Irish Examiner view: Worrying times ahead for Donald Trump
Former US president Donald Trump speaks during a break in his civil business fraud trial at New York Supreme Court on Wednesday. Picture: Seth Wenig/AP
Sitting in a courtroom in the New York Supreme Court, former US president Donald Trump has been keen in recent days to face down one of his many potential nemeses, his former legal ‘fixer’ Michael Cohen.
Since their relationship broke down during the course of Trump’s 2016-2020 presidency, their appearance in that courtroom has been the first time they have been in the same room together and both are looking for vengeance. Their now spiteful affiliation has seen Trump describe Cohen as a dishonest “rat”, while his former attorney returned the favour, portraying his former client as a bigoted, lying “con man”.
The two are central characters in a $250m civil fraud lawsuit brought by New York attorney general Letitia James which could see Trump losing his business empire. During the course of the trial, Cohen testified that Trump ordered him and others to increase how they valued his assets so he could secure better financial terms from banks and investors.
For Trump, the potential pecuniary losses if the case goes against him are enormous — and so too the damage to his legendarily inflated ego.
Oddly, however, as the trial has been proceeding, news filtering through to the former US president (and current poll leader in the race to secure the Republican nomination to run again in 2024) in other outstanding cases against him, which could have the potential to see him jailed, has not been good.
A slew of his former attorneys and advisors have turned state witness in a sprawling racketeering case being brought against Trump and more than a dozen others by Fani Willis, the district attorney for Fulton County in Georgia, where it is alleged they tried to undo his election loss in the state in 2020.
Sidney Powell, Kenneth Cheseboro, and Jenna Ellis have each accepted plea deals in which they admitted their guilt and their willingness to testify against Trump and others such as Rudi Giuliani. This, truly, is bad news for both men and increases the potential for them to be incarcerated.
However, the worst news filtering through to Trump in that New York courtroom came on Tuesday when ABC News reported former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows had struck a deal with special council prosecutors and has testified in front of a federal grand jury about efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
That Meadows has reportedly secured immunity from prosecution for his testimony is significant as it frees him to lay bare the inner workings of the Trump camp as they tried to engineer his de facto coup attempt.
For the main players in all this — Trump and Giuliani, most notably — these developments are deeply worrying, and so they should be.
As has been painfully obvious to most Irish people in the past seven days, and particularly those whose lives and businesses have been blighted by intense flooding, there is now an urgent need for the proper management of our waterways.
The matter was highlighted in the by Cork County Council’s acting CEO, Valerie O’Sullivan, who said there should be a single agency to control and monitor every mile of inland river waterways in the country.
It has been apparent for years as individual flooding events have unfolded that proper management of our rivers is sadly lacking. The cause and effect have been obvious as local people point out where managed dredging or regular debris-clearing would have prevented homes and businesses from being damaged, land being made unusable, and animal welfare threatened.
With numerous bodies responsible for river management — Inland Fisheries Ireland, Uisce Éireann, and the Office of Public Works, as well as county councils and individual landowners — the co-ordination and implementation of necessary remedial works is often impossible.
This is an issue with a simple solution: Create a body with responsibility to carry out inspections on all waterways to ensure they are properly maintained and present no risk of flooding.
The events of the last week should be enough of an incentive for the Government to finally act.
The global threat to free speech is widely reckoned to be at a peak right now, but in India, it has reached perplexing and worrying proportions, as highlighted by the strange case of novelist, journalist, and activist Arundhati Roy.
A decade-old case has been dusted off by officials of Narendra Modi’s government against the acclaimed author for comments she made in 2010 in New Delhi about Kashmir, a region disputed between India and Pakistan, in which she claimed it had never been an “integral” part of India.
Shorn of context, the words have been used by the authorities to portray Roy as being “anti-national”. She has thus been charged with “offences related to provocative speech and the promotion of enmity between different groups”. As things stand, India is ranked 161st of 180 countries in the press freedom index and the case against Roy comes after police raided the homes of 40 journalists in Delhi and elsewhere in which phones and laptops were seized and charges of “terrorism” brought.
There are real fears that Modi’s ruling BJP party — already struggling to paper over failures of governance, an inability to control inflation and create jobs — is looking to tactical distractions to deflect public attention and is willing to criminalise opposition voices to that end.
The trouble for Roy is that she is now seen as the embodiment of opposition to the BJP and ahead of India’s general election next year, that is a very dangerous place to be and while international support for Roy has been welcome, it has to be seen in the context of trying to protect the remnants of free speech in Indian democracy.
