His performance at the G20 has been such a total and scandalous spectacle of more than mere incompetence but real and dangerous mental debility that has been of a piece with Donald Trump's pathological performance as president and during his campaign. He didn't fade under the pressures and challenges of the highest office in the United States government, he was a person who was obviously unqualified, by all of the reasons of incompetence, unfitness for the job and psychosis from before he announced his run. He was our real-life Lord Buckethead who, under the British parliamentary system was only running for a seat from one riding. I believe the theory of presidential governmental systems is that a nationally elected executive is supposed to make it unlikely one like Trump will get to run the country into the ground within a year. But that all goes to hell if the media doesn't do what Jefferson and those other romantics believed it would also do, prevent people from being duped by such a psychotic or demonic figure. As our system shows, that basic level or moral responsibility on the part of a press such as the one we have today, is pretty much dead here. At least in the media that counts, terrifyingly enough, the entertainment divisions of the networks and the continual entertainment venues of the 24-7 alleged news cabloids.
That Donald Trump holds the presidency of the United States is far more than a Constitutional Crisis, it is an exposure of a crisis that has been there all along but which was just waiting for the right evil Russian billionaire genius to master our own vulnerabilities against us and for him. Our own billionaires did quite well for themselves out of some of the same weak points of democracy even back when they were just millionaires.
Even now when two of those closest to trump, his own son and namesake and his son-in-law appointed master of everything have been exposed as having colluded with agents of Putin, our system will not get rid of the malignancy of which such as Donnie jr. and Jared Kushner are major lesions but mere metastases of the thing which will kill us. If you want to carry the analogy to its start, it was the media who created and promoted and enabled Trump during his entire public career, peddling him and his pathological corporate dictator image to the American public, successfully selling him to an effective margin of victory for him which was the carcinogen that made this happen.
And nothing is happening to prevent it in a basic and reliable way just as the regulatory and other measures to prevent another 2008 economic implosion were hardly a fix for that, just as even the more seriously needed post-Nixon crime wave reforms have not prevented, first the record indictment and conviction Reagan administration, the scandalous imposition by judicial putsch of George W. Bush and, now, Trump.
Someone, I can't remember who, said that if Putin's attempt to game our laws and our system for his own ends hadn't worked this time, he and his crime associates would learn from what they did and they would make an attempt based on that the next time. And if that's true, you can bet that they'll learn at least as much from their successes. Their effort included manipulation of our news media as much as it did the insane practice of running our elections through computers and the internet. If the DNC didn't learn the folly of putting anything out there on line where it could turn into another successful Putin-Assange opportunity - and I wonder if it has - it's clear that our federal, state and many local governments haven't even caught up to the disaster of 2000. Nor do they much seem like they want to.
This is worse than a crisis of the American Constitution, this is a crisis for democracy, especially one based on a pre- information technology, 18th century constitution which has features that prevent its modernization. Such a thing is an open invitation to the Putins of the world. If he has been exposed as doing this, there is nothing to prevent other despots with resources from having a go at it, too. Meanwhile our Constitution, our Supreme Court and our legislative branches, federal and state, diddle and delay and try to game it for partisan advantage - AND ALMOST ALL OF THAT IS DONE BY THE REPUBLICAN PARTY, THE PARTY WHICH GAVE US PUTIN. Why bother holding elections if Vladimir Putin is going to end up running the United States through a proxy puppet? Why elect people to congress and the Senate if they're going to not prevent that but try to use it for their gain? We are all Russians, now.
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