The President of the United States is an ill-informed, semi-literate, coarse, narcissistic buffoon whose actions are routinely irrational, childish, venal, self-serving, corrupt and destructive. He is historically unpopular. On the other hand, the vast majority of the American people are well-intentioned, decent folk who are quite uncomfortable with what is going on. So why can’t they stop this fiasco?
Strangely, the answer appears to lie in the word itself, or, more precisely, in the acronym FIASCO. I’ve concluded that those letters stand for Fear, Ignorance, Antiquated Systems, and Corrupt Oligarchs.
There are three distinct aspects to the rise of fear as an impediment to calling out the current administration for its sins. Those three distinct aspects are fear amongst members of the general public, fear amongst elected legislators, and fear amongst senior government officials.
Amongst the general population, there is fear that speaking out about the craziness will invite retaliation, which could include violence by individual MAGA enthusiasts (who may well be armed), or, as we have seen, violence by agents of the federal government engaging in disproportionate acts up to and including extrajudicial killings in the course of implementing the President’s orders with respect to immigration and asylum. These events have gotten considerable attention in the national and international press and media, and it should surprise no-one that they have produced a chilling effect that has frightened many of the potential critics of the regime into silence.
Fear amongst the elected legislators has some of the same elements, but, more importantly, involves fear of losing one’s elected office. That fear is much greater in the United States than in Canada, because, unlike Canada, in the US it costs vastly more to get elected, and holding elected office in the US is a route to acquiring significant wealth. The sources of the vast sums spent on elections in the US also tie in with my comments in the “Corrupt Oligarchs” part of FIASCO (see the related later section below). I wrote about the vagaries of US election finance in November 2025 in this magazine, and that article can be found here.
In that earlier article, I explained how American legislators need to stay on the good side of the party leaders to get the vast sums of money needed to run campaigns and get re-elected in the US, and that most American politicians need/want to get re-elected to stay on the gravy train. I contrasted it with the Canadian rule set, which, unlike the US, heavily restricts donations to political parties and campaigns, and where, in contrast, legislative office is usually not a route to great wealth, and, indeed, many Canadian parliamentarians that I have known earned less as MP’s than they did in their prior occupations.
Thus, in the US, any legislator in the President’s own party who criticizes the actions of the President, no matter how foolish or inappropriate those presidential actions may be, risks losing the office and losing a fortune. And even opposition legislators doing so may be at risk too if they speak out and criticize the President, as vast sums will then be spent to defeat them.
Fear amongst the senior government officials is less complicated. Even when such an official is stating a simple matter of fact, if it happens to contradict a statement that has been made by the President, then that bureaucrat will probably be dismissed. Given that the President has only the most fleeting acquaintance with actual fact, this dichotomy happens with frightening regularity.
The ignorance that is the feedstock for FIASCO in the US falls into two broad categories, which are (a) cluelessness in general, and (b) extra cluelessness about anything outside of the United States of America. I wrote about these two phenomena in June 2025 in this magazine, and that article can be found here. I’ll repeat a bit of it here, with some updating.
(a) Surprisingly, most Americans are fairly clueless as to how their system actually works. It has become mundane to bemoan the decline of primary and secondary education in both the US and Canada. Curmudgeons like me are certain that curricula have been dumbed down and that expectations of performance have diminished sharply. It might be true. Most of my university teacher colleagues, on both sides of the Canada/US border certainly think so, when they feel pressure to dumb down their first- and second-year university courses because of the inadequate preparation of the new entrants arriving after having finished high school.
But not everything is worse. Of late, some emphasis on STEM subjects has alleviated some of the fears in the experimental disciplines. But not in civics (or whatever it is called now). The problem is especially acute in the US, where the politicians have, of late, tended to meddle (to varying degrees) in what is taught.
In my extensive travels in the US, since 2008 (about 1800 days over the last 18 years) I have been struck by the remarkable variation of knowledge of Americans about political processes in their own country. I did encounter quite a few Americans who were well-informed and exceptionally knowledgeable and erudite about their politics and governance, and very keen to share the knowledge. But the vast majority that I met knew dramatically less about their own country, its polity, history, and machinery of government than a foreigner like me did. What they did “know” was the collection of myths, tropes, oversimplifications and slurs which were especially widely circulated in their region or within their social, economic, racial or ethnic groups. Consequently, they were (and are) constantly at risk of being persuaded to vote for something which is very much not in their interest, without realizing that they are doing so.
