Make him stop
Can no one make this criminal fascist monster STOP INCITING HATRED even now???
The Fake News is doing everything in their power to blame Republicans, Conservatives and me for the division and hatred that has been going on for so long in our Country. Actually, it is their Fake & Dishonest reporting which is causing problems far greater than they understand!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 29, 2018
I don’t know what’s scarier – the idea that POTUS is a troll deliberately doing this shit for the lulz (and the votes), or the idea that he’s so fucking stupid that he is genuinely incapable of understanding the part he plays and the influence he has.
I’m lying here on the opposite side of the Atlantic, wondering who stole your famous ‘checks and balances’. He’s been given, by my calculations, enough rope to hang himself and his mafioso cronies several times over, yet he’s still going. Has everyone supposedly in control dropped their end of the rope?
It turns out that there are no real checks and balances. If one party is in charge of every branch and has no conscience, they might as well be phlogiston.
We didn’t realize this until Trump took office. It’s been quite a shock.
Exactly.
My theory is that the Founding Fathers assumed that the average Joe and his representatives were reasonable, rational, normally empathetic human beings and there were enough of those to outweigh the selfish and those that lacked conscious.
We are now at a point that some psychologists have been wringing their hands about for quite some time. There has been a general rise in us non-clinical folks would call anti-social behavior., aka people who don’t give a rats ass about anyone else – jerks, that is.
For whatever reason – drugs, lack of consequences, social media echo chambers, over crowding, or sunspots, those without empathy are numerous enough to rule the rest of us. It’s like the tudors and plantagenets all over again, and honestly I don’t see how we “normal humans how expect everyone to be relatively rational and somewhat empathic” can work our way out of this as we just don’t have the tools to deal with these folks.
IMHO, that is.
For all their faults, the Founding Fathers were men to whom social status was a central motivator. That meant keeping a reasonable pretence of a certain standard of behaviour going. Actually, that may be harsh on some/many of them. I suspect that a good number of them strongly believed that in order to be an honourable and upright person there were certain minimum standards. Don’t lie. Keep your word. Don’t be uncouth. Treat women and other ‘gentlemen’ with respect (at least in public). Don’t engage in verbal brawls unless decorum and honour have been so impugned that even your enemies would admit you had no other choice. Etc etc.
I have no doubt that many of your FF would feel nothing but contempt for the behaviour of Trump and his ilk. Whether they would support his policies is another matter all together.
(I can’t help but feel that many of them would be aghast at the US concept of a ‘well regulated militia’ wrt gun control.)
The Founding Father’s thought the electoral college would prevent someone like Trump from getting the presidency, not enabling it.
To paraphrase the monster itself ranting about Hillary Clinton, maybe the second amendment people can do something.
Not exactly sure that was the precise intention of the electoral college. Seems there were several motivations, not just the thought that ‘the masses are asses (at times)’. It was also to limit the influence of states with the highest voting populations and increase the influence of states with larger non-voting (slave) populations.
cazz,
That’s my understanding as well, that there were different motivations for different aspects of the EC. The number of EC delegates per state was another sort of compromise between strict representation by population and equal representation by state, though more weighted to the former than Congress is.
The fact that the President is elected indirectly through EC delegates, rather than directly by popular vote (or some point-based system based on the popular vote, which is de facto more or less what we have today) I think had at least as much to do with the limitations of 18th Century transportation and communications as any particular desire to prevent some unqualified demagogue from being elected. If I recall correctly, it was several decades before candidates made any effort to formally campaign on a national basis. They weren’t expecting a world where an ordinary citizen in South Carolina could have an informed opinion about whether to vote for this dude from Massachusettes or that dude from Virginia, so it made sense to have him vote for a local statesman who would be capable of learning about and choosing between the candidates.
But in other ways, of course, the Electoral College was far from the best designed institution. The Founding Fathers weirdly assumed that the U.S. would somehow avoid developing political parties, and so the Constitution originally provided that the presidential runner-up would become Vice President, which made for the awkwardness of then-rivals Adams and Jefferson being President and VP, and then the gamesmanship of the 1800 vote. At least that got fixed by amendment relatively quickly. But today, even putting aside the question of whether presidents should be elected by popular vote instead, we still have the anti-democratic (small d) dangers of faithless electors, and the fact that technically, the state legislature gets to decide how delegates are selected, which almost become a reality in the 2000 debacle.