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Makes me wonder why we, for instance, require absolutely healthy sane fit people to send to the the Olympics, a space station or the moon, but leading an entire country requires only extraordinary charisma and absolutely nothing else.
> Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
The thing is, in order to lead, you need people to follow. Otherwise you're not a leader, you're just some loudmouth.
So it makes some sense that leading a country means being the kind of person that people are willing to follow. It's the "only" and "absolutely nothing else" parts that are the problem.
So we need some mandatory check(up)s on extraordinary charismatic leading people who have the power to wreak havoc when they are making stupid desicions.
We (as a species) are not really getting better at that, aren't we?
Looks like you can be both. And a puppet at the same time.
Take a look at this:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/06/opinion/trump-presidentia...:
> Instead of comparing what is happening under Trump with the situations in Hungary, Turkey and Russia, Goldstone argued that conditions in the United States are,
>> ironically, more like what happened in Venezuela, where after a century of reasonably prosperous democratic government, decades of elite self-serving neglect of popular welfare led to the election of Hugo Chávez with a mandate to get rid of the old elites and create a populist dictatorship.
>> I find that decades-long trends in the U.S. — stagnating wages for non-college-educated males, sharply declining social mobility, fierce political polarization among the elites and a government sinking deeper and deeper into debt — are earmarks of countries heading into revolutionary upheaval.
>> Just as the French monarchy, despite being the richest and archetypal monarchy, collapsed in the late 18th century because of popular immiseration, elite conflicts and state debts, so the U.S. today, despite being the richest and archetypal democratic republic, is seeing its institutions come under attack today for a similar set of conditions.
Trump is a symptom, not the cause. But a lot of people really want you to focus on him, to deflect the blame from themselves hopefully return to their prior "self-serving neglect of popular welfare."
For sure, but there's something to be said about nobody else being able to amass so much power with the right and losing to a saner candidate (Haley, Romney, basically anybody else).
> For sure, but there's something to be said about nobody else being able to amass so much power with the right and losing to a saner candidate (Haley, Romney, basically anybody else).
I'm not exactly sure what you're saying, but I think it goes back to him being a symptom. Trump has some personality defects, but those defects seemed to allow him to speak to real issues that prior political consensus wanted to ignore (e.g. questioning globalization and free trade orthodoxy, immigration). He got elected because he spoke to those things, but then that put his personality defects in power.
If the prior establishment had listened and addressed those issues, Trump would have never been viable. His existence as president is due to them arrogantly leaving those issues unaddressed.
Trump is logical outcome, not the cause. The hypocrisy that propped him up was not his. His morality was appealing to right wing people who have exact same morality.
Trump, Musk, Heritage Foundation, Roberts, Kavanaugh, Vance, Miller, Hegseth, congress republicans, evangelical christians, everyone who celebrated Sparta in here, wall street and billionaires, all the reactionary centrists forever defending right and scolding whoever opposes it.
So which specific ideas made you think "I'll vote for the rapist gameshow host?"
12 weeks of paid family leave? More solar power? Only government run prisons? Buying into Medicare at 55? Free in state tuition for families earning less than 125k?
That's what Gemini lists as her most progressive positions.
> That's what Gemini lists as her most progressive positions.
Actually what happened was Hilary Clinton was an unlikable and a champion of neoliberal technocracy, with maybe a bit of frosting on top and a side of entitlement.
It's worth remembering that, while much of the HN crowd loves neoliberal technocracy, it's not working for a lot of folks, often in ways that the statistics-obsessed nerds are blind to.
It's a damning indictment of Democrats that they've lost to Trump, twice. You'd think with all their scary warnings about fascism, they wouldn't have rested on their laurels and catered to their base as much as they have.
This is well beyond some basic excuse of 'bb-but look at the other choice', this is 'fuck them lets kick some shit out and fuck ya all' mentality when you run around in amok with chainsaw level of idiocy.
Keeping things as polite as possible of course, but not more.
> Hillary Clinton while pushing aggressively progressive ideas
This is a lie. Simple as that.
The establishment Democrats are not exactly "aggressively progressive" by any reasonable standard. They shunned Bernie Sanders, who still isn't highly radical.