Trump: persecuted saint or practised sinner?

And how would Nanci Griffith have voted?

Easy to believe: Britain’s own political figure of fun, Nigel Farage, supports Donald Trump "more than ever"after his conviction in the hush-money trial.

Harder to believe: that anyone in their right mind could equate Trump’s fate with that of Jesus Christ and somehow find saintly qualities in the former president. Think again.

This slogan has appeared, with variations, over and again as Trump supporters - including, it must be said, plenty who profess to be devout Christians - vent their rage at the jury’s damning verdict.

I was a choirboy, confirmed in the Anglican Church and married in a Catholic one, but no longer regard myself as remotely religious.

If even I can regard the slogan as squalid and demeaning, we can only imagine what one of those devout Christians should make of it.

An obvious starting point might be to assume that more than a handful of, let’s face it, nutters seriously see Trump in a holy light.

The evidence suggests otherwise. And among those who detect equivalence with Jesus is Trump himself. Time Magazine reports his message to supporters that he is “suffering for their sake”, circulating the considered view of Jon Voigt, a Hollywood rarity in that he’s an admirer, that his hero is being “destroyed as Jesus”.

And then there is this make-believe courtroom sketch, tweeted by a Trump supporter (as long ago as last October) and repeated by the man himself.

Responses to the tweet vividly demonstrate how hard it is to separate parody from genuine adulation. “I'd believe this more than any sketch issued by MSNBC/ABC/CBS/FOX/NBC,” wrote one Nine Foot Couch, behind which nom de guerre appears to lurk a real person expressing a view. “Trump = right hand of GOD,” wrote Deepstate Punisher, possibly keeping a straight face.

To many, most I suspect, on this side of the Pond, Trump is just another of those brash, vulgar, wealthy tyrants for whom the law applies only to little people. One more powerful man - it usually is a man - practised in the art of behaving pretty much as he chooses.

We do not need to think of the US legal and justice systems as flawless. Those God-fearing Trumpists surely know all about the corrupt, cops, lawyers, prosecutors, jurors and judges responsible for so many gross miscarriages of justice, predominantly targeting black people (John Grisham, in fiction and fact, is a useful research tool here).

But while we must always be careful about the detail of trials we have not attended in person, the allegations against Trump clearly indicated he had a case to answer (though he elected not to do so) before a jury, picked with what seemed to be some care, convicted him. Subject to appeal, that makes him a felon, one with numerous other cases hanging over his head.

Joe Biden does not instil great confidence as president and will instil even less if re-elected in November as a man about to celebrate his 82nd birthday. It is a crying shame that American politics could not produce a more compelling Democratic candidate. But what Trump’s expected endorsement as his opponent says about the modern Republican party is really quite frightening.

Even a doddery, indecisive but essentially decent man is surely preferable to a proven liar, a frequently incoherent boor accused of inciting insurrection because he disapproved of an election result. Watch those chilling documentaries about the American far right and its neo-Nazi sympathies and you know perfectly well who they’d vote for, old Adolf being unavailable, in effectively a two-horse race.

Unfortunately, Trump’s appeal stretches beyond a neanderthal mob. Millions of Americans who consider themselves ordinarily law-abiding and intelligent have swallowed whole the idea that he is the blameless victim of outrageous persecution or, failing that, a political giant whose cavalier approach to the law, morality and honesty is of no consequence. Loosely related though in a less obviously serious level, a great number of Europeans will happily bite for far right candidates in Sunday’s Ruropean parliamentary elections,

I first saw that Jesus slogan when it was posted at Facebook by a Biden-hating American whose profile describes her cat as being "smarter than the president". We are Facebook "friends" because we both appreciate the music of the late Nanci Griffith.

Poor Nanci, who died in 2021, would spin angrily in her grave if she knew Trump apologists featured among her fans. Leaving my Facebook acquaintance and like-minded souls to worship their Messiah, I will go on fearing for a United States that once again allows Trump anywhere near the White House.

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My vote in the general election will go with precious little enthusiasm to Labour. Every move by Keir Starmer seems designed to reassure the electorate that he has not merely “changed” Labour but turned it into another Tory party, albeit one summoning memories of that dying breed of respectable one-nation Conservatives. Winning the election is the priority and Starmer’s points defeat to Rishi Sunak in this week’s television head-to-head shows nothing can be taken for granted. But does he really have to go quite so far in appeasing Mail-reading, GB News-watching Middle and Little England?

Moderate though my Labour allegiance may be - I’ve never joined and plenty who have would dismiss me as a centrist - I cannot shake off disgust at membership so routinely being extended to Natalie Elphicke. As well as offering wholly misplaced public support for her then husband, jailed for sex offences, she had given every impression of being the worst kind of hard-right Tory headbanger.

Another new recruit to the party is Mark Logan, whose record suggests fervent support for Brexit even though as an Ulsterman he should have known it posed a distinct threat to the Good Friday Agreement as well as being unwanted by the people of Northern Ireland. Naturally Elphicke is also a keen Brexiter; can neither see what harm it is doing to the country?

Logan is standing down as MP for Bolton North East, a fairly easy decision for yet another Tory otherwise doomed to electoral humiliation. Even in a Red Wall seat, a Conservative majority of under 400 seems rather vulnerable.

With room found in the party for Elphicke and Logan, and a Labour constituency in Co Durham being defended by a man who considers Israel’s slaughter in Gaza to be proportionate, there seems almost no remaining point in having a Conservative Party at all.

Nigel Farage would doubtless agree, believing that his Reform business - sorry, party - should form the natural opposition to Labour.

It would be comforting to think the people of Clacton-on-Sea will send him packing but I wouldn’t bet much on it.

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Nanci Griffith was not only a gem of a singer and songwriter but a woman with a strong sense of right and wrong. On the death penalty, she was a “total abolitionist”. She supported same-sex marriage and women’s right to abortion.

More surprisingly, she rated Lyndon Baines Johnson a good, even great president and wore an LBJ button on her guitar strap to prove it. Opposed to war as she was, she recognised his strengths on social issues, especially his broadening of access to medical care. So not much Trumpism featured in the mix.

The US website Mass Live quoted her in 2009 as saying: “He was very naïve on an international policy level but a brilliant man when it came to domestic issues. We had Lyndon Johnson cramming Medicare down the throat of a congress in order to have what we have because everybody was very against Medicare and they were calling it socialisation.

“Thanks to Lyndon Johnson we have the Voting Rights Act, we have Medicare, we have all kinds of relief programmes and nobody ever mentions him … other than the Vietnam War he was a brilliant president.”

But that’s quite enough politics. Let me close with a simple but beautiful song s’shr co-wrote, Little Love Affairs, performed here live with the Chieftains in Belfast in 1992