The world is watching.
The indictment of former President Donald Trump in New York City has sparked reactions not just in U.S. political circles but also around the world, including Trump allies abroad coming to his defense and U.S. adversaries pouncing on the development as a sign of American political chaos.
The Chinese government’s state-controlled news outlets have used the indictment to smear the image of U.S. democracy.
“U.S. risks sinking into disorder as Trump indicted, political system in disarray,” declared a headline atop an article published by Global Times, a paper run under the auspices of the ruling Communist Party in Beijing.
The article cited Chinese analysts asserting that the indictment has “revealed the dysfunction of the American political system amid increasingly extreme political polarization, warning of the possibility of more violent protests from Trump’s followers.”
U.S. allies have been mostly cautious in their portrayals of the indictment and its potential impact on upcoming U.S. elections, but some Europeans have expressed support for Mr. Trump.
Hungary’s populist prime minister, Viktor Orban, has urged Mr. Trump to “keep on fighting” a criminal indictment over an alleged hush money payment during his 2016 presidential campaign.
“We are with you,” Mr. Orban tweeted Monday in support of the former president.
The tweet featured a photograph of Mr. Orban and Mr. Trump smiling and shaking hands during a meeting at Mr. Trump’s Bedminster, New Jersey, estate in August. The far-right prime minister had traveled to the United States to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, in Texas.
Russian officials have been notably more reserved in their public reactions to the Trump indictment. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov refused to comment during a press conference in Moscow on Friday.
“I don’t think this is a topic for us to comment on,” he told reporters. “These are internal U.S. processes that we do not consider necessary to comment on.”
Some Western European journalists, meanwhile, have cautioned that the developments in New York could trigger political unrest in the United States.
Paolo Mastrolilli, the North America bureau chief for the Italian daily newspaper La Repubblica, asked Friday in a column whether the U.S. will be hit with a wave of violence and whether moderate Republicans will rally behind a different candidate for the 2024 presidential election, according to a translation by the news website Semafor.
Semafor noted a separate argument by Annett Meiritz, the U.S. correspondent for the German-language outlet Handelsblatt, who wrote that the indictment has fueled Mr. Trump’s “attack” on democracy even further.
The French publication Le Monde said in an editorial Tuesday that Mr. Trump contributed to his plight by bending the rules but that his trial will be a more general test of the American governmental system, including popular faith in the fairness of the judicial system.
“The politicization of the judiciary, fostered by the election of judges and prosecutors, has been dragging the United States down a slippery slope for years,” the paper wrote. “The elimination of qualified majorities in the Senate, once necessary to confirm federal judges such as those on the Supreme Court, removed one of the last safeguards against this danger of polarization. The result is a weakened judiciary and a democracy under increasing strain.”
Chinese social media has run with the narrative that Mr. Trump’s legal travails signal deeper rot in the U.S. political system.
A report by Business Insider said the indictment triggered a flurry of memes by Chinese social media users calling Mr. Trump “Comrade Nation Builder” — a hero who is strengthening China by embarrassing the United States.
The idea behind the “Comrade Nation Builder” nickname on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, is that Mr. Trump is an ally of China who went to Washington for the sole purpose of sabotaging America with wild antics and outrageous policies, according to the report, written by Business Insider’s Matthew Loh.
“Comrade Nation Builder, in the police station, in the courts, you must surely endure, we are waiting for you to retire so you can return and watch the sunset with us,” read one popular post on Friday, according to Mr. Loh. He said the post featured a montage of artificial intelligence-generated images showing Mr. Trump retiring in China after fulfilling his “mission.”
Although Mr. Trump had some defenders abroad, others were openly gleeful at the prospect of the former president facing criminal charges.
“A bad day for Trump is a great one for America’s frail democracy,” wrote Andrew Mitrovica, a Toronto-based columnist for the Arab news website Al Jazeera.
“I am celebrating that a grand jury made up of ordinary, wise Americans has done what the Department of Justice and a special counsel have, to date, failed to do — hold a thug president to some measure of account,” he wrote when news of the indictments first leaked last week. “I am celebrating that this indictment will be a harbinger and a warning to future presidents that no one is indeed above the law and that the once unbreachable Rubicon has, after more than two centuries in the life of America’s tumultuous republic, been crossed.”
• Guy Taylor can be reached at gtaylor@washingtontimes.com.
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