@b05

This is a stark reminder of the difference between a president that loves the country, it's principles, and all the people and one that could care less about any of those things. “democracy only functions when its leaders remain genuinely, uncomfortably close to the specific gravity of individual human suffering” - Barack Obama on handwriting highly personal letters to 10 Americans each night of his presidency None of our presidents have been perfect, some have been pretty corrupt, and plenty have stepped on the values and principles of the country, but until Donald Trump, they all understood ultimately that being President of the United States carried with it a responsibility to protect the incredibly fragile nature of our system of governance. Certainly many of them would have loved to have been able to be dictators and violate all that we hold dear. Bush Jr. publicly said, “If this were a dictatorship it would be a heck of a lot easier... as long as I'm the dictator. Hehehe.” ― George W. Bush While Bush and others violated the trust of the nation on multiple occasions and allowed for bad things to be done in the name of the country, not even the man that openly wished for a dictatorship stepped over the line. All of the men that served as POTUS before Trump, no matter how many other corrupt or heinous things they did, held on to the things that allowed the United States of America to survive because they respected the structure of our governance, the base limits on the power of the presidency, and most brought with them if not real empathy, an understanding of the job being to be seen as serving the American people. That's not to say some didn't attempt to stretch things further than they had before in terms of grabbing more power, but you can see that ultmately they understood that the structure of this government was predicated on something that is impossible to enforce, that the people that serve in the office actually care about the survival of the system. Some may argue that this is the Supreme Court's fault for the immunity ruling and while it certainly made Trump feel like he could more easily get away with trampling on the rules of our system. I have no doubt that in the end it would not have mattered, because Trump has never truly cared about the country or any other human except himself. They may have all thought their way was superior, but every president in the history of this country understood that the strength of the nation and it's continuity required them to make decisions about the balance of power, the transition of governance, and the care of our citizens that would allow the nation to carry on when they were long gone. That value system has been devastated by Trump and the 30 million or so folks that worship him because his selfish and hateful behavior with no bounds, is a feature, not a bug. Trump has fully exploited the thing that has been our greatest weakness and until him our greatest strength as a nation and I'm not sure we can ever recover from it. You may not have supported Obama or disliked much of what he did, but his love of our constitution and more importantly his understanding of how critical it was to ground himself with empathy for average American citizens is a perfect example of why this grand experiment worked for so long, no matter how imperfect the system and the men that served as president may have been. (link to the original Twitter post in the first reply)

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