Bryan Gould: Trump trials fail to hold true offenders to account

Donald Trump aide Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to charges involving bank fraud, tax fraud and campaign finance violations. Photo / Getty Images

The guilty pleas and convictions of two of Donald Trump's senior advisers - Paul Manafort, his former campaign director, and Michael Cohen, his personal lawyer - have added to the sense that his presidency is mired in a swamp of sleaze, corruption and moral depravity, and are likely to hasten the day when he is called fully to account.

But these trials have not succeeded in putting in the dock those who are truly responsible for lumbering us with a president who is so manifestly unfitted for the role.

Those who have been so self-serving, weak-kneed and lacking in principle as to foist Trump upon us have not yet been called to account, and show no sign of being willing to take responsibility for what they have done. They are, of course, the Republican Party.

The Grand Old Party has, for the most part, had an honourable history in offering the American people a true choice as to who should lead them. It is hard to comprehend that the party could have allowed itself to be so thoroughly taken over by a charlatan, and then re-moulded in his image.

Yet, that is what has happened. The Republican Party has become the Trump Party. The Republicans passed up the chance to reject Trump and all he stood for, and in effect sold their souls for the sake of getting a supposed Republican into the White House. They have since been unable to disown this Faustian bargain for fear of losing the support of those voters who respond particularly to Trump's special brand of politics - a group of voters who are almost certainly a minority in the electorate as a whole but who, thanks to Trump's coat-tails, now control the Republican Party.

There are now two possible ways forward. First, the wider electorate may take the opportunity of the mid-term elections to vote out Trump-supporting candidates so the Republicans lose control of Congress. The hard laws of electoral arithmetic, and the realisation that Trump is electoral poison, might then provide the Republican Party with the courage and the incentive to make the decisive break with him, leading perhaps to his removal from office.

The other, less likely, possibility is the Republicans will regain some sense of their responsibilities to the American people and will demonstrate, without any prompting from the voters, a readiness to restore some sense of order and decency to American politics and government.

There is, of course, the third possibility - that, without any political intervention from the Republicans or elsewhere, the Mueller inquiry and the courts will initiate a process that leads to the president being forced from office because of this "high crimes or misdemeanours". In this event, the Republicans would be left to bear the blame for the disastrous episode that their cowardice and lack of principle had enabled; the verdict delivered by the voters then would undoubtedly be a harsh one.

The outcomes of the trials faced by Trump's associates, damaging as they have been to the president, are in other words unlikely to be the decisive trials that the Trump presidency will face. The trials that really matter are those that are yet to come and that put the Republicans in the dock - and the decisive verdict in those trials will be that delivered by the voters. The ramifications of that verdict will be felt by the Republican Party for years to come - and justifiably so.

It is not just the American voters, of course, who will follow those trials with interest - not to say bated breath. What used to be called "the free world" will be more than interested onlookers and will look forward to the day when the White House is again occupied by someone who commands respect and who can provide principled leadership.