Could Donald Trump join the rogues’ gallery of history’s criminal politicians?

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Ian Buruma is the author, most recently, of The Collaborators: Three Stories of Deception and Survival in World War II.

While Donald Trump holds the dubious distinction of being the first former U.S. president to run for office while facing criminal charges, he is not the first political candidate in U.S. history to have been indicted, convicted, or even incarcerated.

There was Eugene Debs, who ran for president in 1920 from the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, where he was serving a 10-year sentence for violating the Sedition Act of 1918 by delivering a speech opposing the United States’ involvement in the First World War. Running as the Socialist Party’s candidate, he did not win the presidency but received nearly a million votes – the most a socialist has ever received in a U.S. presidential election.

Some convicted candidates even managed to win. Marion S. Barry, Jr. won a fourth term as mayor of Washington in 1994, despite serving six months in prison for drug possession four years earlier.

While it is uncommon for candidates who have previously been indicted or jailed to secure prominent government positions in democratic countries, it is not unheard of. Sometimes, it accompanies the democratization process. Nelson Mandela won South Africa’s first free election in 1994 after being imprisoned for 27 years by the apartheid regime. More recently, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won in 2022 after being sentenced to a 12-year prison term on corruption charges, of which he served less than two before his conviction was annulled.

Others have benefited politically from their time behind bars, Adolf Hitler being the most infamous example. Before his failed coup d’état in Munich in 1923, Hitler was a relatively unknown beer hall agitator with a criminal record. He was sentenced to five years in prison for the Beer Hall Putsch, but not before he became a national news story after the remarkably sympathetic judges allowed him to present his political arguments.

Hitler ended up serving only nine months in Landsberg prison, during which he wrote his antisemitic manifesto, Mein Kampf. By the time he was released, he had become famous. Less than a decade later, the former rabble-rouser was Germany’s Führer.

Nobusuke Kishi, the grandfather of the late Shinzo Abe, is another example. He was still in his 30s when he was entrusted with overseeing the economy of Manchukuo, the Japanese puppet state in Manchuria, where he ruled over an industrial empire built on Chinese slave labour. During the Pacific War, Mr. Kishi served as vice-minister of munitions. But despite being arrested for war crimes in 1945 and imprisoned for three and a half years, he was never formally tried and convicted.

During his incarceration, Mr. Kishi plotted his political comeback with fellow prisoners, including a notorious gangster and a prominent Japanese fascist. After the Americans determined that opposing Chinese and Soviet communism was more important than prosecuting Japanese war criminals, they decided that Mr. Kishi was just the kind of man they needed. Running for the highest office soon after he was released, he repaid the Americans’ trust by consolidating Japan as a staunchly anti-Communist U.S. ally while serving as Japan’s prime minister from 1957 to 1960.

Mr. Trump is neither a dictator nor a war criminal. He is a malevolent self-promoter seeking to leverage his legal troubles for political and financial gain. As a self-proclaimed outsider, he has turned his indictments into political assets, portraying himself as a martyr persecuted by entrenched, corrupt elites.

So far, at least, his strategy seems to be working. Each new indictment has boosted Mr. Trump’s popularity among Republican voters and fuelled more contributions to his presidential campaign. When he steps into a courtroom – particularly in Fulton County, Ga., where his trial for election interference will be televised and livestreamed – Mr. Trump will undoubtedly relish the opportunity to campaign from the dock.

None of this implies that Mr. Trump will succeed. His violent rhetoric and threats against opponents are worrying, especially since many of his supporters are armed. But without the support of the armed forces, as well as Wall Street, it is difficult to see how he could force his way into power. In a creaky electoral system that favours rural over urban America, it is, of course, possible that he will win enough votes to become president, even while running his campaign from a prison cell.

A Trump victory wouldn’t be anything like Hitler’s coup in 1933, but it would be bad enough, and certainly much worse than Japan under Mr. Kishi in the late 1950s. Counting on indictments to prevent Mr. Trump from winning is as misguided as German conservatives’ notion that they could tame Hitler. As history has shown, sometimes crime does pay.