Once upon a time, I found myself managing part of a large
outsourcing contract, with a customer who turned out to be, shall we say, a
little difficult. The approach to anything they didn’t like was a combination
of shouting and threats, and there was a lot they didn’t like and on which the
contract was either silent or vague. In an internal meeting, I asked the guy
who had negotiated the contract how on earth we’d got ourselves into such a
situation where there was so little clarity on the detail, and his response was
along the lines of, “We thought we were dealing with honourable people”.
An interesting, if less than entirely helpful response.
I wonder if the framers of the 22nd
Amendment to the US Constitution may have been suffering from a similar degree
of trust in the integrity of individuals. It seems to me to be crystal-clear
that Trump is ineligible to stand again, yet he repeatedly holds out the prospect
of serving a third term. But what’s not clear from the amendment itself is the
actual mechanism for preventing him from standing. Can the US equivalent of the
Returning Officer refuse to accept his nomination? Can the Chief Justice refuse
to swear him in? Or was it just assumed that making his ineligibility clear was
enough in itself? The issue would probably end up before multiple judges at
some point. It’s probably academic, though. I don’t think that Trump has any
intention of fighting another presidential election, even if the ravages of
time (he’s not a young man and is clearly deteriorating both physically and
mentally) throw at least a degree of doubt on whether he will be able to. He
was quite taken with what Zelensky told him some months ago about not holding
elections during a period of martial law – his preference is likely to be for a
third term without the bother of an election.
The framers of the 25th
Amendment may have suffered from a similarly touching degree of faith in
the integrity of individuals. Whilst they wisely foresaw the possibility that a
president might need to be removed from office if he was no longer able to
discharge the duties, including by reason of insanity, they don’t seem to have allowed
for the possibility that those given the responsibility for deciding that the
president was insane might be even madder, just better at completing an
occasional sentence. Those US citizens – to say nothing of the rest of the
world – resting their hopes on Vance and the Cabinet eventually deciding that
enough is enough should be careful what they wish for. There is absolutely no
reason for anyone to believe that the removal of Trump would end the nightmare.
The whole approach of governments the world over, including
Starmer in the UK, seems to be predicated on an assumption that there will be
an end to Trumpism in a defined electoral timescale. They need to be preparing
a Plan B.
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