A grim logic, isn’t it? So why is the world acting surprised?
Whatever the deeply insecure U.S. President, Donald Trump, now attempts on the global stage—making the world far less safe in the process—he first rehearsed at home and got away with. The lingering question is whether he will also escape accountability as a global outlaw. That answer still lies in the womb of time.
Consider his American record.
On May 30, 2024, Trump was duly convicted in New York on 34 felony counts. Ordinarily, such a verdict would send any citizen to prison, former president or not. Instead, Trump was rewarded with a cascade of votes that returned him to the White House.
In what became a theatre of the absurd, the very court empowered to sentence a proven felon publicly declared its own impotence. Having watched a convicted criminal regain the presidency through the ballot, the court effectively surrendered its authority to punish, despite due process having run its course.
The final outcome? An “unconditional discharge.”
On January 10, 2025—barely weeks after his November 2024 electoral victory—the sentence was pronounced. A convicted felon walked free, not rehabilitated, not restrained, but politically empowered.
This was hardly Trump’s first escape from accountability.
Four years earlier, on January 6, 2021, he had desecrated the most sacred symbol of American democracy. In a bid to overturn his defeat to Joe Biden in the November 2020 election, Trump incited a mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol. Yet, through institutional cowardice and partisan brinkmanship, the Republican-controlled segment of the U.S. Senate chose to look away. Although the House of Representatives fulfilled its constitutional duty by impeaching him, the Senate delivered nothing more than a symbolic slap on the wrist.
The lesson from this judicial and legislative abdication is stark.
If Trump’s own country could not bring a proven felon to heel—whether for criminal conviction or for unleashing violent political chaos—what global order can restrain him now? An international system that largely operates on conventions and goodwill is ill-equipped to confront a leader who has already learned that power shields impunity.
Thus unfolds the global Trump tragedy.
A man his own nation would not restrain. A felon turned president. A domestic outlaw now roaming the world stage, wielding America’s immense power to mask personal shame and appease deep-seated insecurities.
US felon. Global outlaw.