The Age of Incompetence

Berkeley

ON Jan 20, 2017, US president-elect Donald Trump will take office having received almost three million fewer votes than his opponent; and he will work with a Republican Senate majority whose members won 13 million fewer votes than their Democratic opponents. Only the Republican majority in the House of Representatives, led by Speaker Paul Ryan, has any claim to represent a numerical majority of the 55 per cent of Americans who voted on Election Day 2016.

Mr Trump will also begin his presidency with an approval rating below 50 per cent. This is unprecedented - or "unpresidented", as one of his semi-literate tweets put it (before he deleted it) - in the history of such ratings. The government of the world's oldest democracy is, in fact, not democratic. Also unprecedented is the fact that so few members of the president-elect's own party, and none of the Democratic opposition, consider him to be qualified for the duties of the presidency, apart from serving as Cheerleader-in-Chief.