The trial everyone is talking about
(Originally published in the Western People on 2024-06-11)
As the warm Californian evening falls, the latest news beams out from large flatscreen TVs across the stacked rows of apartments visible from our living room window. Few residents feel the need to close their blinds in this balmy weather, instead leaving windows and doors open, creating an almost Mediterranean atmosphere. Excited voices of TV anchors vying with shrieks of playful children drift upwards to our terrace. Inside, my wife exclaims periodically as she watches the sharp summaries of the day’s events in ad-spliced YouTube videos. Later, she will call her friends in Ukraine to deliciously discuss the shock and outrage of the case: why did he think he’d get away with it?, how did he think he was above the law?, and is there a political angle to his prosecution? Today however, was different. After weeks of media pageantry surrounding the public prosecution of this high-profile politician, the large and small screens all reported that it was over and he was sentenced to 24 years in prison.
In a publicly televised trial, Kuandyk Bishimbayev, a former high-profile economy minister of Kazakhstan, was found guilty on 13 May 2024 of the brutal torture and murder of his wife last November. Previously imprisoned on corruption charges, Bishimbayev, aged 44, was shown in CCTV footage repeatedly punching and kicking his 31-year-old wife, Saltanat Nukenova, before dragging her by her hair into a room where she later died. This trial captivated our Russian-speaking community in Glendale, north of Los Angeles. Armenians have settled here in waves over the decades, now joined by Russians and Ukrainians, especially since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Still embracing their culture, second and even third generations of these emigrants still speak their native language and watch media from the former Soviet republics. So, perhaps unsurprisingly, my evenings’ orchestra of TVs were notably not tuned into CNN, MSNBC, or FOX News. Their owners’ attention was much further east than the wall-to-wall domestic overage of Donald Trump’s trial over his paying illegal hush money to a porn star.
The politics of an imminent Biden versus Trump election campaign seem even more distant here in California than they did when I was back in Ballina. I still watch online highlights of the latest partisan punditry on Donald Trump or MAGA outrages, which drown out the ordinary day-to-day political coverage expected in Ireland or the UK. Cable news commentary and their social media clips repeat the same daily events, with infotainment journalists interviewing their own sides’ mouthpieces. My Russian-speaking neighbours, don’t appear to engage with this circus, preferring their own news programs from ‘home’.
We have been here only a short few weeks, but I already see non-aligned bubble communities coexisting within the ‘civil war’ America portrayed by cable news anchors. At least some are more excited by the high-profile court case in Kazakhstan than by the one Donald Trump daily complains about in New York. According to Pew Research Center, about two-thirds (66%) of the voting-eligible population turned out for the 2020 presidential election – the highest rate for any national election since 1900 (and higher than the Irish 2020 General Election at 63%). This has been driven by Donald Trump and his MAGA movement energising both the Republican base and his Democratic opponents. How will the nonaligned voters react to his court case judgement? And how many (like my neighbours) are actually paying attention?
While trying to avoid thinking of Trump by daydreaming about Mayo reaching an All-Ireland semi-final, I waited for my Wells Fargo bank appointment in downtown Glendale. My tactical chat with a surprisingly argumentative Kevin McStay was interrupted by a perplexed bank representative asking if I was somehow on the phone. After further confusing her with a half-hearted explanation of Mayo GAA, we explored my unlimited (yet very limited) banking options. She was curious why my wife and I had moved from Ireland and mentioned her sister’s excitement about her recent Dublin visit. ‘You know that with a Green Card, you can’t stay longer than six months outside of the United States,’ she directed at me earnestly. Uncomfortable by the subsequent silence, I changed the subject by asking if she liked it here. ‘I’m from here,’ she quipped. Before I could process her non-answer, she leaned away from her screen, and pointedly quipped, ‘it’s not the same as it was before’. Then, as if we both had experienced an out-of-body commercial break, we returned to officially opening my amazing bank account, all smiles and thank-yous.
The New York Times recently published an article (May 22) by Jess Bidgood on ‘How Today’s Economy Could Matter in November’, highlighting that people feel worse off now under a Biden administration than the previous Trump one, despite a healthy economy and low unemployment. How much of this is human nature—looking back with rose-tinted glasses—and how much is a post-COVID phenomenon is hard to say. The mainstream media do appear to be catching onto the fact that getting inflation down is secondary to the fact that prices have already increased significantly. It remains to be seen if wages can catch up – or feel like they’ve caught up – by the time of the presidential election in November. Like that of my concerned bank friend, the feeling of things being worse now may be too difficult for Biden to shake.
My intense Wells Fargo Bank representative isn’t the only native Los Angelian (yes, it’s a word—I checked) to wistfully mention a sense of loss in general conversation. Little by way of specifics: it could be the weather becoming colder and cloudier (though an Irishman might struggle to see how), everything being much more expensive, and a general sense of societal decline. COVID seems to mark some sort of threshold, which might explain why the scandal-riven Donald Trump appears to be neck and neck with Biden—if not outpolling him in key swing states. I wonder if the excitement among news hosts and their guests over the results on election night will be shared by my Russian-speaking neighbours. My balcony view that evening could well reflect election news and opinion from Armenia, Russia, or Ukraine rather than here, especially as Putin is no doubt very invested in this upcoming election.