What America’s friends should make of The Trump Show

YOU HAVE to hand it to The Trump Show. Just when you thought it had little left to offer, back it comes with a blockbuster episode. This week it offered a sensational courtroom drama, as Donald Trump became the first former American president to face criminal charges—34 of them in all. Those charges, which stem from three sets of hush money, including one to a former porn star, allegedly involved falsifying business records and the violation of campaign-finance laws. They are familiar, but lurid enough to grip an audience. Mr Trump has denied them all. America is, as ever, bitterly divided in its reactions, but united in being glued to the spectacle. What should the rest of the world make of it? Two contrasting reactions are in order.

One is to be relatively relaxed. All this may be a first for America, but not for other democracies, where taking former leaders to court is pretty common. From France (think of Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy) to Italy (Bettino Craxi, Silvio Berlusconi) and Israel (Moshe Katsav, Ehud Olmert and now Binyamin Netanyahu), the list of prosecuted former presidents and prime ministers is long. In Taiwan indicting ex-presidents verges on a tradition. Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, is back in office after a 580-day stint in prison. This week a former president of Kosovo, Hashim Thaci, pleaded not-guilty to war crimes and crimes against humanity at a special tribunal in The Hague. Though Mr Trump calls his legal reckoning “an attack on our country the likes of which has never been seen before”, elsewhere such things have not obviously been a disaster for democracy. Often, it is quite the reverse.