PRESIDENT TRUMP IS US GONE MAD
BY
DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS
29 April 2017
The failure of Hillary Clinton to win the presidency of the United States despite her great majority of popular votes overall may be attributed to the strategic error of her campaign in neglecting a few key states wherein she lost all the electoral votes simply because she lost the popular vote in those states by a very small margin, thereby giving Donald Trump a wide margin of electoral votes in the elector college, where electors do not vote their conscience, as was intended by the Framers of the Constitution, but almost all routinely cast all their votes for whosoever won the popular vote in their states.
That is, the Electoral College system has become a farce. The perversion of the electoral system in the United States was referred to by Walter Bagehot, in The English Constitution (1867), wherein he compared the virtues of the English Cabinet to the American Presidential system:
“The presidential system not only gives the executive power an antagonist in the legislative power, and so makes it weaker; it also enfeebles it by impairing its intrinsic quality. A cabinet is elected by a legislature; and when that legislature is composed of fit persons, that mode of electing the executive is the very best. It is a case of secondary election, under the only conditions in which secondary election is preferable to primary. Generally speaking, in an electioneering country (I mean in a country full of political life, and used to the manipulation of popular institutions), the election of candidates to elect candidates is a farce. The electoral college of America is so. It was intended that the deputies when assembled should exercise a real discretion, and by independent choice select the president. But the primary electors take too much interest. They only elect a deputy to vote for Mr. Lincoln or Mr. Breckenridge...." “The member of electoral college is but a messenger, a transmitter: the real decision is in those who chose him, who chose him because they knew what he would do.” (See Note)
President Trump, a consummate bamboozler, claimed that the election returns were skewed by fraud, that he actually won the popular vote, but of course there is absolutely no evidence of that or any of the other bizarre claims he has made before and after he was elected.
That is, after all, what a showman does. Nonetheless, many people thought the carnival would end the day he took office. It has gone on and on, and TV armchair psychiatrists have diagnosed him as psychotic instead of neurotic, the norm for most of us.
We apologize in advance for repeating the slanders in the interest of fair comment on the nature of psycho-political commentary: He is delusional because he supposedly believes that facts are fake; he is a malignant narcissist, a sort of devil who loves himself as god so much that he hates the humankind he would deceive and annihilate in a nuclear holocaust; he suffers from attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, as evidenced by his pacing about the White House in the wee hours, tweeting like mad, and muttering “To do or not to do, yes I shall but no I shall not, to do or not to do, yes I shall, but no I shall not, yes, no, yes, no, tweet, tweet, tweet. ” And that is not all.
The latest poll I took from a representative sample of a dozen people at the South Beach Crunch gym has The Donald’s worst sin not as groping, something women seem ambivalent about given the man, but, all answered “Yes” to “Is the president an egomaniac?” Some added obscene words next to the box, but that is outside the scope of the poll.
That was admittedly a loaded poll question, for whom do we love but ourselves when we love others? That is made obvious by the people who love the president very much. The only thing maniacal about self-love is when it is all too obvious.
In any event, narcissism is inappropriately applied to Mr. Trump because he loves nymphs, and that was not the case with Narcissus at all. And nowadays we have huge mirrors, so there is no chance he will drown himself in a pool.
The question should also be asked of ambivalent humankind, whom do we love most of all when we hate others if not ourselves?
Why, the President has just finished his first hundred days in the White House including weekends in his Florida Mansion, and, according to Leaky Leaks, people are confessing to priests that they want him dead as soon as possible, but are tormented by the thought that Pious Pence would take over, because they believe he is an unctuous snake so do not want to pray with him, or, even worse, Wily Ryan, because they see a satanic glow in his eyes.
There is no chance of impeachment because, as President Jefferson truly observed after resorting to it behind the scenes to prevent the judiciary from being an independent branch of government, impeachment is a farce that should not be tried again. That he was correct was proved, at least as far as presidents are concerned, by the impeachment of Presidents Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton. As long as Spin-The-President gives Republicans more wins than losses, and President Trump is their Bully-in-Chief, there will be no impeachment. There is no way the Senate would convict President Trump, anyway, at least not until after the next election.
The President’s cabinet could appeal to Congress to relieve President Trump from his duties if he were unfit, mentally incapacitated or certified insane by a bipartisan panel of psychiatrists. Forget about that. It is best for his councilors and department heads, if they wish to keep their jobs, to keep him in invisible chains, try to minimize his appearances so the public cannot see the drooling and slobbering attended to privately by his attractive daughter, probably the only person who loves him unconditionally as she does her best to distract him from tweeting and help him clip coins.
The best thing his advisors can do at the moment is familiarize him with one of the chief merits of President Calvin Coolidge (Silent Cal), who observed that politicians do little harm to themselves by keeping quiet. That is not always true, but President Trump should learn how convenient it would be for him to just shut up; that should in part defray concerns about his Mental Age.
