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Comment by nilkn | Hacker News Reader

The power of the Presidency has been slowly expanded over the last few centuries. Each time, when the power was expanded, it was done so under a President who seemed reasonable enough that nobody was afraid of what the change truly meant. They knew that their current President wouldn't abuse it, and they didn't think much further ahead than that. Many of these expansions of power were made for very short-term political gain that seems downright silly in retrospect.

Trump should be a lesson that reverberates throughout future history on why we should always be wary of expanding the Presidency's power. There will come along a President every once in a while who will abuse every drop of power given to him and who will basically act like he's in an episode of Game of Thrones. The government should be designed to work fairly even with such a person in power.

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I warned my conservative friends of this under Bush. I warned my liberal friends of this under Obama. Neither cared so long as their guy was in power, and both whined about every expansion of power when the other guy was in office. For the majority, no lessons will be learned.

Me too :(

I have been encouraging people to up their security game. Finally got a bunch of people on Signal so that it is meaningful communications tool for me.

We have handed a man who appears mentally unstable, the ability to switch on a vast domestic surveillance network. The only thing that stands in his way are people trained under Bush / Obama to follow procedure. As this weekend's the immigration debacle proves, procedures are only as meaningful as the "small" people called upon to uphold.

I have no stakes in here (I'm not American), but as far as I know, he's just doing what he promised he'd do if he got elected. What you're asking for is... to protect people from themselves? I don't understand.

Many of his voters believed he wouldn't be able to do many of the outrageous things he promised...that's why they voted for him anyways!

But these people are now slowly warming up to reality :(

A majority of voters did not actually vote for Trump. And a majority of voters laughed off his promises because nobody thought he would be elected.

The foundation of "checks and balances" in the United States was that we have representatives that would speak for the people. Those congressional representatives would move the ball forward. The president was never supposed to have the power to create unilateral policy. In a sense, the people need protection from someone they never wanted in the first place. The majority of Trumps views are held only by the minority. This is what people need protection from.

A liberal democracy is not a tyranny of the majority (aka ochlocracy). Checks and balances exist, inter alia, to protect the minority who didn't vote for the president. (And in this case, possibly a majority.)

Plus, there's the problem of a gradual (or even sudden) erosion of checks and balances when one person has too much power and the distinct possibility that the electorate did not foresee all the long term consequences of getting such a person elected.

Of course, you may also go for Mencken's view that "democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." But that would require a fair amount of cynicism.

In my social circles we are ecstatic that Trump is following through on his promises.

I suspect your social circles will end up paying dis-proportionally once the bill for Trumps promises arrives.

It's about protecting the minority from the tyranny of the majority (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority)

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