Freddy Gray

Since Joe Biden confirmed that he will run for re-election, the odds of Kamala Harris becoming the first female president of the United States have shrunk – and significantly so. For Harris to take over from Biden, several things would have to happen. Biden would have to keep her as his vice-president for the 2024 campaign. Let’s assume, not with total confidence, that the 80-year-old Biden is still alive and well enough to lead by the start of 2025. If not, his vice-president would anyway take over as commander-in-chief, possibly only for a matter of days. But if Biden won in 2024 and didn’t complete his second-term, it would be all hail Kamala, the lady chief, possibly for several years or more. Brace yourself.

It won’t have escaped Donald Trump’s notice that his arrest has come during Holy Week, when our Lord and Saviour was sentenced by a cruel mob and crucified only to rise again. Trump — aka ‘the Tangerine Jesus’ — has long understood the religious power of politics in America. That’s why ‘I am your retribution’ is his campaign pitch in 2024. It’s why, recovering from Covid in the run up to the 2020 election, he described his recovery as ‘a blessing from God’ and behaved a bit like Lazarus brought back from the dead. It’s why he accuses the Democrats of stealing ‘our sacred elections.

Shall we talk about double standards? People scoff at ‘whataboutery’, yet sometimes an iniquity towards one side becomes so absurd it's sillier not to talk about it. And when it comes to American politics, the Democrats, and the indictment of President Donald J Trump, right-wing Americans have a point. This is a ‘weaponisation’ of the justice system and the unfairness of it reeks.    Two weeks ago, the Republican-led House Oversight Committee revealed that the Biden family had, through an associate, received more than $1 million dollars from a Chinese energy company. The documents show that, from 2015 to 2017, Joe Biden’s brother Jim, his son Hunter, and his deceased son’s widow Hallie received significant funds – as did another, mysteriously unnamed ‘Biden’.

Often spoken of in the same breath, Boris Johnson and Donald Trump are not in fact all that similar. Both men inspire devotion among their followers. Both men are egotists, born privileged in New York. Both have weaknesses when it comes to the opposite sex. But Johnson is more of an introvert than Trump and less interested in money. Boris is a voracious reader who writes his own books. Donald might, like the satirical horror novelist Garth Marenghi, be one of the few people who has written more books than he’s read.  Still, it is curious how, since the rabble-rousing year of 2016, the lives of Johnson and Trump have overlapped.

The 45th president of the United States of America — and the leading Republican contender to win back the White House in 2024 — may or may not be arrested today or tomorrow.  According to his former-lawyer-turned-legal-nemesis Michael Cohen, Donald Trump should escape the indignity of handcuffs but could well be ‘fingerprinted, swabbed [and] mugshotted.’ Cohen insists he doesn’t want to see images of Trump doing a ‘perp walk’ because, he says, ‘he respects the institution of the presidency.’  Trump may despise Stormy Daniels, but he would surely respect the hustle   Cohen, a convict himself, is hardly the most credible source.

How will it look, for the health of American democracy, if the former President Donald Trump is put in handcuffs next week over charges that he paid ‘hush-hush money’ to the porn star Stormy Daniels?  The man himself seems to be bracing for legal persecution over what he calls ‘The Stormy Horseface Daniels Extortion Plot.’ He says he expects to be arrested on Tuesday and blames his ’sleazebag’ former lawyer Michael Cohen, who claims Trump paid him £230,000 to pay off Daniels and another woman called Karen McDougal, who was voted America’s second ‘sexiest playmate of the 1990s.’  Trump has always denied the allegations and says the whole Daniels case is ‘ancient and now many times debunked.