Institutional American Vs. President Donald John Trump And The Alt-right
You can see it coming. The speeding train that is President Trump is barreling headlong down the tracks toward the dead-end station. It will come off as an unavoidable wreck of unprecedented proportions, ripping asunder the world’s greatest democracy. The political carnage will stretch from coast to coast as America’s established institutions rise up to protect the United States and, indeed, the world from the words and deeds of a certifiable mad man that prowls the White House.
Perhaps we will turn on Morning Joe one shocking day to see stretched across a stage somewhere the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, the president’s cabinet, ranking members of both major parties of Congress, representatives of America’s security services and leading representatives from the nation’s psychiatric community, declaring in unison that the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the US Constitution has been evoked, removing a man of unsound mind from high office — Vice president mike Pence has been elevated to the presidency.
The unthinkable has happened. A duly elected president has been summarily removed from his responsibilities in which case at least a quarter of the American population will scream foul. The media organs of the alt-right — Breitbart, ultraconservative talk radio, the National Inquirer and most likely segments of Fox News (conspiracy freaks all) — will claim that they were right. There is a “deep state” that supersedes the will of the people. It is all rigged just as their hero, Trump, has been saying.
The truth is that a situation has developed whereby democracy has become too dangerous for its own good. The grownups in the room will have concluded that they no longer can tolerate insanity fiddling with the nuclear codes. It will be an event that simultaneously unleashes conflicting emotions of fear and relief, fear of wondering if democracy can survive such a heavy blow to its existence and relief that a crazy man in the ultimate position of world power has been safely put aside — possibly.
Even then, as America falls into this political black hole, no one can guess at the unforeseen and unintended consequences. Will Trump be placed in a straightjacket or subjected to some sort of house arrest? Will he lead his fanatical backers upon a bloody insurrection? Or possibly will things quickly settle down into something that passes for normal. Whatever happens it will be the greatest shock to the American system of governance since the American Civil War of the 1860s, and if you can see a way around this calamity, please state how?
