AS THE indictments have piled up against ex-president Donald Trump, they appear to have little impact upon US electors and registered supporters of the Republican Party. 

Public opinion barely moved after the first set of indictments at the end of March, when a Manhattan grand jury charged him with undisclosed criminal offences relating to hush-money payments to pornography “star” Stormy Daniels. Polls showed a “popularity deficit” against him of around 15 percentage points.

He remained popular among 40 per cent of US citizens, including many religious zealots who do not believe the charges and have no faith in the integrity of federal and government authorities.

In June, the billionaire ex-president was indicted by the Department of Justice on 37 counts relating to the storage of thousands of sensitive government and state documents on his Florida estate. 

That widened his unpopularity gap from 13 to 16 points, but only because some electors got off the fence. Joe Biden is almost equally unpopular.

At the beginning of August, a federal grand jury indicted Trump over his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and his alleged role in inciting the violent occupation of the Capitol building — the home of the US Congress — by his supporters on January 6 2021.

We shall see whether the latest indictments against Trump and a coterie of top federal and state officials have a bigger impact, indicating as they do the extraordinary lengths to which the White House gang went in their drive to discredit perfectly thrice verified election results in Georgia. 

Sections of the US and British Establishment mass media have covered these developments with a mixture of satisfaction and fear.

The satisfaction comes from their belief that an evil pantomime villain looks like getting his just deserts. The fear is that he may yet cheat justice and could even win the US presidential election in 2024. If so, what then?

At stake, we are repeatedly warned on Sky News and the BBC, is “American democracy” and US “leadership of the free world.”

That such patently dishonest cold war terminology enjoys such a revival in the British mass media should cause enough alarm for anyone who cares for truth, democracy and justice. 

It is as though US imperialism never existed. The subversion of political systems around the world, the military coups, the training of murderous dictatorships, the slaughter of millions — yes, millions — of civilians in their own countries in order to protect US economic interests was nothing but a bad dream. 

As for “American democracy,” its real character now stands exposed by one simple question: what kind of a system enabled such a monstrously egotistical, unprincipled and corrupt character — a cross between Benito Mussolini and Krusty the Clown — to get elected in the first place?

For all the bourgeois liberal blether about “one person, one vote” and “equality before the law,” the reality is that Mr Corporate Fat Cat Jnr has an infinitely greater chance of reaching the White House than Mr Joe or Ms Josephine Public. 

The latter’s only hope is to put themselves in hock, financially and politically, to the Fat Catocracy as current President Joe Biden first did decades ago.

What if Trump wins in November 2024 and avoids a daily diet of porridge behind bars?

The US working class and its oppressed sections will need all our solidarity, as they do today. And finally it might dawn on US-hugging liberals and social democrats in Britain that we should end our subservient junior-partner alliance with US imperialism in Nato.