 Hello, you are watching NewsClick and today we are going to the United States where yet again Donald Trump, the former president is in the news. Now Donald Trump faces charges 34 counts of felony for concealing information, for potential campaign fraud, for instance related to various expenses he made. Now this has, of course, become a big news, as I said. But how will it really affect Trump? How will it affect the United States? To discuss all this, we have with us former Indian Ambassador M.K. Badrakumar. Thank you so much for joining us. Ambassador, first of all, I'm going to ask you to maybe look at the crystal ball a bit and tell me whether the number one question on everyone's mind is will Donald Trump go to jail? Or is he going to be permanently out of the political spectrum? Do you think that's really on the cards? You see Prashant, I can only begin with what Harold Wilson said once that a week is a long time in politics. I think it is evolving. That's the point I'm trying to say. And there are far too many variables in the situation which we need to account for as time goes. As things stand, there is even a, to illustrate the point, there is even a thinking that Biden has done this because he wants Trump as his opponent. There is a thesis to that effect. It may sound conspiratorial, but it has an in a logic which I don't need to explain to you that he would get a person like Trump, then he might have a greater chance of winning the election himself. And he is facilitating, in fact, that thesis is that he's facilitating the candidacy of the Republican Party to be falling on Trump's lap, which is entirely conceivable, the kind of railing that is taking place on even Mitt Romney and John Bolton and others, they are all flocking together saying that this is outrageous, this should not have happened. So you see, that's one component that the motivations playing. But at the same time, the thing is, Trump is certainly having a comeback in his own rating, his own rating. And there is a groundswell of opinion that something very unfair has been done, and all this is very ugly, politicking. The fact is, this contributions that he has got over exceeding $10 million just in a week's time, far outstripping what any other Democratic candidate could get. It shows that there is a groundswell of opinion. You see, that also we need to see whether, the second variable is that how from this point, he may get easily, his path will be much easier in getting the Republican Party's candidacy, the Florida governor and all these people, they will have a tough time countering him now. But then, if you go by the first thesis, Biden may have a strong opponent also, that is one thing. And secondly, the thing is inherently, these cases are weak. And therefore, there is no surety that he will be sentenced. Absolutely. If he's not sentenced, then he's uncontrollable. Exactly. And it's ironic because there was the January 6th coup attempt in which clearly a lot of involvement of the Trump team was there. He's not facing any major action for that. There is the issue of, I believe, income tax fraud. There is the issue of concealing presidential documents. And there are cases in all of this, but this is the case that he's finally been nailed on at least for now. So many people, I think, suspecting that this is probably the weakest of the cases that they had against Trump. It is. And also, another thing is that normally here, I must point out that this is really about the federal election. And therefore, this should have come within the federal laws. But the Justice Department in Washington DC didn't think that there is sufficient enough case to be made out of it. So it's very strange that a district attorney would come into this like that. So the credibility itself of this process that is unfolding is in doubt. As it is, none of these charges can prevent him from contesting the election, even becoming the President of the United States. There, he can be stopped only if there is one particular count which shows that he tried to organize an insurrection. Now, I don't think we are anywhere near that. With all the attempts that were there, they couldn't pin him down there. And then, another big factor is Trump is a fighter. And he, this is not new for him. The fact is, Obama administration's time, the attorney general and others had kept a surveillance on even his campaign machinery. And then from day one, he was under attack by the deep state. And this Russia collusion now in retrospect, we know that it was a very well-planned orchestrated attempt to paralyze his presidency. You see, this recently I read about Richard Nixon faced the same thing. Eisenhower faced the same thing. So Nixon's also the other one is Nixon's other side of Nixon is that he wanted the thong with Russia. And he wanted to open line with China. It's very staunchly anti-communist though, his mindset. He wanted it as a pragmatist. He thought that the United States needed it. Eisenhower again had the same approach towards Soviet Union. So the deep state immediately got into the action. Trump's was the same thing. Trump had made no bones about it that he intended to improve relations with Russia. So the Russia collusion thing was brought in. And virtually now we know that his four years of his presidency, it was paralyzed because of this Russia collusion thing, anything that he would take in terms of improving relations with Russia so that he can bring back the troops and he can concentrate. He wanted to bring the troops back from Syria, but he was not getting anywhere. And it is the same with Afghanistan. So the man did not, he had also the problem that he was an outsider. The Washington bureaucracy is the permanent establishment is very tough. They disdainfully look at politicians anyway and because they