(b) Most Americans have almost no real knowledge about the rest of the world. That Americans are mostly ill-informed about the world outside of their country is not entirely their fault. It has long been observed that citizens of a relatively self-sufficient great power do not routinely have to take into consideration what goes on outside their borders. That is natural. On the other hand, the educated citizens of a small nation which relies on many things from its neighbours are usually very well informed of attitudes, issues, tensions and political trends in the countries around them, and even quite a bit about others far afield that they may rely upon.
Thus, we are faced with an America which is a hegemon or near-hegemon that expects to have the major say in what goes on pretty much anywhere in the world, while most of its citizens do not even have a framework for understanding the actions that their country is taking on the international stage. This can make for some pretty weird foreign policy choices, especially when the motivation for many of those choices is often the effect that those choices might have on domestic politics in the US. The history of US relationships abroad is littered with bizarre choices that have backfired, including a few in this hemisphere, where they pretend to have a historic special role and have, on occasion, boasted of special knowledge.
Thus, we should be unsurprised when their handling of especially difficult files, like the Russian war against Ukraine, the status of Taiwan, or the now 77-year-long war in the Middle East, does not produce the result they predicted.
Much less successful, however, have been attempts to pressure or persuade other very different cultures to do things “the American way”. That has led to embarrassing failures in many parts of the world. Vietnam, Cuba, Afghanistan, and Iraq spring to mind, of course, but there are lots of other settings too where the “one size fits all” approach ended up costing blood and treasure, to no permanent useful purpose. Thus, a lack of depth in their understanding of the broader world gave the American people unrealistic expectations of many of their international initiatives, and the subsequent failures of their foreign policies has made a considerable portion of the US polity cynical about engagement abroad, and has encouraged the rise of an ill-informed variant of isolationism.
Nor has the situation been improved by having a chief executive who sees all diplomacy as an analog of a slightly dicey commercial real estate transaction. The current spat with Canada, intended no doubt to distract attention from the colossal blunders with respect to Iran, is a case in point, and has been replete with untruths about Canada which most Americans won’t spot.
Americans tend to think of the United States as a “new” republic, as their national story focusses heavily on their break from the “old” world, achieved by the American Revolution. However, the way the US is run actually looks like a throwback when compared to most of the developed states which are also now democracies. In part, this is because the US Constitution covers such a wide range of matters and is so hard to amend.
Rather than trying to do an extensive survey of the “antiquated” and inadequate rules or systems, I shall touch on only six of them which, in my view, do not meet any reasonable test of modernity and which interfere with the ability of the majority to select and hold accountable those who govern them.
1. Bizarre discrepancies exist in voting weights: In the US some votes count vastly more than others. And I’m not talking about minor differences, like the ones we have in Canada, where some constituencies have one and a half or even twice the number of voters of some other constituencies, thus diluting the votes of those casting their ballots in the more populous ones. No, I’m talking about imbalances on an almost unimaginable scale.
Take, for example, elections for the US Senate, which is the most powerful of their two federal legislative bodies. Each state elects two members to the Senate. Wyoming has a population of about 588,800, and California has a population of about 39,360,000. Hence, one vote for a Senate candidate in Wyoming equals 66.9 votes in California. Want to increase your political influence by almost two orders of magnitude? Just move from California to Wyoming.
This effects spills over into the allocation of votes in the Electoral College, which chooses the President, so that even when voting for a President, a vote in Wyoming is worth 3.71 votes in California.
The overall impact of these imbalances is to dramatically weaken the political power of more populous states, which usually means effectively reducing the value of votes in large urban areas. Hence, the US government will always have a massive rural bias. Vast numbers from urban areas will feel disenfranchised, and many complex governing issues will be trivialized.
Additionally, gerrymandering of district boundaries to suppress representation of the opposition party or parties is rife, as the redrawing of electoral district boundaries is done by the party in power in each state legislature, rather than by a neutral and independent commission. That technique has been used in the past and still continues to be used to a considerable degree to disenfranchise the opposition or minority populations, and has been a favoured tactic of racist politicians.
2. The President is not accountable: The Supreme Court in the US has handed the President enormous power by deciding that he has a vastly greater level of legal immunity than the leader of any other developed, nominally democratic state. The convictions of Sarkozy in France and of Bolsonaro in Brazil for their various misdeeds are examples of holding national leaders to account, but it seems extremely unlikely (or essentially impossible) that a US President could be held accountable if he or she committed similar offences in the United States (and contemporary reportage suggests that such offences have indeed taken place).
3. Faint hope for the 25th Amendment: The 25th Amendment to the US Constitution came into effect almost 60 years ago, and was intended to establish a straightforward process to replace a President who was no longer fully capable of carrying out the duties of that office. Section 4 of that amendment deals with replacing a President who is incapable, but who does not so declare voluntarily. A declaration to invoke it requires a majority vote of the members of cabinet, or more precisely “ a majority of the principal officers of the executive departments”, which is a fancy way of saying the same thing.
