THE news that Donald Trump had been arrested and indicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records by a court in New York over an alleged hush-money payment of $130,000 to former porn performer Stormy Daniels, with whom he is alleged to have had sexual relations in 2006, will have come as manna from heaven for his Democrat opponents in Washington and millions across the US.

It will also, however, stir up a Republican Party which he rules like a king rules his kingdom, along with a Make America Great Again (Maga) base across the country in equal measure, to thus confirm that the land of the free has never been more polarised with no sign, none whatsoever, of the mutual animus dissipating anytime soon.

With Trump having also been subpoenaed to appear in front of the congressional committee hearing into the Capitol riot of January 6 2021 — and with the former president also currently facing multiple lawsuits and other legal probes into his real estate and business dealings in New York — and also the retention of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago beachside mansion in Florida — many are predicting that his demise is finally at hand.

However, it would be folly to become complacent in the belief that any legal takedown of Trump will end this insane chapter of US history. On the contrary, as things stand, Trumpism has already morphed into a material force.

Indeed, in projecting his various legal travails as part of a liberal witch-hunt being waged to try to prevent him from running again in 2024, Trump has succeeded in holding himself up as an anti-establishment martyr.

Here, as Matthew 7.15-20 in the New Testament warns: “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.”

In many ways, Trump succeeded in catalysing the huge undercurrent of reactionary anti-establishment sentiment that had been bubbling away beneath the surface of US mainstream politics in the wake of September 11. This was a function of the growing chasm that had opened up between a significant section of US society and Washington, measured in declining incomes, growing job insecurity and ever-higher bills at the bottom.

Meanwhile, at the top, the US saw a spike in wealth enjoyed by the nation’s economic elite, ably served by a political class for whom the interests of Wall Street were prioritised over the needs of Main Street. Add to the mix a mainstream media whose capacity for serious journalism had become hamstrung by a corporate ownership model that takes the “free” out of the free press and you had yourself the ground upon which the seeds of conspiracy theory and right-wing populism — interchangeable entities — grew to the point of no return.

The ultra-conservative Tea Party Movement, established in 2009, paved the way for Trumpism, with its open attack on Obamacare, federal government welfare programmes, and its call for lower taxes — in other words, the kind of right-wing, libertarian policies increasingly associated with a Republican Party, whose base was by now becoming defined by animus not only towards not only Barack Obama but the very idea of a black president.

Trump’s role in pushing the racist “birther movement,” seeking to delegitimise Obama, placed him in an ideal position to take up the cudgels of the Republican nomination for US president in 2016.

Trump, like every demagogue and putative dictator there has ever been, understood the temper of that section of the US people desperate for a leader to crash uninvited into the cosy consensus around multiracial and cultural harmony, to reassert the primacy of white supremacy and white nationalism when it came to the country’s affairs.

This he proceeded to do with the gusto of a man who fully believed that he had been ordained by god to rescue his benighted country from the looming onset of socialism, mass immigration and the supposed threat posed by Black Lives Matter to law and order.

However, in the history of US-style demagoguery, Trump stands as the latest in a long line of those who have viewed the masses as mere pawns on the chessboard of their own megalomania and narcissism.

The mob that rushed the Capitol on January 6 2021 did so fully imbued with the belief that Trump was their saviour and that the election had been stolen from not just him but them, thus violating their right to freedom as a birthright.

With QAnon and other conspiracy theories given oxygen by Trump, theirs was a mission undertaken to halt Joe Biden from being certified as the next president in the name of patriotism, not criminality or treason.

The chaotic and violent scenes broadcast around the world that day painted a picture of a nation and society on the brink of civil war. They painted a picture of a coming fascist dictatorship. Indeed history may well record the Capital riot as Trump and the US’s Munich Putsch — Hitler’s failed attempt to overturn the Weimar Republic by force in 1923, a decade before he reached the summit of power by the ballot rather than the bullet.

In his classic biography, The Meaning of Hitler, Sebastian Haffner makes the crucial point: “Hitler to them [German people] was a miracle, a ‘godsend’, which, put more prosaically, means someone inexplicably blown in from the outside...

“To the Germans, Hitler had always seemed to come from a long way off — first, for a while, from high heaven; later, may the Lord have mercy on us, from the deepest abysses of hell.”

Trump’s supporters likewise believed, and still do, that Trump arrived on the political stage as a godsend. If his legal demise ensues, as many within Washington expect, the movement he gave birth to will ensure that his political legacy lives on as a tribute to the ineffable and enduring power of white supremacy in the land of the free.