If it’s one thing we know about Trump, it’s that he’s a bully. He is the classic example of a President the Founding Fathers strove to protect against when framing the Constitution. In a piece in the Guardian back in December 2017, Jonathan Freedland wrote a piece headed:
The year of Trump has laid bare the US Constitution’s serious flaws
Jonathan noted back then:
‘…Trump has vividly demonstrated that much of what keeps a democracy intact is not enshrined in the written letter of a constitution, but resides instead in customs and conventions – norms – that are essential to civic wellbeing. Trump trampled all over those as a candidate – refusing to disclose his tax returns, for example – and has trampled over even more as president.’
There is no question that, as he described it, the Constitution is “a document crafted with almost mathematical precision, constructing a near-perfect equilibrium of checks and balances.” However, what it never accounted for is a bad actor enabled by people who know better, partnering with a corrupt Supreme Court to bestow powers on a notorious man of bad character, seeking to become a 21st-century monarch. Precisely the type of president the Founding Fathers sought to prevent from gaining power.
The Constitution is framed to establish a system of government that assumes the electoral process has established the good character of candidates seeking the office of president, clearly a significant error. From 1789 to 2016, the Constitution, despite bumps in the road, has largely delivered governments that have adhered to the principles of the American experiment. The checks and balances enshrined in the document created by the framers worked entirely as intended for 227 years. It did this without any need to grant immunity for ANY actions taken in office by a president, corrupt or otherwise. We can argue about the effectiveness of the governments it has produced over the years, but that wasn’t the framers' responsibility; it was the electorate's, and in more recent times, helped along by corporate money, which now represents free speech.
What’s truly astounding is that, in Trump’s first term, we saw a man elected president who broke the mould by reimagining the Constitution the framers had created to guard against ever being subjected to monarchical rule again. Political populism had arrived, and it had decided to elect a six-time bankrupt, failed businessman who had fabricated a fantasy persona of success by acting like a successful businessman in a reality TV show. You couldn’t make it up, yet here we were: America had become the TV set for a new type of politics.
In the fantasy TV world he had created before his run for president, truth played no part, as he monetised the show by licensing the Trump name on everything from stakes to bottled water. I still find it hilarious, given that a ‘trump’ in the UK is a fart. There’s much debate about him being a lowly educated idiot, but that comes from assessing intellect in academic terms; using this as a benchmark leads to a misguided conclusion. I often joke about his crimes against the English language and sentence structure, a phenomenon he passes off as ‘the weave’. To use intellectual capacity as a measure is to ignore the fact that he’s what I call ‘street smart’.
Like all prolific conmen and street thieves, he uses the ‘fake it, ‘till you make it’ strategy. He’s an economic streetfighter who has, all his life, used other people’s money to run highly questionable money-making schemes. His persistent use of sharp practices, while flirting with illegality, has resulted in the financial ruin of many who did business with him in good faith. On par with mob boss activity, the court records are littered with prison sentences for those who have been bullet catchers for his dubious scams.
Over the years, he has used the judicial system as a shield against prosecution by filing frivolous lawsuits that make it prohibitively expensive to hold him accountable. Despite his constant claims of being subjected to an unfair two-tier justice system, he has used that very system to con people out of money without consequence, even to the point of stealing money from his own charity.
In 2016, he brought together everything he had learned from creating a false persona on The Apprentice and applied it to politics, and it proved astoundingly successful. He soon came to realise that, in that campaign, what had previously been a political adoption of artistic licence to dress up the truth could be stripped down to bare-faced lies and weaponised. No academic would have arrived at this conclusion, only a political street fighter. The normalisation of the bare-faced lie marked a turning point in US politics. It saw the birth of ‘alternative facts’ and the political fantasy narrative on which his current presidency is built.
If you can combine the normalisation of the lie with the word ‘interpretation’, you have the foundations for the perfect weapon to pursue autocratic rule, as we see today with every move he makes. In his first term, his abject failure to protect Americans from the COVID pandemic led to an estimated 200,000 unnecessary deaths. However, just like his reimaging of the January 6th insurrection and the rewriting of American history, he’s crafted an alternative reality that will keep psychiatrists busy for generations to come, as they try to understand how one man can wage a hostile takeover of the minds of millions. A takeover where people are prepared to punch themselves in the face while cheering their way into economic slavery—no wonder he was appealing to his wealthy benefactors seeking global financial domination.
It leaves those not infected with Trumpism in a state of bewilderment that their fellow citizens would cast a vote for a man spending every waking hour filling his pockets with their money. Tragically, this is the reality we find ourselves inhabiting, with no apparent escape route.
Trump faces the same problem all pathological liars face: he’s forced to control the narrative, and that can be a serious challenge, as he is now finding. He can tell Americans all day long that the US is, as he likes to describe it, ‘hot’. However, once people can’t afford to live or put food on the table, it becomes increasingly challenging to maintain control. You can’t claim affordability is a hoax when people’s lived experience doesn’t support the lie. That’s why we see his popularity ratings tanking as the people no longer trust him on the economy.
The challenge of hiding the truth is that it’s like a bad smell; it eventually overpowers the air freshener you keep spraying, and that is where Trump is right now. He’s trying everything to roll that turd in glitter, but it still smells. He conceals the inflation and the job numbers, but the smell keeps getting worse and worse. What people have to understand is that, for him, being president is NOT about serving the people; it’s merely about monetising the office for personal gain. The country has become a franchise headquarters for global extortion. Whether it’s the Ukraine war, Gaza, healthcare subsidies, or food nutrition, he’s in constant search of self-enrichment opportunities. Once you frame it in this light, things become easier to understand.
It’s our natural tendency to believe that the government’s job is to serve the people. There is no question that this was the Founding Fathers' intent when they wrote the Constitution. But that’s now buried under a corrupt interpretation created by those for whom moral decency, integrity, and commitment to PUBLIC service long left the building.
As I have said many times, I remain cautiously optimistic that this regime will fall, and each day I lean more toward the belief that if things continue as they are, he will be lucky even to survive the midterms. My fear is not if, but when the political collapse will take place. However, my biggest fear is that, as with all demolition projects, there’s a distinct risk of damage to surrounding properties when the main building comes down.
An even bigger fear of mine, is the Democratic Party's inability to avoid the transfer of special interests from one party to another. Delivering the same corporate exploitation, just dressed up in a blue suit, marking an alleged slowdown in the transfer of wealth. All current evidence points to the Democratic vision being nothing more than a corporate rebrand. This is absolutely NOT the transformative vision and ambition required to deliver a better tomorrow for ALL Americans.
This is one of the best descriptions of what has happened/is happening to the political structure in the united states. Must Read!
Reformation, not restoration. Overturn Citizens United, make gerrymandering illegal, no individually traded stocks for lawmakers and immediate families, universal healthcare once and for all!