The framers of that text had always assumed that the cabinet would be composed of somewhat distinguished public figures who had show a high level of expertise, accomplishment and responsibility in order to be appointed to such a post. No-one had anticipated the current cataclysm in which the majority of members of the Trump cabinet are mere lickspittles of the President, and who were notably undistinguished in their prior lives, and therefore could never be expected to show any autonomy of judgement.
Interestingly, in the parliamentary democracies based upon the UK model, like Canada, the risk is rather lower, for two reasons. First, the parliamentary caucus of the party of the Prime Minister of the day can vote to select someone else as PM in such a crisis. And secondly, the members of cabinet in a modern parliamentary democracy, are themselves elected members of parliament. This was not always the case, as there was a long history, until a few decades ago, of occasionally selecting ministers who were not members of the House of Commons, in order to get special expertise or geographic representation. This has abated, so today all ministers have competed for and hold parliamentary seats in their own right.
So, the current incumbent President, by virtue of having subverted the customary notions of the sort of person who would be appointed to lead an “executive department”, has made the use of Section 4 of the 25th Amendment essentially impossible.
4. The 73-79 days allowed for revenge: In every democracy in a developed state other than the US, when a governing party loses an election to another party, the new government takes office quite promptly, i.e. within a few days. In the US, however, the elections take place on the Tuesday following the first Monday in November, and a new President does not take office until January 20th of the following year.
In the late 1700’s this may have made some sense, because, after elections in the individual states, and the careful confirmation of the counts of those elections for the Senate and House, the newly selected and designated members of the Electoral College had to get on their horses and ride to Washington, settle in, celebrate Christmas and New Years, and then convene to confirm what everyone already knew. Thus, by rule, 73-79 days elapse between the election and the change of government.
This gives the incumbent about two and a half months to scheme against his or her successor, which is exactly what President Trump did in the last months of 2020 and the first month of 2021. While the manoeuvre failed, despite the scary attack on the US Capitol building in January of 2021, it underscores the fragility of a system which leaves power in the hands of resentful, defeated politicians for such an extended period.
5. The resurrection of antique acts without legislative approval: One technique which President Trump and his closest confidants have used very effectively to subvert the customary balance of powers in the US and to allow the President to arrogate unprecedented power to himself is the use of powers found in acts passed anywhere from 96 to 49 years ago, and which were never intended for the contexts in which he has used them (or the pretexts he uses to invoke them). Most of these relate to tariffs, which is the President’s go-to lever for pretty much any application of pressure short of war. (The old adage that “if your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail” seems especially apt here).
Even when the courts eventually get around to declaring such efforts illegal (as they have in one especially egregious case so far), the turgidity of legal process in the United States and the extreme politicisation of judicial appointments robs this curative route of most of its offsetting influence.
These devices for stealing power from the House and Senate might have been less problematic if they were either kept up to date or subject to some sort of sunset doctrine. (As a curiosity, one notes that even a very early document in one of the first colonies, The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, adopted March 1, 1669, and largely written by John Locke, contained a sunset provision. It was #79 of the 120 provisions, and erased any law on its 100th anniversary if it was not passed again.)
If the US House and Senate do not take a stance on what they consider to be (or not to be) a sufficient emergency for the President to arrogate to himself the powers that those two bodies normally hold, then the President and his coterie will continue to find antique bits of legislative detritus to justify his power grab.
6. The opposition is always leaderless: In virtually every democracy in a developed country, political parties normally have leaders. An election defeat may or may not trigger a leadership review, but in most cases it does. That review either sees the leader confirmed or a new leader is selected by some sort of vote within the party. To proceed for years at a time without a confirmed leader is normally seen as tantamount to dissolving the party.
Not so in the United States. Following a defeat in a presidential election in the US, the defeated party neither formally confirms the failed candidate as the party leader, nor does it move to select a new party leader. This situation persists for roughly 3.7 years, and then, with what seems like only days to go before a general election, the party picks a presidential candidate who is then the party leader. This bizarre sequence has many harmful effects. First, in the absence of a leader, the defeated party cannot have a consolidated platform for the 3+ years after a general election. Its many tiny spokespersons may differ from one another in their views and emphases, shredding its political impact. This leaves the party in power with very much the same advantages as the government of a non-democratic autocracy. Furthermore, selecting a party leader only moments before a general election means that there is almost no time for that new leader to unify the party and put their stamp on it, and certainly very little time for a new leader to evolve their brand and develop a competent and publicly recognized leadership team.
