The Trump Card

As a subject of the United States, I follow the "elections" with some fascination. Choices have been degrading over the course of my lifetime and what passes for political discussion in the U.S. has followed the typical path of most empires, degrading into a polarized contest between two different parties at least one of whom refuses utterly to work with the other. That is how empires die. The Mamelukes, the Byzantines, Rome... all fall into a period when the leadership would rather tear each other apart in quest of absolute power than realize that they have much more in common with each other than not and consequently fall prey to internal or external forces that tear it apart.
I came across this item the other day, which illustrates exactly the situation and the problem: An Open Letter to My Friends Who Support Donald Trump
The current situation is that the Democratic Party, through disheartening fraud managed to secure the nomination of their preferred puppet candidate in their quest to implement a program that, prima facie, supports and improves lives of poor working classes, but which, in fact, merely supports the status quo. A status quo that has, over the past 30 years, pretty much destroyed the working class, the source of their wealth and power and alienated the internal proletariat, turning them into apathetic, passive  cynics at best, angry, betrayed enemies at worst, so eager for something other than the status quo that they will turn to the first enticing demagogue who appears on the horizon. And at the final state of dysfunction in Empires, a demagogue always appears to try and restore people to some time when they felt optimistic.
Enter Donald J. Trump, possibly the least qualified popular figure ever to vie for the crown oval office.
While neither Hillary nor Donald can alter the deeper course of decline of the American empire in its final days, there is a definite difference in how the process unfolds and I'd much prefer to have the Democrats desperately trying to fix the status quo than the kind of radical change this man represents. I know the American people are in about the same mental place as the people of 1780s France, or in the Weimar Republic, or the Kingdom of Italy, or the Russian Empire but it is possible to move from empire to post-empire without the cataclysm of social disintegration that Trump & the Republican Party will assuredly follow.
He has whipped up an increasingly large mob of angry supporters which will probably carry him into the the White House. But after that, he will have to deal with the reality that angry mobs who crush your enemies are not known settling down to make rational decisions about serious issues.
Unfortunately, Trump will likely become President, because of the way he is running his campaign, versus the way Clinton has been running hers.
He peppers his scrambled rants with grandiose feel-good statements that he will 'improve' things and plays on false-memories of some vague glorious past when America, for all its faults, was still full of optimism and drive, before the banksters, mainstream economists, professional politicians, and other fraudsters started eroding those hopes from the daily lives of most Americans.
Clinton is constantly being attacked by enemies who implicitly understand Goebbels dictum about saying something loudly and repeatedly until it becomes truth, and isn't apparently offering a grand vision. Mr. Hopey-changey pretty much destroyed the worth of that line of credibility when he utterly failed to make any meaningful course-correction in policy foreign or domestic and she hasn't come up with anything to match it. Yet. Most of her supporters are trying to rely on the failing strategy of scaring voters with 'he's awful' as their main argument and that is definitely not working. Moreover, the disaster of the scandal of the corrupt nomination process has pretty much alienated most of the support that might have made all the difference. Betrayal is harsh and I'm pretty sure that there are a lot of Bernie Supporters out there who right now want to see the whole mess go up in flames.
If Trump becomes President that will probably happen sooner rather than later.