Corazon de Leon wrote:That's all it would take to bring down quite a few countries though. A smart, impressive, charismatic speaker who is also a sociopath.
True enough, but never before has there seemed to be such an open, viable pathway to dictatorship in the US - despite there being many objectively awful presidents.
Always we've believed that the constitution would be defended, that the systems of checks and balances would hold strong, that no political party would back a tyrant, even from among their own ranks.
In the mid-19th century, the then-conservative Democrats made a hard right turn and followed the exact same path to tyranny that the Republicans are on now, and it destroyed them as a political force for a generation. IIRC it lead to a realignment of US politics and the formation of the Republican Party, but I may be wrong on that score.
Anyway, my point is - Trump and the Republicans are tearing up the constitution, checks and balances are being taken apart, laws we thought he couldn't break are being broken with impunity. They're pursuing power for its own sake, and none of the things we always thought would save us are working. The only saving grace of all this is Trump's own incompetence - he may be a blank slate for all the Stephen Millers and Karl Roves of the world, but he's always getting in his own way, strawberry floating things up in the process.
This links up with Lex-Man's point regarding punishments for crimes committed by high level politicians going unpunished for decades.
All future US presidents are going to be elected knowing that they can get away with far more than Trump's predecessors ever imagined, which leaves the door wide open for sociopathic populist wannabe-dictators in a way it never was before.