Dear Mr. Madison, you stuck us with Trump

Dear Mr Madison,

I am writing this open letter on a matter of urgency.

You and your colleagues did good work in Philadelphia that summer of 1787. You shaped a “presidential” republic in a world crowded with “monocrats,” as Mr Jefferson liked to call crowned heads. And it worked. At least, it worked through the distinguished succession beginning with George Washington, John Adams, Jefferson, you, Monroe, and John Quincy Adams. Then came a bump: Andrew Jackson ignited a “democratic” revolution in 1828 and capricious, often uninformed, gusts of popular sentiment played a mounting role. The original Electoral design eroded, under which independent electors made the choices and peer judgment of character was paramount

Indeed your original system was“elitist” in assuming political literacy among the choosers.

American political society was a small world then. But if you could see what passes for political argument now and compare it with the “Federalist” essays you and Hamilton wrote in support of constitutional ratification in New York, you would be dismayed -- pleased, that scholars of American politics and government still take bearings from your essays. But Donald Trump probably never heard of them, and by his own confession gathers notions and attitudes from television talk shows.

I’m not suggesting that there have been no fine presidents since the original design began to fade. Lincoln, the two Roosevelts, William Howard Taft and Harry Truman, among others, offer arguments to the contrary. But has the really bad news reached you and Plato there in the Elysian fields? Trump won in 2016 — the first clearly unqualified president in American history, easily replacing Millard Fillmore among the nincompoops.

By boasting that his inauguration was viewed by a larger crowd than Obama’s, of whom he throbs with envy, or indeed any audience in the history of the universe, he inaugurated a counterfeit system of information. It continues. So far, by the unofficial count of the Washington Post, Trump has committed some 2500 false or misleading statements. In his usual fits of psychological projection he accuses critics of “fake news.” But he is the real faker, the real daily assassin of truth. Given a chief executive who cares nothing for accuracy, and has a false and degrading insult for his critics every day, “the consent of the government” is a joke. Trump is not only insulting but capricious and vulgar. No other presidents have waged continual war on the rule of law, on “so-called” federal judges, the FBI and the national intelligence community. His habitual pout is a giveaway; he has the moodiness of a brat.

Why then, if Trump is unqualified by ability or temperament, isn’t he impeached and thrown out? The problem, Mr. Madison, is that while your constitutional design included an impeachment article and a provision that “high crimes and misdemeanors” are grounds for trial and possible removal, those legalistic terms are vague.Trump may well be accused of some kind or degree of criminality — eventually. But when? How long, O, how long? In fact, the issue with Trump is an issue of character, temperament and fitness. His obvious liabilities are not criminal but “civil offenses” — and we need a remedy for civil offenses that doesn’t depend on the criminal code.

You, sir, left this area of presidential discipline utterly ambiguous. Are we, for instance, to read “high” as a modifier of “misdemeanors,” as in “[high] crimes and (high, understood) misdemeanors”? Even when impeachment works indirectly, as in Richard Nixon’s case, the process takes months or years to creep to a conclusion. There are those who speak of Section 6 of the 25th Amendment as an alternative, but its provisions were framed with physical debility in mind, and its procedures are so unwieldy as to be all but useless.

You and your colleagues could hardly have imagined, 231 years ago, with George Washington presiding at the constitutional convention, that the likes of Trump would ever reach the presidency. But there he is, and your machinery is threatened with chaos and breakdown, as Trump and his gang undermine its morale and institutional structure. Some may argue that a different form of instability lies at the other extreme if presidential dismissal is made easy. But I, for one, would risk the instability we associate with our friends in France and Italy in preference to another hour under Donald Trump.