By violating US judicial norms, Donald Trump might be putting himself and China in a lose-lose situation

Trump’s penchant for directing judicial outcomes is making the US legal system more like China’s. But if a president emboldened by his impeachment acquittal continues such actions, his re-election campaign might be derailed

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Attorney General William Barr and President Donald Trump turn to leave after speaking in the Rose Garden of the White House in July 2019. Barr has sparked a backlash after apparently walking back a sentencing recommendation for Trump’s friend Roger Stone. Photo: AP

Published: 1:30am, 18 Feb 2020Updated: 2:17am, 18 Feb 2020

Asserting that Donald Trump feels a strong kinship with strongmen like Chinese President Xi Jinping used to be something of a rhetorical exercise.

The assertion would be made to jolt those closest to Trump and also, with an overall sense of allegiance to the default positions of traditional American foreign policy intact, to check the US president’s royalist impulses.

Trump’s defenders would then dismiss his antics – fawning over Russia’s Vladimir Putin, sword dances with Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman, chummy summitry with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and calling Xi a “good friend” – as his way of making his enemies, including America’s foreign policy elites, squirm.

But after last week’s dust-up over the Roger Stone case, it’s difficult for anyone to deny that Trump would like to elevate the White House from one-third of the federal government to an imperial palace.

Following Trump’s charge that his friend and associate Stone hadn’t been treated fairly by the Justice Department, Attorney General William Barr moved to overrule his own prosecutors and revise the sentencing recommendation for Stone – sparking a backlash of unprecedented proportions.