This week’s indictment may not diminish his supporters’ devotion, but it will challenge his fraudulent conception of reality
I blame the father. Frederick Trump raised his children, one in particular, to believe that the world was divided into winners and losers and that there was no greater crime than to fall into the latter category. In 2020, Donald Trump was ready to bring down the American republic rather than admit before the shade of his dead father that he had lost a presidential election. Scholars speak of “losers’ consent” as an essential prerequisite of a democratic system: without it, there can be no peaceful transfer of power. For two and a half centuries, that model held in the US. But in 2020 it ran into a man who would rather destroy his country than wear the scarlet letter L on his forehead.
The result is the indictment against Trump that arrived this week, the third – with one more expected – and easily the most serious. Across 45 pages, Trump is charged with plotting to overturn a democratic election – to thwart the will of the voters who had rejected him at the ballot box and thereby remain in power.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
