alt Hacker News> Trump isn't exposing new weaknesses in our system; the weaknesses have always been there.
exactly there; the system relies on everyone following the rules and doesn't have much in the way of remediation, other than impeachment, if the president just decides to ignore the other two branches. possibly SCOTUS, but they've hamstrung themselves with their recent decisions
And interestingly; its not clear to me that we'd have a better system if many of these weaknesses were patched. As software engineers might say, the quickest way to fix all the bugs in a system is to delete the system; the quickest way to a government perfectly resilient to authoritarian control is a government which simply can't do anything. This services no one.
At the end of the day, you can build safe-guards, and the American system of safeguards is among the best in the world. But, we also need leadership that can and will act to solve emergent problems, lest we cannot adapt to an evolving world. And, honestly, America has struggled for the past 20 years, especially since 2008. Our solution to everything has been "throw money at it", when we don't have the money we abuse our position as global reserve currency to just print more, and no one in charge has had any desire to think critically about how we get out of that hole, or how we solve any of the other problems the country faces smarter not richer.
I don't know if Trump and his team will make the problem better or worse. I feel pretty confident that they'll make it worse for some already-marginalized people, and I wish that wasn't the case, but the world that is likely to happen should we not solve these problems will not be kinder to them than the one they're in right now. Someone like Trump was guaranteed to happen after our insane, elitist, kick-the-can-down-the-road response to the GFC and COVID. There were saner voices in the room at those times. No one listened to them.