Why The World Looks at the Trump Case and…Yawns

In the eyes of the world’s media, the indictment of Donald Trump was not the big freaking deal many Americans might expect. Save for a handful of English-language websites and newspapers, the story ranked beneath most regional and local concerns and in more than a handful it was found alongside or just above the coverage of other celebrity news items like the denial of parole to Paralympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius and the Gwyneth Paltrow ski accident trial.

There’s a reason for this and it may be hard for many Americans to hear. For all our chest-thumping about our world-leading democracy, we lag the world in living up to the idea that no one is above the law, particularly when it comes to heads of state and government. While, as much coverage at home and abroad noted, the indictment of a president is unique in American history, to the rest of the world, holding top leaders to account is much more common place.

In fact, it is hard to find a major country that has been as reluctant to require their leaders to face the legal music as we have been. Contrary to the MAGA GOP argument that prosecuting Trump makes us look like a “banana republic,” the reality is that placing our president above the law is a clearer sign of political backwardness than the alternative.

Read more at The Daily Beast.