Response to Paranoid and Vindictive Men

(See: Just Above Sunset: Paranoid and Vindictive Men)

Let me get this straight:

On Friday, Donald Trump is going into a meeting with the top leadership of American “intelligence” (in quotes, as he writes it), with whom he is having a public dispute in which he has publicly declared himself on the side of our nation’s foes, and is also apparently threatening to (or maybe "just dropping hints that he may”), according to the Wall Street Journal, “restructure and pare back the nation’s top spy agency”, that agency being the CIA?

In other words, if he doesn’t like the hand they deal him, he’ll reshuffle the deck more to his liking?

If true, this is indeed scary, partly because hints of this approach to governance (and he’s not even governing yet!) have not seemed to elicit the widespread panic it richly deserves, but also because it suggests we have need for a constitutional amendment to instruct us on how to deal with a leader who either (1) is pulling a “Nixon”, pretending to be crazy as a ploy to keep our nation's “enemies” off-balance, or (2) is pulling a “Nixon” in the sense of not just pretending to be crazy, but of actually being crazy.

Either way, we’d have a serious problem that we need to somehow deal with. The planet has already experienced, just within the past century, a nutcase national leader who’s way of dealing with his world was to try to scare everyone in it to the point of distraction, apparently not anticipating that they all might just kick the crap out of him — which, of course, they did.

How should we deal with that eventuality if it happens here?

Maybe we need some constitutional safeguard, in which a standing committee, including members of both houses of congress from both parties, plus all the sitting Justices of the Supreme Court, would meet and decide whether the president-elect — or even the president! — is or isn't a dangerous crazy-ass psycho, and should be forced to be analyzed by psychological professionals to determine whether or not his being president is a mortal threat to the country, and whether or not he is to be removed, and maybe even detained, until a new election can be held.

(And by “new election”, I mean a popular vote election, of course, with none of your “electoral college” funny business. If we get to set this up from scratch, there’s no reason that we can't do this right this time.)

Yeah, I know the real dangers in us setting up something like that — it’s easy to imagine some person or party misusing it someday — but as Donald Trump may soon prove to us, there might also be dangers in not doing it. Do we really want to take a chance that some minority of voters accidentally decides to hand over the country to, for example, someone working for our enemies?

Sounds a lot like that 1964 movie, Seven Days in May, "an American political thriller motion picture about a military-political cabal's planned take-over of the United States government in reaction to the president's negotiation of a disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union” — but with the twist in this version being that, this time, the generals would be right!

The bad news, of course, is I think that there’s essentially no chance of ever getting that passed, or at least not until after Trump is no longer in office, and that just might be too late.