Consequently, the electorate does not get to watch leaders develop over time, before deciding whether to give them the highest office, which is an important aspect of the popular assessment of leaders in most democracies. The last-minute selection of a leader militates against choosing promising leaders who still need a bit of development, and favours insider stalwarts who are unlikely to bring much new to the table. In those rare instances when the last-minute selection process does pick a true outsider, the long normal slog of doing politics for a few years before a general election is not available to the party to weed out an infelicitous choice. In most democracies, a party leader who performs poorly for a couple of years may well be replaced by the party even if a general election is looming on the horizon, but, in the US, another disadvantage of having a leaderless party between elections is that the time to watch, vet and possibly even replace a mistaken choice of leader is wasted.
It need not be this way. There is no requirement in the US Constitution to handle party affairs in this way. The political parties are essentially private membership clubs, and can set up their procedures in any way they wish. There is no impediment of substance to prevent the Democratic Party in the US from choosing a party leader now, and no impediment, if they wish, to choosing a different leader to run for President in 2028. The party is following a rule set of its own devising, and is too steeped in the history of this wacky approach to change its club rules.
As for the Republicans, had they selected a new leader right after Donald Trump’s defeat in late 2020, either they would not have selected him, or, if they had selected him, they would have had many years to change their minds by seeking a leadership review, as they watched him sink deeper into goofiness and corruption.
Any nation state in the developed world invariably contains a certain number of very rich people. But there is huge variation from country to country in rule sets and customary practices, so that (a) undue political influence of the wealthy is more tolerated in some nations than others, and (b) there are wide variations in toleration of the use of wealth to “purchase” or otherwise procure various forms of favours and exemptions from the authorities.
The current conditions in the US are uniquely favourable to both of these dystopic forces. As a result, the US is gradually shifting from “imperfect democracy” towards “hybrid regime” in the two best known rating systems for evaluating such trends. Naturally, these changes limit the ability of the majority to put the brakes on such nefarious activities.
The relatively recent change which has enabled much of the undue political influence of the wealthy relates to election financing rules. Of course, no election campaign can be run without some money. However, in the United States, the 2010 Citizens United decision removed all restrictions on independent political spending by corporations and unions, because of the court’s view that such restrictions would violate the First Amendment’s free-speech protection. The resulting tsunami of money, via political action committees controlled by candidates and parties, has polluted the electoral process ever since. Thus, in the US today, a successful election campaign is, of necessity, hugely expensive. Hence, any elected person who wants to stay in office must constantly seek these significant pools of funds, either from donors, or from the national party organization (who got it from donors). And, as noted above in the section on “Fear”, there can be substantial economic advantages to keeping the party brass happy and staying in office.
The fact that election campaigns in the US are now always expensive also means that candidates without plenty of campaign money are very unlikely to succeed, which militates against the election of individuals who find the current election financing processes repugnant.
In contrast, the Canadian rule set is profoundly different. In Canada in 2026, no person may give more than $1,775 to a political party during that calendar year, and that single limit includes all donations to the campaigns of any of that party’s candidates and the party itself. Corporations may not donate to political parties. An individual who is also a candidate may contribute no more than $5000 to their own campaign. On the other hand, there is considerable public funding for political campaigns; after an election a party can claim and be reimbursed by the government for roughly 50-60% of approved campaign expenses. This very sanitized system largely prevents very wealthy individuals or enterprises from swamping the process with money and implicitly buying future favours.
In the United States, we see very wealthy individuals getting a wide variety of special treatment by government, including appointments for which they have no known qualifications other than a willingness to prostitute themselves to a corrupt regime which, among other sins, has already been used to vastly enrich its chief executive (despite a constitutional provision that was once believed to bar the President from using the office to enrich himself).
So, in a bit of defence of some of the oligarchs who are funding the current craziness, perhaps their lot includes a fair number who wouldn’t be corrupt if the system didn’t facilitate and encourage it. Indeed, some of them might argue in private that they are corrupt in self-defence, because if they did not aid the regime in its undemocratic urges, they would likely find themselves on the outs with it, and could expect to be disadvantaged, and even persecuted for not providing their “tithe” to the church of Trump.
So, there you have it. The mass of well-intentioned Americans cannot stop the fiasco because of FIASCO.
But to be fair, the United States is not an actual autocracy, despite a non-trivial drift in that direction. Its political processes could still recover some of the legitimacy they once had, though a full recovery is unlikely anytime soon.
After all, in a full-fledged autocracy, the acronym FIASCO would likely stand for fear, intimidation, assassination, subjugation, and corrupt oligarchs. While the trends in the US are indeed worrisome, it’s not yet at that terrible point. Our American friends have some difficult choices to make, and we hope they choose well.
