Is Trump too dangerous to defeat?

Those of us who have travelled and lived long enough to experience democratic government in all its forms can only be recoiling in horror at the events of recent months.

I do not directly refer to impeachment proceedings against a United States President; or to the convolutions of a minority Government in the United Kingdom. Unsettling as they are there have been precedents.

What must concern anyone who believes in government of, for and by the people are the antics of those we have placed in these positions of power and the effect it could have, not just on us, but on those nations who in the past looked up to and respected our  systems and tried to emulate them.

As well as for those, trapped and oppressed by authoritarian regimes, who might have clung to the faint hope that our example might eventually result in a change.

How the autocrats must rejoice at the events in London and Washington – a Prime Minister who defies the law; a President who tears up international treaties and tips the bucket on his allies.

The dictators would see this as overwhelming justification for strong and inflexible leadership, keeping an iron grip on their populations as an inoculation against the infection of individualism and democracy creating such havoc in the so called Free World.

US President Donald Trump and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson have both backed themselves into corners of their own making. Johnson’s intransience will hurt his own country and damage the European Union, but the real danger lies with Trump.

An erratic and unstable US President who tweets about his “great and unmatched wisdom” has at his disposal matchless economic and military might. Already during his presidency we have heard threats to consume North Korea in fire, to obliterate Iran from the map and lately, to destroy the Turkish economy.

Should impeachment fail, which is likely in a highly politicised Senate trial, Trump may yet go on to win the 2020 presidential election. Even though the polls are against him, he can still rely on the antiquated Electoral College system to get him over the line — remember that in 2016 he lost the popular vote by some three million, but still won handily in the College.

Yet what if he did lose? This would leave him still in the White House with full presidential powers for more than two months between Election Day and the inauguration of his successor, the so-called lame duck period.

Might he decide to sign off with a dramatic gesture? Cataclysmic revenge on some of the enemies, or countries that have dared to defy him over the previous four years?

If so, who would stop him? The US Constitution, designed in a slow-moving, pre-technological age when it was assumed that those in leadership positions were always going to be reasonable men who played by the rules, is silent on the subject.

Asking these questions would have been unthinkable three years ago, but that was another time; a different world.