control and they are in league with Wall Street, military-industrial complex, the intelligence establishment, Pentagon interests, all those things. It's very formidable front. So you see his presidency is paralyzed, but this time around I get a feeling that the man knows also he is more experienced in working the system. And hopefully he may not make those kind of mistakes which he made is a very poor judgment he had of human character. He got into his cabinet, people who were guaranteed to undermine his political program. But Ambassador, just to sort of extend the point you were saying, Trump's years were strange. So to put it like on the one hand he escalated the attacks on Cuba and Venezuela on one hand. On Iran, of course, he worsened the situation. In fact, brought to the region very close to a war. He did escalate issues with China, although not as badly as Joe Biden has done. But on the other hand, like you said, they were also sort of attempts to kind of maybe draw back from this state of perennial conflict. So how do you sort of understand this kind of a policy framework where it is not a complete withdrawal from the US of the traditional US policy, but there are nonetheless some bits of trying to be different from the deep states methods? This is a very, very, very interesting question, that contradiction is there. It has been pointed out by a lot of people. But essentially, the thing is the kind of program, the kind of, you may call it vision, foreign policy vision or the national priority, the package that he had, you could not compartmentalize it. It had to go as a package. And then when I analyze it, I feel that an important component of it, like Russia and even China, the point is, if you get people like this Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, none of them, the incumbent officials there, none of them was in sync with his thinking. So you see a number of these situations, Prashant, which you detail, the attitude, the policy, the approach, everything is on the basis of what the underlings prepare. And I don't know to what extent his attention span is notoriously limited. Now, when you have a man like John Bolton, for instance, as your national security advisor, after all, he gets options A, B, C, but it is out of the three that he has to choose. So I don't think he stood a chance. That's why I said that about two, three days ago, there was a very beautiful essay on this, putting together all the evidences that were there in spread over various books, it had been written about, about the Nixon presidency. And it is stunning, the similarity. So it's not a propagandistic thing that this deep state is frightening. And the Eisenhower, in his fable speech, made that famous military industrial complex as a threat to democracy. Now, actually prophetic words when you look at it. So you see coming back to what you said, therefore, I subscribe to the view that if he had, for example, proceeded to improve relations with Russia, and he was confident that he had the capacity to build a working relationship with Vladimir Putin. If he had done it, then, you know, the thing is the alchemy would have been different of the world politics, you know. And there would have been a conversation with Putin. And Putin would have also helped him in a certain way like that. And a number of these situations may have taken a different turn. That didn't happen because there is a log jam there. So on the main plank is a total stalemate and he couldn't, and he was under assault. He was on his back foot. And then these underlings would bring up all these peripheral issues, you know, of Cuban cigars and, you know, flights to Havana and all that kind of things. And it went into a very different kind of a track. Interesting. So I'm going back a bit to the character of Trump itself and the US current political US establishment. There is a sense of complete collapse as far as the US political establishment is concerned. And I think the traditional establishment and one of the signs has been for many years the emergence of Trump, because in some senses, he has defied, he has defied everybody. He's swamped. He has defied all the swamp. He's defied the expectations of what people traditionally thought that what would harm a politician has not harmed him. Like you said, an indictment filed against him against him has actually helped him raise money. And in fact, I think the his team printed t-shirts with him behind the bars or something and raised money that way also. So in that sense, how do you see the phenomenon of Trump itself in the context of how the people in the US feel about the political establishment? You know, what is the constituency of people who are so unhappy with the politics as it is that they support, they support a millionaire, right? A lot of poor people support a millionaire who tells them that the state is a problem. It's a very ironic situation in some senses. So how do you read that? Basically, this is the phenomenon of the uniparty, which has alienated the public. It developed over a length of time. And now we know very well that presidents may come and go, parties may change, the ruling elite may change. But essentially, there is a uniparty ruling the country. And the same policies are continuing. The neocon policies can be identified with Bill Clinton, with George Bush, with Barack Obama, you know, and they came down to Biden now. So you see, this is the kind of thing. And the people really, basically in the democratic process there, the people have no role today, you know, if you explore deeply into it and dig for the truth, what has happened, you know. Now, Trump said yesterday or the day before yesterday, after this arrest and all that, he came back to Florida to his mansion. And there he gave a very interesting speech, you know, and