Former President Donald Trump is attending the first week of his criminal trial in Manhattan where jury selection continues. Trump faces 34 felony counts for allegedly falsifying business documents to cover up payments made to adult firm star Stormy Daniels prior to the 2016 presidential election.
Trump, a billionaire American capitalist who lives in the richest country in the world is on trial in New York City just a few blocks from Wall Street, the world’s de facto financial capital.
Though he is not currently an elected official and is opposing the current administration, Trump arrives at the courthouse each day in a chauffeured car, with a government-provided security team, and meets his phalanx of lawyers who have made millions defending their client’s constitutional rights in numerous legal cases — cases in which Trump has received due process under the law.
The former President has not been jailed or restricted from movement, despite repeatedly defying an order not to malign the court or intimidate witnesses (which upends due process). Nor has Trump been restricted for his alleged role in fomenting an insurrection against the government or his refusal to return classified documents purportedly containing nuclear secrets to the U.S. government.
(Contrary to his claims of being on the short end of a “two-tiered justice system,” there is evidence Trump receives privileged treatment from the courts.)
Yet a MAGA-driven narrative that Trump is being tried in a corrupt banana republic-style “third world country” persists, as it gets repeated on conservative media outlets.
Among those beating the “third world country” drum is retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen Mike Flynn, who was Trump’s National Security Advisor for three weeks in 2017 — and was pardoned by Trump after he pleaded guilty to lying to FBI agents about his communications with Russia’s ambassador. Flynn is using the “3rd world country” rhetoric to criticize the validity of the criminal charges Trump currently faces in New York — and to try to discredit the judge on the case, Juan Merchan.
While spreading MAGA-approved misinformation about Judge Merchan not letting Trump attend his son’s high school graduation in May (the judge has yet to rule on the request), Flynn complained: “We are officially living in a 3rd world country.”
We are officially living in a 3rd world country.
I’ve been fighting for this man and his family for many years now (I know what he feels like)…I will now fight even harder for @realDonaldTrump to become our next POTUS!#MAGA#AmericaFirst @FreedomIsUpToUS https://t.co/kdN5K9vYiu
— General Mike Flynn (@GenFlynn) April 15, 2024
“We will truly become a third world country,” Trump himself has said. “We are already, in many ways, if you look at our border. We are worse than a third world country,” he counterintuitively claims, as so-called third world countries don’t commonly have an influx of people risking their lives to get into them.
The term “Third World” surfaced during the Cold War, used to define countries that remained non-aligned with either NATO or the Warsaw Pact — later becoming primarily associated with nations that are, because of financial challenges, exceedingly vulnerable to political corruption.
Basic human rights, let alone constitutional protections and due process, are not assured under third-world governments, which often function as autocratic regimes despite sometimes dressing up as democracies. (Notably, these are nations where criminals are often pardoned, if the are even convicted, by leaders granting favor and currying fealty.)
Third World countries chiefly included those with colonial pasts in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, and were “defined by high poverty rates, lack of resources, and unstable financial standing.” The United States is not by any reasonable measure a third-world country, nor does its legal system function like one, even in the case(s) — perhaps especially in the case(s) — of Donald Trump.