Paul Krugman: Trump Makes Caligula Look Pretty Good [feedly]

Paul Krugman: Trump Makes Caligula Look Pretty Good
http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2017/08/paul-krugman-trump-makes-caligula-look-pretty-good.html

"The Worst President Ever™":

Trump Makes Caligula Look Pretty Good, by Paul Krugman, NY Times: Even before the media obsession with Hillary Clinton's email server put The Worst President Ever™ in the White House, historians were comparing Donald Trump to Caligula, the cruel, depraved Roman emperor who delighted in humiliating others, especially members of the empire's elite. But seven months into the Trump administration, we can see that this comparison was unfair.

For one thing, Caligula did not, as far as we know, foment ethnic violence within the empire. For another ... Rome's government continued to function reasonably well despite his antics...

Finally, when his behavior became truly intolerable, Rome's elite did what the party now controlling Congress seems unable even to contemplate: It found a way to get rid of him.

Anyone with eyes — eyes not glued to Fox News, anyway — has long realized that Trump is utterly incapable, morally and intellectually, of filling the office he holds. But in the past few days things seem to have reached a critical mass. ...

Everyone in Washington now knows that we have a president who never meant itwhen he swore to defend the Constitution. He violates that oath just about every day and is never going to get any better.

The good news is that the founding fathers contemplated that possibility and offered a constitutional remedy: Unlike the senators of ancient Rome, who had to conspire with the Praetorian Guard to get Caligula assassinated, the U.S. Congress has the ability to remove a rogue president.

But ... all we get from the vast majority of elected Republicans are off-the-record expressions of "dismay" or denunciations of bigotry that somehow fail to name the bigot in chief. ...

The fact is that white supremacists have long been a key if unacknowledged part of the G.O.P. coalition, and Republicans need those votes to win general elections. Given the profiles in cowardice they've presented so far, it's hard to imagine anything — up to and including evidence of collusion with a foreign power — that would make them risk losing those voters' support.

So the odds are that we're stuck with a malevolent, incompetent president... If so, we have to hope that our country somehow stumbles through the next year and a half without catastrophe, and that the midterm elections transform the political calculus and make the Constitution great again.

If that doesn't happen, all one can say is God save America. Because all indications are that the Republicans won't.

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