You’re Gonna Need a Bigger Constitution

When hunting the shark in Jaws, one character says, on looking at the size of the shark, “You’re gonna need a bigger boat!”  The USA has elected a big orange baby who lives on narcissism, toadying and vengeance.  He appears to have no regard to the rest of the world outside his own fake tanned body and therefore uses no diplomacy at all except “I want” and “I get”. This is pretty unacceptable behaviour from a child not much over the age of 6 months, in an adult it is quite inappropriate and in a politician unforgivable, in the president of the USA it is terrifying for every country in the world.

However that is not the problem as I see it.  The problem is the way that the USA political machinery is constructed.  And, flawed though it always was, we all see it falling apart before our eyes.  No one wants to say no to the orange baby, well no one in the Republican Party anyway.  I recently read Noam Chomsky’s book, “Who rules the World” – not his best work by any means but then he is a very old man and none too well  From that interesting book I see that what Trump is actually doing in foreign policy is what most of the, perhaps, all, the presidents of the last 7 decades wanted to do, but they were a little more diplomatic about how they said it, although not how they did it.  Kidnapping Maduro and a few nasty bombing raids on Iran hardly compares to the destruction of Iraq, the overthrow of democratic governments who didn’t tow the US line in South America and the Middle and far East and the consequent bloodbaths and environmental damage.

Where Trump differs is that he likes the idea of complete power and his advisors and experts showed him how to achieve it when he returned to the White House.  He said that citizens of the USA would not ever need to vote in an election again and he wants to make that happen.  He is taking away the gap between the Judiciary and the politicians in power, he is removing, or trying to remove the franchise from all people who do not vote his way and he is doing this by copying from the method of that excellent dictator Hitler’  Tell a lie and just keep telling it.  Follow it up with more and more lies and stifle or even murder the opposition and you will find that it all disappears.  I am not saying Trump is like Hitler politically, though he is psychologically, but merely that he has followed him in how you can win power legitimately (more or less) and keep it without worrying about elections.

So what is the solution to prevent the world’s most powerful democracy from becoming the country with the world’s most unaccountable leader?  Remember he already has immunity that many dictators probably envy because it was awarded to him on a gilded plate.  He literally can do no wrong.  The answer is to draft and push through a new part of the constitution which includes making it illegal for the president to interfere with the judiciary, and get on with it pronto before Harvard’s famous law school becomes the Trump Center for Immunity in Public Office.  I am no lawyer, I read Chomsky 40 years ago when he was a leading philosopher and linguist, but to watch the pathetic farce that passes for the Republican party makes me very sad and if there is no brake on Trump, short of  his natural demise, then the USA will not be welcome in civilised company.