He faces four felony counts related to his efforts to undo the presidential election, including conspiracy to defraud the US government and conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding.

This is the third criminal case brought against Mr Trump in six months, and it is the most serious. But it is not the last. He faces several cases in the year ahead, dealing with issues from business fraud to mishandling classified documents.

It leaves us with the mind-bending prospect that Donald J Trump could be on his way to serve a lengthy jail sentence, or he could find himself back in the White House as he leads the field of Republican candidates hoping to unseat Joe Biden in the 2024 presidential election.

Jail bird or leader of the free world?

As so often happens in describing the life and times of
Donald J Trump, the acronym Gubu — famous in another context in Ireland — seems apt. Much of the spin and absurd lies that were repeated during Trump’s presidency, and after it, are grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre, and unprecedented. 

He continues to undermine the political system by labelling any criticism against him “fake news”. Now, he is shaping up to denigrate the country’s legal system.

There is reason to be hopeful. American democracy proved to be robust, despite Trump’s attempt to allegedly (he is innocent until proven guilty, after all) undermine an election. His own vice-president Mike Pence stood up to him, as did others at the centre of power. It remains to be seen if the American justice system can hold him to account.

What is most worrying in all of it is that Trump appears to have already won in the court of public opinion. Polls tell us that a staggering 71% of Republican primary voters believe he is innocent.

His popularity, it seems, rises in direct proportion to the number of criminal charges he faces. And with it, his ability to fundraise for next year’s elections. 

As he said himself: “I’m the only person [who] ever got indicted who became more popular.”

That is one Trump assertion which is incontestably true.

Even so, his supporters appear to have an endless appetite for his Humpty Dumpty approach to language. As the latter told Alice in Alice in Wonderland: “When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

Those same supporters will also argue that it is arrogant and, indeed undemocratic, to discount their views. And it is, but it is also vital to question what passes for truth in the wonderland spun by Donald Trump. The integrity of democracy and respect for the rule of law depend on it.

TV licence fee boycott will backfire

RTÉ is expected to record a deficit in its annual accounts for 2022, although the size of the shortfall will not be known until Media Minister Catherine Martin publishes the final report.

What is known, however, is that TV licence fee revenue fell by nearly €3m in July, a drop that is blamed on the scandal over secret payments to RTÉ’s top earner, Ryan Tubridy.

Those who watched the details of barter accounts, party flip-flops, and undeclared payments emerge from the Public Accounts Committee last month have every right to be angry about corporate governance (or the lack of it) at our national broadcaster.

What better way to protest than withholding the licence fee? Viewers are hitting back. And with some justification, although their actions won’t have the desired effect. Boycotting the €160 licence fee is certain to backfire.

Withholding the fee sends a strong message of disapproval about the squandering of public funds. Indeed, it is a position that found an echo in a Dublin court recently when Judge Anthony Halpin criticised RTÉ’s “ruling class” for squandering and abusing public money.

He reluctantly convicted those charged with failing to pay the licence fee, saying “the law is the law”. Refusing to pay the fee, however, also delivers a death blow to public service broadcasting at a time when the high-quality, independent journalism that RTÉ delivers has never been more important.

Women in Stem

In Oppenheimer, one of the summer’s blockbuster films, there is a pointed scene in which a woman scientist is asked if she is a typist. Perhaps it’s intended to mirror the prejudice of the decade, but it does not reflect the truth of women’s achievements. In 1941, for instance, Irish theoretical physicist Sheila Tinney completed her PhD on the stability of crystals, under the supervision of Max Born, the same physicist who supervised one J Robert Oppenheimer.

In the same year, aged 23, Dr Tinney was appointed to an assistant lectureship in UCD and made a part-time fellow at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. The institute’s director Erwin Schrödinger, the famous Nobel-prize winner, described her as the “most successful of the younger generation of theoretical physicists in this country”.

In 1948, she took up a fellowship to study aspects of nuclear physics at Princeton, New Jersey. She later told her students at UCD she stood in the queue for coffee with Albert Einstein.

Her pioneering work reminds us that the history of women in Stem is longer than Oppenheimer would have us imagine.