From what I understand of the US Constitution, there is a very good degree of separation of powers along with checks and balances to make this very difficult to implement in a practical sense, and would necessarily require both houses of congress as well as the supreme court to all be complicit in the act, thus requiring more than just one immoral person to pull off.
Indeed, but it's not one person. It's him and apparently 40% of the population, and large parts of the Republican establishment have also fallen in line (and many more would have if another 5% had switched to his side and made him the frontrunner).
These things don't happen overnight, and the single most important firewall may be the presidential term limit, and the absence of any similar office (like Russia's "prime minister" that Putin switched to when he was term-limited, installing Medvedev as his puppet in the meantime).
I'd hope that the limit is such a binary line that 8 year's aren't enough to change that perception. But who knows? Maybe he could have created a narrative to legitimize another term. Some sort of crisis... The usual.
But, luckily, the worst now seems unlikely to happen. It still seems important to run up the score, and then we'll see how his party deals with it. Ideologically, at least on economics, there isn't much left of what was called conservatism a year ago.
> Indeed, but it's not one person. It's him and apparently 40% of the population, and large parts of the Republican establishment have also fallen in line (and many more would have if another 5% had switched to his side and made him the frontrunner).
I don't agree with this 40% thing because it's not sufficient to say that because they support him, they support his worst ideas. Maybe they support his best ideas, and have a high degree of confidence that the worst will not happen. Nobody has foreknowledge of what a President will actually do in office. We can choose to use our best judgment and apply it while voting - that is why everyone gets one vote, to exercise that judgment.
To argue that those who are voting for him are in favor of racism, bigotry, etc. is a generalization. Would you generalize this way about followers of any religion? Many religions advocate some oppressive ideas, but we give followers the benefit of the doubt beforehand by saying that unless proved otherwise, let's first assume that they are peace-loving tolerant people of faith who believe only the "good parts" of this book, and not the violent parts. We don't seem to be doing that in politics, and I think that's wrong.
