Donald Trump, a convicted felon, an unashamed racist, an unapologetic misogynist, a habitual liar, a climate change denier, and a twice-impeached former President, returned to the White House through democratic elections, fair and square. Trump's victory shocked many, but this is not the first time a malignant personality has been elected to a high office.

Hitler also rose to power through a legitimate democratic process. He convinced the German voters that the German Jews were behind the humiliation Germany suffered under the Treaty of Versailles. He blamed the Jews for collaborating with the enemies in the First World War and called them “vermin.” The strategy worked. He got elected, became a dictator, and killed an estimated 6 million Jews. Emulating Hitler, Trump blamed immigrants, particularly illegal immigrants, for all of America's woes, from crime to economy to housing to health care, and threatened to expel the estimated 11 million “illegals”. Like Hitler, the president-elect called his opponents at home “vermin”. It worked.

Pundits, professors, pollsters and significant newspaper columnists, who until a day before the election were predicting a close election, are now in overdrive dissecting the unexpected result—what Harris and the Democrats did wrong that culminated in Trump's triumph and what will be the impact of the four years of the Trump administration domestically and internationally. Surprisingly, these analyses do not explore the deficiencies in the United States Constitution that enabled an unrepentant felon to rise to unchecked power.

The American Constitution

The US Constitution is the world's first national constitution, ratified in 1788. A product of a compromise among various warring colonies, the slave owners in the South, and antislavery citizens in the North, it was a remarkable document at the time and is still in force.

However, many of its requirements are inconsistent with modern times—for example, the allocation of Senate seats. The Constitution allocates two seats to every state, regardless of population size. Thus, California, with a population of nearly 40 million, and Wyoming, with a population of about 500,000, have two seats each in the Senate, contrary to the fundamental tenet of modern democracies where population sizes determine the number of representatives. The skewed system gives the smaller states an oversized voice in the powerful Senate, a significant advantage to the Republican Party with a stronghold in these states. It was this undemocratic Senate which refused to ratify Trump's impeachment by Congress twice and bar him from future elections.

The lifetime tenure of the Supreme Court judges is another serious flaw in the Constitution. Lifetime tenure was intended to insulate justices from partisan politics. “Once a justice is confirmed and takes a seat on the court, they're not beholden to anybody”. But those ideas have gone by the wayside as the President's nominations to the court have become increasingly partisan. Flags symbolising opposition to the outcome of the 2020 election, which Trump lost, have been displayed on the front grounds of a Supreme Court judge’s home; the wife of one of the judges has been found working with those conspiring to subvert the 2020 election.

Conservative judges, who call themselves “originalists” (while deciding a case, they interpret the Constitution as the founders would have interpreted it), are in the majority in the Supreme Court. How they get into the heads of these 18th-century men is anyone's guess, but in most Trump-related litigations, they have decided in Trump's favour. The Supreme Court could not or would not stop a felon from contesting election to the highest office in the land, while many ordinary felons are not even allowed to vote. One recent decision of the Court was to grant the President immunity for all his actions as head of the Executive branch. Dissenting Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned that the decision would set future presidents as “a king above the law”.

With control of both Houses of Congress and a Supreme Court stacked with a majority of compliant conservatives, Trump will have a near-absolute grip on all the levers of American power for at least two years until the midterm elections. The checks and balances imagined in America's 1788 Constitution will be virtually ineffective for these two years unless Congressional Republicans show some spine and rise to challenge Trump's excesses. If they don’t, Trump’s monopoly of power will continue for the entire four years of his term unless the mid-term elections change the control of the House of Congresses.

If Trump does everything he has promised—and given the appointments in his administration announced to date, there is no reason to believe he won't—the United States will be in serious conflict with itself in the coming four years. Its impact will be felt worldwide, not just in economic and military matters but also culturally.

Impact on Nepal

Trump is a highly transactional individual. He will only give something away if he gets something back in return and with a profit. Under Trump, the volume of US aid to Nepal will likely depend on the degree of Nepal's collaboration with the administration in pushing its agenda to challenge China's growing global influence. Given Trump's anti-immigrant bias, in the coming four years, the number of visas granted to Nepalis is likely to reduce significantly; there will be no Diversity Visa (DV), no family-sponsored Green Cards (Trump has consistently opposed both DV visas and family Green Cards); and naturalised Americans, like other naturalised citizens, will be under constant threat of denaturalisation for the slightest infringement of US laws. An accomplished Nepali engineer who came to the United States in 1992 told me, “There is no certainty that Trump will not resume the aggressive denaturalisation process he started in his first term”.

Trump's victory will also have a significant cultural impact on future generations in the US and around the world, including Nepal. Upon confirmation of Trump's victory, my seven-year-old granddaughter quipped, “Now I can say and do anything I want”. Thinking of children growing up with such a mindset is worrying. There is no doubt Trump's behaviour over the last eight years provides a feeder to our political leaders who are unashamedly corrupt and have a penchant for personal insults and dehumanisation of their opponents. If the American President can do it, why not us?

Trump's election was America's moral collapse. With control of both houses of Congress and a compliant Supreme Court, the democratic levers of change in America are now near nonexistent. Trump is virtually the only source of power, the “king above the law”. This is not good for America or the rest of the world, including Nepal.

I hear the echo of my feelings about Trump's election in the words of a celebrated Canadian journalist, Andrew Cohen: “All my life, I have been an admirer of the United States and its people. But I am frightened of it now, and I am even more frightened of them”.