This Is What Happens When You Elect A Turd as President

[Pat Mustard]

Actually, I think this is what happens when an empire has run its course. The US stepped off this cliff many years ago but the first part of the fall wasn't bad; good view, a cool breeze, we could pretend we were looking down at the rest of the world from a well earned or god given mountain top. It looks different with the ground rushing toward us at fatal speed, but it is way too late to step back from the edge of the cliff.

Well put. But I must disagree with your conclusion, It's not too late. With the realization that there is something profoundly wrong with an electoral system that in order for it to function, many billions of dollars need to change hands.
It's a fucking F T Barnum road show, the best snake oil takes all. How the general populace will come to this realization, I have no idea. It's a game of blind poker, the one with the most money wins.

The larger the mob, the harder the test. In small areas, before small electorates, a first-rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even the mob with him by force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second and third hand, and the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most easily adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.

The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

Henry Louis Mencken.

Bit too late though.

My highlight.

But the problem with that thinking is that the empirical fact is that the Republitraitors had to disenfranchise ten million US citizens, refuse a couple million more on the day as they didn't have the id declared illegal by the Supreme court, and refuse to count who knows how many more votes (we know of the 75,000 uncounted Clinton votes in Michigan because state law said they coudn't yet shred them, how many more in states like Pennsylvania or Florida where there were 4% plus discrepancies between exit polls* and counts). And even at that they had to resort to the anti-democratic^ mechanism of the electoral college to crown Herr Oberststurmbanngroppenfuhrer Drumpfuck.

*Which are by far the best measure of checking the legitimacy of a result, so much so that if there is a two percent discrepancy the US government will refuse to acknowledge the declared winner as the legitimate government in any foreign election.

^Yes the EC is anti-democratic it had two purposes, 1) to allow the south a disproportionate level of power (along with two senators per state) in effect an effrot to make slavery permanent, and b) to ensure that the untitled aristocracy which controlled the US at independence would not be troubled by a popular candidate inimical to their wants.