. So, could the Trump show end with a cliffhanger and a return to the White House? Or could this made-for-TV-fantasy end in a very different type of highly secure US government facility – one aimed at keeping someone inside not for his political convictions but convictions of a much less pleasant kind? Yes. Stay tuned.
