Ben Lowry: We have big political problems in Northern Ireland but America's might be even worse

Here there is an increasingly narrow window for the DUP to return to Stormont, and if indeed there is one at all (many unionists say there isn’t). They could go back now but there has been no preparation of rank-and-file unionists for such a return. They could return later in the autumn but the Irish Sea border begins to kick in in October. The party could re-enter the assembly next year but that risks an unsuccessful return ahead of the general election, which is likely to be held 12 or so months.

In the US there is an even more unhappy clash of events and the electoral cycle. Donald Trump seems increasingly certain to be nominated as the Republican Party candidate to stand against the Democratic Party incumbent, President Joe Biden. After this week’s Republican Party debate I cannot see a rival who has much chance of defeating Mr Trump in that party’s internal contest to be the standard bearer in the nationwide presidential election next November. Unless he withdraws from the race, Mr Trump is likely to win the nomination race thumpingly.

I also cannot see a credible contender to Mr Biden for the Democratic nomination.

This makes a repeat of the narrow 2020 Trump-Biden contest or the White House plausible, and perhaps even likely. It is a very bad set of options. Mr Biden because he seems increasingly unfit due to old age and memory loss. Mr Trump because he seems to be on the brink of going to jail.

The most charitable thing that I feel able to say about Mr Trump is that he has been psychologically unwell for years, since well before he defeated Hilary Clinton in the 2016 contest for the Oval Office. It is as if he has one of those conditions in which people lose their inhibitions and speak or behave in an outrageous fashion. Mr Trump is much more coherent in historic footage of him speaking, such as in the early 1990s when he appeared on ITV’s Saint and Greavsie show, or more recently, such as after the 2001 terror attacks. But any possible medical explanation for Mr Trump’s conduct will be of no consequence in his coming trials unless he is prepared to cite psychiatric grounds as mitigation for his behaviour – which he is not going to do. He faces seven trials, which will have him in and out of court in 2024 even if he does not end up in prison. That Mr Trump surrendered to the Georgia authorities on Thursday for trying to overturn that state’s 2020 presidential election results showed that he cannot evade the legal process, for all his bravado.

The other six trials are:

a Washington DC federal case in into efforts to overturn the 2020 election and the January 6 2021 invasion of Congress; a Florida case over his handling of classified files after leaving the White House; a civil trial in New York into alleged manipulation of data to get tax breaks; a civil trial in a woman accuses him of defaming her when he denied raping her; a class-action accusing him of promoting a pyramid scheme; and a criminal trial in New York accusing him of concealing hush-money to a porn star.

I know of no president like Mr Trump since the United States was established in 1776. There certainly has been none in my lifetime.

If Mr Biden deteriorates further with age and has to give way to someone such as his vice president Kamala Harris Mr Trump will probably win re-election.

A constitutional crisis looms in the world’s only super power. Will the Supreme Court, a third of whom he appointed, find a way to intervene on his behalf? If so America’s vital system of checks and balances between branches of government will be in ruins.

Many unionists would prefer Mr Trump to the pro Irish nationalist Democrats. I accept that the arrival of an avidly Irish American president in Mr Biden has been disastrous for unionists when they are already under extreme pressure. But Mr Trump’s return could be disastrous for the world, in the harm it might do to an outstanding democratic system with his inflammatory lies about the 2020 election, and his influence on global policy. He celebrates the blood-soaked LIV golf tour, funded by a Saudi Arabia that more than any country is implicated in the 2001 terror assault. He is at the helm of an isolationist strain in the Republican Party that would sacrifice Ukraine to Putin and so embolden China to invade Taiwan.

The next 15 months will be politically nerve-wracking, here in NI and across the Atlantic.

Ben Lowry (@BenLowry2) is News Letter editor