Surviving Trump Part IV

DESPITE TRUMP, despite the strength of his morally and intellectually bankrupt support base, there is hope, hope for repairing the damage they have done. It will take time, maybe years, for the American people to regain trust in our vaunted electoral process, including our common shared belief that voters, and not demagogues or corporations or courts of law, can and should determine who are chosen as our political leaders. The need for some basic reforms is now obvious. All candidates for high political office should by law be required to provide a full disclosure of not only tax returns, but financial dealings of all kinds. Assets of the Vice President and President should be by law placed in a blind trust, to prevent conflicts of interest at the highest levels of government. Citizens United, under which the Supreme Court ruled that vast amounts of unaccounted for corporate money can legally be injected into political campaigns, must be overturned. Congress has the power to do this. Jouralist David Cay Johnsotn, author of "The Big Cheat", suggest this. Another excellent source book is "Corruption In America: From Benjamin Franklin's snuff Box to Citizen's United". The codification of specific impeachable offenses would be of great value in making the impeachment process a legal as well as a merely political process. The list would include financial fraud, bribery, extortion, and perjury, among others. Nepotism, such as when JFK appointed his brother as Atttorney General would be clearly defined regarding which offices were off limits. Whistleblower laws, protecting those who reveal corruption, should be strengthened. Unspent campaign contribuions should by law be returned to the donors, rather than pocketed, as is the case now, by the recipients. When Trump established his "legal defense fund", and asked people to donate money to his insane attempt to overthrow the election results in the courts, small donors, merely by failing to put a checkmark in a small box, unwittingly allowed the Trump campaign to keep drawig money out of workkng class people's bank accoutns without their express permission. This outright theft was not widely reported. Under our current sytem, candidates may pass on unspent donations to other candidates, further corrupting the campaign financing process. The bottom line is; political campaigns should be publicly financed, and closely regulated to reverse our current system in which high political offices are bought and paid for. All these reforms would have preveneted Donald Trump from ever running for president, much less serving as president and committing multiple crimes while in office, resulting in his being impeached twice and numerous ongoing lawsuits, yet to be settled. And this alone, if for no other reason, would have made all these changes to our system more than worthwhile.