Bro we have the oldest still in use codified constitution in the world and haven’t updated it in 40 years, really longer. What exactly made you think this fucked up system was anywhere close to resilient?

You can impeach a president for any reason. You don’t need a crime or such committed, all you need is congress to do it.

Be careful what you wish for though since the other party could do “tit for tat” with the president you support.

It turns out that a handful of young land-owning white men from the 1700s, born almost 200 years before the advent of game theory, didn’t actually properly anticipate every way in which the political system they were designing could fail.

Our government leans heavily on decorum and good faith. Trump’s success has been due to his refusal to adhere to decorum and good faith. Our system doesn’t know how to handle that other than shaming and shaking fists so Trump gets free reign to do whatever he wants.

In 1776, people didn’t know what fascism was. Hell there wasnt even consensus on what capitalism was, Wealth of Nations was published that same year. They had never seen a capitalist system degenerate, as would happen in France under Louis Napoleon in the 1850s.

They knew what feudalism was, which was bad and a form of authoritarian autocracy, but this isn’t Fascism. They were afraid that the kings and queens would get restored, as revolutionaries (and capitalism was revolutionary and progressive at that time) they were safeguarding against a counter revolution which would come from monarchists.

There is no way they could conceive of a movement to overthrow capitalism, which they barely understood although being the revolutionary capitalist class, that would come from a greater demand of social reforms, one where the class they were a part of would rule society rather than just administer it as they had for centuries, one where a class that they didn’t even know about, the proletarian working class, would supplant them and bring greater prosperity and equality. This movement developed fully in Russia and Europe after the first world war when the last of the weakened feudal aristocracy destroyed their own continent to fight over scraps of colonial internationalism. A revolution in Russia inspired the global working class, especially where they were highly organized and industrialized such as Italy and Germany, and terrified the ruling capitalist classes of those countries.

In the shadow of the emerging workers movement grew the dialectical opposite and evil twin of German and Italian communism: Fascism. Fascists gleefully fight and kill communists, and desire power above all else, exploiting contradictions in liberal democracy (that’s “liberal” meaning supports private property, not cool liberals that like freedom and justice) to confuse the masses and gain power. The ruling classes, weakened by decades of militant worker struggles, assented to the will of the fascists and in a last ditch effort to preserve their dwindling control, handed power over to them. The rest is history.

The founders couldn’t conceive of the conditions you describe as they either didn’t exist or wouldnt be developed enough to study for 50-70 years. Not all forms of authoritarianism are the same. They thought they were doing away with their version of it. Besides, the “founding fathers” gags violently would have fucking loved Trump

The voters were supposed to be that check and the Framers were explicit in that it was part of how they designed the Constitution.

Even regarding electing a felon, the Framers didn’t want a case where one state pushed through a a felony conviction quickly to keep someone out of office.

The mechanism is the three branches of power providing checks and balances and voting. But when the people elect them to all three branches. It kinda defeats the purpose

You’d think a hegemony with a 100-years tradition of upkeeping democracy against major non-democratic players, would have some mechanism that would prevent itself from throwing down it’s key ideology.

“100-years tradition of upkeeping democracy”? That’s not even true in a very minimal definition of democracy, let alone if we also mean equal rights for all. Just off the top of my head:

The vote of racial minorities was not protected before 1965.

COINTELPRO was a thing just over 50 years ago, targeting whatever political group was considered undesirable by the FBI. The FBI was found to be using unlawful surveillance targeting protesters for the inexcusable killing of a black man by police as recently as five years ago.

Last election there was an attempt to overturn the election results. It’s not taken as seriously as it should have because it failed, but it was literally an attempt to overthrow democracy. It’s important to note that Trump was allowed to run for president and the case against him was dropped as soon as he got elected. I’m pointing it out because the system was already there to protect him and it’s not something that he caused through his own actions as president.

There are so many unwarranted invasions of other countries, assassinations, and human rights violations that I don’t even know where to link to as a starting point.

Don’t forget the large scale surveillance both within and without the country.

And then there’s all the undemocratic qualities of unregulated free market capitalism. Politicians are lobbied. News outlets belong to wealthy individuals who often have other businesses as well. Social media too. Technically, you get to cast a vote that is equal to everybody else’s. But your decision is based on false data, and your representative is massively incentivized to lie to you and enact policies that server their lobbyists and wealthy friends instead. Do we all really have equal power?

So if you mean democracy in a very literal and minimal sense, that the people have some sort of power through their vote, that’s technically still going on. If you mean in it a more general sense, where people have fundamental rights that are always protected regardless of race or other characteristics, and where power is not unfairly distributed between individuals and racial groups, then again not much has changed. Because that was never the case. If you think fascism was universally condemned then you just hadn’t realized how widespread and normalized it always was. Maybe fascism is growing. Maybe it’s becoming more blatant. But it was always there.

You need the other half of the electorate to agree

Well isn’t that the reason everyone uses on why America needs so many guns. So they can stand up to the government? But seems it ment standing up to a government giving more people rights not one taking them away.

Lol its called the 2nd amendment we just gotta wait for the new Luigi to drop

So, giving the public a means of dealing with tyrannical leadership, either through intimidation or something more, is literally and unironically one of the intended use cases for the second amendment. That’s not to say you won’t face prosecution, but there it is.

The country just elected this guy knowing that this is what he would do. That’s democracy.

we have systems for putting people like him in jail but we just didn’t want to do it

I’m told three marked bullets work wonders.