Opinion | We Don’t Need Presidents
I don’t think I’m breaking any new ground by saying that the last few years have been rough. Rougher than usual, for everyone. For as unpleasant as this stretch of time has been, it’s prompted an epiphany in both myself and hopefully many others; maybe we don’t need one leader with all this power.
The presidency of Donald J. Trump has shined a light on the office that can’t be readily ignored any more. Constant overreach,hand-waving judicial process, actively speaking out against democratic values. Literally holding hands with dictators and despots across the world. A clear contempt for anyone or anything that wasn’t one hundred percent in favor of everything he did. Supreme Leader Donny made it clear from day one what his agenda was, and it wasn’t like we didn’t see it coming either.
Presidents have been slowly inching their power outwards since the earliest days. Incrementally sliding the scale in their favor, Don-Don simply said the quiet parts loud. This, in turn, brings me to the main thrust of this piece.
Maybe entrusting all that power over the single most powerful nation in modern history tends to attract lunatics, and maybe having all the authority centered on one person is asking too much?
Donald Trump was hardly the only president to lie in order to achieve his goals. Ronny Reagan, with practically everything that ever oozed from his flapping face-chasm, which I could fill an entire article with. The Contras, the war on drugs, welfare queens, trickle-down economics, the list goes on and on. To Bill Clinton, with his affair and repeated appearances on Jeffery Epstein’s flight logs. To Barack Obama who amounted to being, to quote Youtuber and professional goofball ThoughtSlime, “a well-manicured fraud.”
Its also not like we haven’t adjusted the constitution in the past to better reflect changing values. The 13th and 19th Amendments come to immediate mind, which abolished slavery and granted women’s suffrage respectively.
I make no claims to being some towering intellectual, so I’m not nearly smart enough to come up with a workable solution to this. Perhaps more frequent elections, or appointing two heads-of-state from both parties to mediate. Perhaps increasing state authority to run themselves, or form regional senates. I don’t know, I’m not nearly smart or qualified enough to make any definitive suggestions.
I do know a problem when I see one, and I hope you can too. Its a matter of when until some slick-speaking sociopath can convince the right people into letting him (let’s be real it’ll likely be a man) be crowned Emperor of America Forever. Luckily Trump was too much of a boorish dipshit to pull it off, and the only support he could pull was from equally boorish dipshits the world over.
