Regardless of how confident one is that Donald Trump is too much of a mouth-running fuckup to see himself into the White House, the very fact that anyone like him ever came this close to begin with is simply too much. Assuming he loses, what about the next psycho - maybe one with a little more self-control when the cameras are rolling? And the next, and the next?
The fact that we have to be this worried about the whims and lunacy of one person is literally what this country was founded to avoid, and yet seemingly every day we're throwing up in our mouths at something Trump has done months before there's even been an election. All at the mere prospect that he will obtain office.
This, folks, is not democracy. Every four years two factions fighting over ONE title, one of them occasionally nominating pure fucking evil and endangering the entire country in the process. As comforting as it is when the right person wins, even that is not entirely a good thing, because people just go home then and stop paying attention - all the other offices are badly neglected in midterm elections.
The madness and evil of Donald Trump have revealed something that should have been obvious a while ago: The Presidency as currently configured is an unsustainble institution if it's to remain part of a constitutional order.
Someone like him will eventually take it, and will destroy it. Not merely disgrace it, not merely abuse it - they will simply end the constitutional framework of the United States government through all the standard tactics such people employ when republics end: Mob chaos, ethnic cleansing, paramilitary terrorist attacks on opponents, etc.
The solution is a question for another time, but right now the recognition of the problem is urgent: This is unsustainable. If Trump steals the election, or less likely wins legitimately, the resistance should not merely be to his personal presence in power, but to the dangerous institution he was able to hijack.
In addition to defeating Donald Trump, the danger of someone like him ever obtaining that kind of power must be mitigated by reforming the structure of the US Executive branch. The Presidency cannot be allowed this level of power, let alone anything greater - it must be mitigated, divided, terms of office shortened, whatever.
We need an office that does not make people complacent when performed well, nor sink them into despair when hijacked by madmen. An office that does not base long-term progress on instantaneous decisions that are far too easy for the most grotesque and depraved to game.
And since Presidential signatures are not involved in passing Constitutional Amendments, at least we know that altering the Presidency is not a systematic impossibility. While we still have a Constitution, before Trump or someone like him can replace it with Putinism, we need to reduce the threat through some structural reform of the Presidency. And do it regardless of who wins that Presidency.
ここには何もないようです