one of the things he mentioned is this, that how we are used to some of these things in the Indian context, you know, he said, you know, that the electoral laws that has been fudging, you know, and there, you know, earlier time when he mentioned these things and he raised a hue and cry over it, that this is unfair, this is not a level playing field. We thought, you know, that he was, you know, getting into a blame game. But now the point is, there is a sense of helplessness and despair. These things are happening in America. So the people's attitude towards these processes is that, you know, that they are now looking at it, that, you know, they are not having any impact on policies. The Uniparty is ruling the country and it's a kind of a musical chairs, you know, it's just going on like that. That is the one part of it. And then the anomalies in the electoral laws, you know, has reached such a point that the outcome of elections can be easily manipulated today in the US, you know. And then, you know, their archaic system is such that, you know, the uniformity is not there in the whole country. Different states have, you know, enacted different laws, you know, and they work differently in the local conditions there. So I think all these things are there. And then there is a very strong economic content to it in the sense that the inequities in the society, it's a well-known fact it has been written about, plenty of data available on that, that, you know, that they say very big and the distance is widening, you know, a small section of the population is arrogating the wealth and the impoverished people and the middle class particularly has been badly squeezed and they are no longer, you know, able to have that kind of middle class way of life frustrations there. Then the kind of deindustrialization which took place in the US as a result of which the working class is alienated also. So then there is a very big powerful component of the religious constituency, the Christian constituency. So all these things came into it and his major attraction in the 2016 election was this, that he was an outsider. Exactly. That itself, you know, drew, he could draw people like a magnet, you know, to him, that here is someone, you know, who is standing outside the Uniparty and is promising, of course he didn't deliver, but you know, even today that attraction will still be there because this antithesis, nobody is going to be able to articulate so persuasively as Trump can, you know. The closest to maybe Sanders who came to actually. Sanders is different. The pity of the situation is that this could have been channeled in a creative way and it would have found creative and a positive agenda in the hands of a politician like Sanders. But you know, he's the quality of leadership that Trump could give and can give even if he gets reelected now. He's very poor, you know, because he has very severe limitations for a national leader. Sanders is not that, you know, Sanders has been in the Congress and he knows how to work the system and he also has a kind of, what can you call an outlook, how to, you know, correlate foreign policy with domestic policies and in domestic politics prioritizing in a certain way and, you know, the left of center politics, you know, that he represented. So Sanders would have been, Sanders would have probably been America's salvation if he had been and I think again, the problem there is that again, the deep state and, you know, those entrenched interests, the uniparty would have felt very uncomfortable because, you know, he was, he was, he deserved the candidacy even in 2016, but then he was outmaneuvered and he was persuaded to give up and throw in the towel and walk off, you know. So, Ambassador, finally, I mean, right now for the Democrats, it's a very complicated situation to say the least. Like you said, Joe Biden mainly won the last election because he was not Trump. That was pretty much his campaign plank, however much he sought it and all the promises he made during the campaign, he's pretty much failed to deliver in the huge infrastructure packages. It has been largely curtailed, social spending again hasn't really worked out. He's not even brought his own party together, forget bipartisan support that he had again promised, but there have been maybe some marginal improvements in the economic situation. So does it look like right now the Democrats really have a plan except, like you said at the beginning of the interview, to be the not Trump party? You know the 2016 mood was one. That I think Trump is probably going to be in a position to recreate. Trump has a greater chance in 2024. As far as Biden is concerned, the 2020 mood, he cannot recreate in 2024. I think even within his party, it is palpable that there isn't that sort of enthusiasm for him and that they would have liked it if this man had just walked away from the ring altogether and left the party and that would have been the party's best option. But then the point is an incumbent president, if he wants to make a reelection bid, it's not in their political culture and it is not within the party for anyone to stand up and say, no, you're no good. He's running down and it's suicidal for the party to do that. So you see, it's a catch-22 situation for the Democrats, basically. They're stuck with this man. But I don't think that he will be able to recreate that 2020 juxtaposition that he managed as the winning card for himself. Thank you so much, Ambassador, for taking us through some of these nuances of US politics and we hope to talk to you soon. Thank you. So that's all we have time for today. This is definitely a developing story, a story that will develop this year, it will develop next year, until the elections and we'll see what happens. Until then, keep watching NewsClick.