The reality is this: President Trump is not really in charge of anything now, not even when he goes to the toilet.
That does not mean he is insane. We like to think one person can lead us into Zion, but our presidents are enchained by innumerable organizational influences from the day they take the Oath of Hypocrisy to serve the will of the people instead of their prejudices e.g. idiotologies and theologies, when they take office. The office changes the officer. President Ronald Reagan was once a bleeding heart liberal. President Franklin Roosevelt was once a fiscal conservative. And so on.
Alas, there is no such thing as the General Will of the People other than currents upon which leaders can bob as corks, swim downstream or sink trying to go against the flow, perhaps giving a little guidance along the way as pilots as circumstances force their hands.
It is a great deal of fun to poke fun at public figures, and even to despise them, but it is not politically correct to laugh at and despise mentally disturbed people. The cause of most mental disturbances in individuals will be found in society. That society is presently hysterical and obsessed, has nearly gone stark raving mad.
If this president be a Narcissus for his blatant self-worship, the reflection he is seeing in the mirror is the huge base of supporters who love him and would continue to do so if he shot a Democratic dead in broad daylight on Broadway. They love him for the reason that they love themselves, and they believe the circumstances they hate are unnecessary and can be changed for the better. We elect the leaders we deserve. What is definitely called for in all of us is therapeutic self-improvement. Then something constructive may be done.
XYX
NOTE
“It is true that the British House of Commons is subject to the same influences. Members are mostly, perhaps, elected because they will vote for a particular ministry, rather than for purely legislative reasons. But, and here is the capital distinction, the functions of the House of Commons are important and continuous. It does not, like the electoral college in the United States, separate when it has elected its ruler; it watches, legislates, seats and unseats ministries, from day to day. Accordingly it is a real electoral body. The parliament of 1857, which, more than any other parliament of late years, was a parliament elected to support a particular premier, which was chosen, as Americans might say, upon the 'Palmerston ticket', before it had been in existence two years, dethroned Lord Palmerston. Though selected in the interest of a particular ministry, it in fact destroyed that ministry. . . .
"The independence of the legislative and executive powers is the specific quality of the presidential government, just as their fusion and combination is the precise principle of cabinet government." “The executive is crippled by not getting the laws it needs, and the legislature is spoiled by having to act without responsibility: the executive becomes unfit for its name since it cannot execute what it decides on; the legislature is demoralized by liberty, by taking decisions of which others (and not itself) will suffer the effects.” “(T)he cabinet can compel legislation by the threat of resignation, and the threat of dissolution; but neither of these can be used in a presidential state. There the legislature cannot be dissolved by the executive government; and it does not heed a resignation, for it has not to find the successor.” “(U)nder a presidential government a nation has, except at the electing moment, no influence; it has not the ballot-box before it; its virtue is gone, and it must wait till its instant of despotism again returns.”
"It has been said that England invented the phrase, 'Her Majesty's Opposition'; that it was the first government which made a criticism of administration as much a part of the polity as administration itself." “There are doubtless debates in the legislature, but they are prologues without a play. There is nothing of a catastrophe about them; you cannot turn out the government. The prize of power is not in the gift of the legislature, and no one cares for the legislature. The executive, the great centre of power and place, sticks irremovable; you cannot change it in any event.” "(A) parliamentary or cabinet constitution possesses an additional and special advantage in very dangerous times...." "Under a cabinet constitution at a sudden emergency this people can choose a ruler for the occasion. It is quite possible and even likely that he would not be ruler before the occasion...." “By the structure of the world we often want, at the sudden occurrence of a grave tempest, to change the helmsman, to replace the pilot of the calm by the pilot of the storm...But under a presidential government you can do nothing of the kind." “There is no elastic element, everything is rigid, specified, dated.”
“Even in quiet times, government by a president is, for the various reasons which have been stated, inferior to government by a cabinet; but the difficulty of quiet times is nothing as compared with the difficulty of unquiet times. The comparative deficiencies of the regular, common operation of a presidential government are far less than the comparative deficiencies in time of sudden trouble, the want of elasticity, the impossibility of a dictatorship, the total absence of a revolutionary reserve.”
“…a strong cabinet can obtain the concurrence of the legislature in all acts which facilitate its administration; it is itself, so to say, the legislature. But a president may be hampered by the parliament, and is likely to be hampered. The natural tendency of the members of every legislature is to make themselves conspicuous. They wish to gratify an ambition laudable or blamable; they wish to promote the measures they think best for the public welfare; they wish to make their will felt in great affairs. All these mixed motives urge them to oppose the executive. They are embodying the purposes of others if they aid; they are advancing their own opinions if they defeat: they are first if they vanquish; they are auxiliaries if they support. The weakness of the American executive used to be the great theme of all critics before the Confederate rebellion. Congress and committees of Congress of course impeded the executive when there was no coercive public sentiment to check and rule them.”
Share
Save
