If the various political gossip sources are to be believed, Donald Trump is due to be arrested over claims that he paid hush money to adult film star Stormy Daniels on the eve of the 2016 US Presidential election. Trump and team deny that there was anything nefarious going on with regards to any alleged payment and the American Left are rubbing their hands together at the prospect of seeing Mr Trump appearing at a New York courthouse treated as would a common criminal be treated.

Donald Trump has been the ‘Emmanuel Goldstein’ for American left wing and liberal (in the American not the British sense) for many years now and the target of many leftist’s own ‘two minute hate’. The left want this court case to be the point when their Trumpian nemesis, the man who in their view upset a comfy political apple-cart, has finally been crushed,

But it might not work out that way. There’s every chance that a Trump arrest could turn him into a martyr and galvanise his supporters and grow his support base. It might be the case that although the Left and politicised state and federal organs will throw all they’ve got at Trump, this might not hurt the Trump movement itself, in fact it could aid it. This is because there are a lot of Americans it seems who care little about Trump’s personal conduct as for them he is merely a lighting rod to express their dissatisfaction with the way that the USA is governed.

This dissatisfaction is unlikely to go away as America has some blindingly obvious economic, governance, cultural and social problems that the Biden administration cannot avoid at least some blame for. The dissatisfaction party, which is growing in the USA, as it is in the UK, something I intend to write about in a later article when I get the chance, is unlikely to vote for either a Biden return or Kamala Harris if she decided to stand for President. It’s even more unlikely if American workers continue to suffer economically and they perceive that the blame for their fiscal and employment hardships lay at the feet of the Biden -Harris administration. Those Americans who can see that their lives were better under Trump than under the current Democrat administration may not wish to vote for more of the same. This attempt to destroy the Trump populist movement might end up being its saviour, just as Tsarist Russian soldiers firing on peaceful demonstrators in 1905 created the conditions where workers were then more likely to move towards the Bolshevik Party. This is because they saw or experienced how the Tsarist State was not amenable to peaceful petitioning by the people asking for their grievances to be addressed

The freelance Sweden-based writer Malcom Kyeyune, writing for Unherd Magazine has come up with this interesting potential historical parallel between the Trump case and the 1905 Russian Revolution. He describes how a movement of workers led by a priest Georgy Gapon, which Mr Kyeyune said was partly supported by the Tsarist secret police to divert people away from Bolshevism and Socialism, went to present a petition at the Winter Palace in St Petersburg. But the march ended in bloodshed when demonstrators were gunned down by troops when the petitioners approached the Palace.

After the murders support for the movement founded by Gapon melted away as people believed that the Tsarist regime was not going to treat peacefully with them which led people to put support into groups like the Bolsheviks. The attempt by the Tsarists to sublimate worker anger at appalling working conditions by using Father Gapon as a tool didn’t just fail but failed in a big way and paved the way for the successful 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.

Mr Kyeyune said:

The real force behind Trump in 2016 was the same as that of Gapon in 1905. Trump, like Gapon, was propelled not just by his personal qualities, but also by the way these qualities allowed him to serve as a vessel for political passions that were much, much more powerful than him. No matter what they thought they were doing or initially hoped to accomplish, both men eventually ended up being swept along by the tide. The events of January 6th, which the Democratic Party has long tried to turn into America’s own contemporary Bloody Sunday, with fairly modest results, was something that Trump himself was powerless to control.

Good point there. Gapon was not an ideologue, he was a priest who worked with the poor. Like Trump he ended up as the way that people could express their views. Gapon’s movement was to a large extent out of his control just as the Trump movement is not entirely controllable by Trump himself. In both situations these men acted as lightning rods for public dissatisfaction.

Mr Kyeyune added:

In the days ahead, we should keep this in mind. Imprisoning Trump and subjecting him to politically motivated public humiliation or legal action might feel very cathartic, and it might even seem like a good idea. But it’s really not. During times of rising inflation, political polarisation and a growing military crisis, a dormant political volcano always lurks just out of sight. And as things become worse, as the future becomes more gloomy and the present becomes more painful, the risk of a serious eruption greatly increases. Once Gapon had served his purpose leading the march to St. Petersburg, neither the crowds nor the revolution needed him any longer. He died in obscurity soon after, murdered by the very same Socialist Revolutionaries he had once successfully kept away from the main stage. Bloody Sunday led directly to a massive general strike that, at least for a time, completely crippled Russia. And it was also the event that really made workers ready to listen, for the very first time, to the much more radical socialist agitators. Georgy Gapon was no longer needed.

There’s a great deal of dissatisfaction in the USA at the moment at least from what I can see from my vantage point. That dissatisfaction is not going to go away soon and the American economy is in such a state that the Democrats or anti-populist politicians cannot that easily use public money by way of government spending to bribe the supporters of the populists to go away. Crude ‘put a chicken in every pot’ politics is no longer economically feasible.

In both the United States and Britain there is as Mr Kyeyune a ‘volcano lurking out of sight’ but in America the volcano seems far closer to erupting than it does here. Imprisoning Trump after a nakedly politically motivated and influenced trial might just be the final push that makes the volcano go off. By going after Trump in the manner that they are some Democrat politicians in their hubris, might be opening the way to something far far worse than Donald Trump.