Frank's Musings

President Donald J. Trump is so impulsive and untutored that it is hard to believe his claim of being a genius.  His ineptitude in dealing with the pandemic and with understandable social unrest as well international relations is evidence of his unsuitability for the job he holds. 

Nevertheless, there appears to be a solid 35% of the population who support his style of governing.  The reasons for that probably are largely related to disaffection with the administration of public affairs by what appears to them as a separate class of people who they see acting as if they believe they are entitled, by their God-given wits and their connections to a network of lucky wealthy, educated,  and mysteriously influential people who run corporate business and the government.

As long as that is true, representative democracy is a fiction for them.  They are captivated by a leader who appeals to their disaffection by promising and delivering chaos in state affairs.  Someone is a genius for having recognized that disaffection with the purpose of government and its relevance to peoples’ daily lives is very wide.  It is so wide that it has enlarged the proportion of the electorate who are ambivalent aout the outcome of a general election to around half of those eligible.   It thereby handed the 2016 election victory to those whose solution to their disaffection was to award the presidency to a demagogue who has used his position like a wrecking ball to destroy liberal democracy. 

Trump’s dominance of the political process has withered because of the embarrassment and disgust his conduct has created among the majority of the population.  Those people normally ignore electoral participation in the U.S. but recent opinion polls indicate that they may have learned that elections do matter.   It is, therefore, questionable whether Trump or the brains behind him can pull off a general election victory again in 2020.