The world watches, stunned as Trump is cleared
The whole world watched the second impeachment of former US President Donald Trump and his acquittal. In many cases, if media coverage is an indication, the global audience paid rapt attention. The BBC was one of many outlets that carried the Senate proceedings live. France24 television broadcast much of the proceedings on their English and French services, with simultaneous translation into French, including the final vote and subsequent responses by Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer and Republican Mitch McConnell — both of whom condemned Trump’s actions, but with McConnell nonetheless voting to acquit the former President.
At the onset of the proceedings, the leading Paris daily newspaper Le Monde carried an enormous photo at the top of its front page of the House impeachment managers marching across the Capitol Rotunda to the Senate floor. The French publication then followed the proceedings closely, concluding within minutes of the final vote with the headline on its website: “Donald Trump acquitté à l’issue de son second procès en destitution.” (“Donald Trump acquitted at the end of his second impeachment trial.”)
The German national daily paper Süddeutsche Zeitung carried a headline, “Trump also acquitted in second impeachment proceedings,” on its website above a large photo of a grimly smiling Trump holding up a USA Today frontpage from his first impeachment, last year, with the headline, “Acquitted”. In Nigeria, the Tribune quickly led its website with the headline: “Breaking: With 57-43 Votes, US Senate Quashes Impeachment, Acquits Ex-President Donald Trump.”
It’s likely that much (but not all) of the world has watched not out of pure curiosity or voyeurism but out of horror and fear, that Trump’s actions and the fact that only seven of the 50 Republican senators were willing to vote for his conviction — too few to cross the two-thirds majority threshold needed to convict — have only accelerated the dimming of democracy and freedom America represented. Indeed, just as President Joe Biden was announcing he would sanction Myanmar’s military leaders for seizing power by force of arms, the House impeachment managers were describing in brutal detail how then-President Trump sought to strongarm himself into a second term he’d failed to win at the ballot box.
The great fear in many quarters abroad is that Trump’s budding autocracy was not simply a brutal interregnum, and that Biden’s administration is but a brief interlude before America plunges again into the deep spiral that has marked the last four years. Although UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson claimed Sunday that US democracy remains “strong” in spite of the impeachment “kerfuffle,” Biden himself has warned that democracy is “fragile.”
And as German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas pointed out on Jan. 6, “The enemies of democracy will rejoice at these inconceivable images from Washington DC. Seditious words turn to violent actions…Contempt for democratic institutions has devastating effects.” In some even quite liberal quarters abroad Trump’s acquittal now simply reinforces a fundamental belief that America has strayed off course.
The Senate’s vote “speaks to something increasingly problematic about the American political system’s ultimate ability to curtail presidential abuses of power: for many the impeachment process no longer presents much of a threat or deterrent to bad, or even illegal, behavior by the most powerful figure in the land,” noted The Guardian newspaper.
Certainly, the Biden administration is doing its best to reassure the world that the American system can and will be made to work. As House Democrats were presenting images that were horrifying much of the world, President Biden was dialing up China’s Xi Jinping, reading him the riot act as Trump never did — warning him that America would no longer ignore gross human rights abuses from Xinjiang to Hong Kong, nor its military’s threats from the South China Sea to Taiwan.
Still, Patrice de Beer, a former editor of Le Monde, said he believes that the world’s view of America has only been reinforced by the chilling images displayed by House managers in the impeachment trial. “I don’t think that this has changed our vision of the US as an unpredictable and violent country,” he told me via email from Paris. “But we hope Biden has put a stop to this. For now.”
At the same time, Claude Corpechot, a consultant in “big data” and professor of global management at the Paris Dauphine and Paris V universities, observed that while “Trump did not change my perception of America and Americans, he showed all of us the two faces of America, while many until now had seen only one.”
Throughout the week, the world’s press has been fixed on the vivid images streaming across televisions on every continent. In Hong Kong, the South China Morning Post led with the news, quoting Trump saying that the trial had been “the greatest witch hunt in the history of our country.” And Saudi Arabia’s Arab News reported the acquittal, adding Trump’s comment that “his movement had ‘only just begun.'”
The conclusion from French journalist de Beer was the kind of deeply felt plea that seems to be all but universal across broad swaths of the world. “Good luck [now] muzzling Trump and his Trumpets.”
