Trump faces criminal charges as U.S. bipartisan struggle intensifies – Xinhua English.news.cn

Xinhua News Agency, Washington, March 31st (International Observation) Trump is charged with criminal charges, and the bipartisan struggle in the United States intensifies

Xinhua News Agency reporter Sun Ding Liusi

A grand jury in New York State voted on the 30th to indict former President Trump on criminal charges. This is the first time in U.S. history that a former president has been charged with such charges.

As the United States has entered the 2024 presidential election campaign cycle, the struggle between the Democratic and Republican parties has intensified. This “hush money” case has further ignited partisan disputes in the United States, once once more exposed the ugly political chaos in the United States, and even reflected the political polarization of the United States. , The deep crisis of social tearing.

“Hush money” case resumes

According to US media reports, the indictment will be made public in the next few days. CNN quoted sources as saying that Trump may face more than 30 charges involving commercial fraud. Trump is expected to travel to New York City for arraignment on April 4.

The charges stem from an investigation by the office of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a Democrat, into Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen paying an actress $130,000 ahead of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. U.S. dollars in “hush money” for the actress who said she had an affair with Trump years ago. Trump denied it. Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison in 2018 for violating election laws and other charges. During the investigation, he reached a plea deal with federal prosecutors, pleading guilty to paying “hush money” at Trump’s direction. But prosecutors have not charged Trump. Since then, the Manhattan prosecutors in New York have restarted the investigation of the case several times, but nothing has been done.

Today, the “hush money” case has been uncovered once more. In a statement, Trump accused Democrats of a “witch hunt” and “election interference” while blasting the Prague-led investigation as politically motivated. Trump’s lawyer said the case “completely lacks legal merit.”

After experiencing the sea lake manor search storm last year, Trump officially announced in November last year that he would participate in the 2024 presidential election. He is currently a strong contender for the Republican presidential nomination.

The US Consumer News and Business Channel website commented on the 30th that the “historic prosecution” once morest Trump may have a wide-ranging impact on the 2024 presidential election and even the congressional election.

New material on partisan struggle

Despite being prosecuted, Trump can still run for president in 2024, but the “hush money” case will make the election campaign more complicated and sensitive, and it will also add new material to the bipartisan struggle.

After the announcement of Trump’s criminal prosecution decision, Republicans stood up to support Trump, accusing the Democratic Party of “weaponizing” the judiciary for political purposes, trying to discredit and attack Trump and the Republican Party. McCarthy, the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, said that Prague’s attempt to interfere in the U.S. presidential election has caused irreparable damage to the United States. House Republicans will hold Prague and its “unprecedented abuse of power” accountable.

Democrats have generally emphasized that indicting Trump is the right kind of accountability. U.S. Representative Adam Schiff, a Democrat, said the indictment of a former U.S. president is unprecedented, “but so is the illegal conduct that Trump has engaged in.”

At present, Trump is also facing several other criminal investigations at the federal and state levels, involving his role in the “Capitol Hill riot” on January 6, 2021, and his handling of confidential documents when he stepped down as President of the United States. A joint poll released by three organizations including National Public Radio on the 27th showed that 87% of Democrats believe that the investigations once morest Trump are fair, while 80% of Republicans believe that these investigations are “political persecution.”

Hans von Spakowski, who is in charge of the election law reform initiative at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in the United States, pointed out that the different attitudes of politicians and voters of the two parties to these surveys reflect that the United States is being divided into two halves.

intensified political battles

In recent years, as the gap between the rich and the poor has intensified in American society, drugs and guns are rampant, and racial conflicts are frequent, politicians of the two parties have always been obsessed with partisan struggles.

Since the beginning of this year, chaos has emerged in the American political arena: the election of the speaker of the new House of Representatives has encountered a “difficult” stalemate that has not been seen in more than 160 years; On the issue of the upper limit, the two parties are tit-for-tat; gun violence is intensifying, but the gun control agenda is struggling due to the differences between the two parties…

Whether it was Hillary’s “email scandal”, Trump’s “Russia scandal”, Biden’s “document scandal”, or the current “hush money” case, they are all farces on the American party show. Partisanship has led to more serious problems such as political polarization and social division in the United States.

At the beginning of 2021, Trump refused to recognize the election results following his defeat in the presidential election, which triggered a series of political crises and directly led to the “Capitol Hill riots” that shocked the world. On March 18 this year, Trump posted on social media declaring that he would be “arrested” and called on his supporters to protest to “take back our country.” This remark has aroused concern in American public opinion, fearing that the “Capitol Hill riot” will happen once more. In New York and Washington, the police are on the alert.

An article published on the website of The Atlantic in early March disclosed that, according to a survey in the fall of 2022, a quarter of election officials have received threats of violence or even death threats because of their work. The Brookings Institution of the United States released a report in January this year stating that election violence may return in the 2024 election year.

According to a poll released last fall by the African American Research Collaborative, 60% of Americans said that “the political system in the United States is failing, and we are very likely to have difficulty in having an effective democracy in the next 10 years”, of which 35% of people said they were “very concerned” regarding the situation.