While it’s true the Founding Fathers constructed our government with the idea of a possibly tyrant getting elected in mind, I don’t think they took into account the possibility of a huge portion of the populace getting raked into a cult of personality and abandoning both truth and reason. No matter what system of government you have, enough crazy people can fuck it up.

But it’s really more complicated than that too. Because Trump’s constituents aren’t actually “crazy,” and the question of why they decided to vote for him in the first place is an important one. Leftists are fond of pointing to the influence of the “strong man” and the appeal of resorting to xenophobia and scapegoating as ways in which Trump himself duped conservatives into voting for him, but when I’ve talked to conservatives about it, most of them have told me they haven’t felt well-represented by their own party for years. They also point to the fact that conservative views aren’t expressed by most major media outlets (the 24-hour networks), and pretty much not at all in entertainment media (Hollywood is unequivocally leftist), so they feel cut out of the national dialogue as well. Personally, I think this is all a boiling point response to the recognition that they’re losing the culture war and that future generations will not share their values, look, or act like them. And while I obviously disagree with conservative values, I am empathetic enough to acknowledge that realizing your culture, your group is going extinct is both depressing and terrifying. People in that kind of emotional desperation will vote for anyone who promises to make them the mainstream again.