I appreciate your desire to see a more humane and rational situation pertain but my analysis concurs with that of Plato, namely that democracy always ends in a form of tyranny. More importantly, representative democracy is unable to cope with a modern complex inter-connected world. So I don’t see the answer as a return to some notional golden age, because I believe the systemic flaws of democracy have always been high and are now catastrophic. I believe strongly that as we will prove unable to moderate the scourge of populism around the globe we must endure horrors and then hope that those left standing will look for better approaches to the problems of governance. This isn’t about Trump or the absurd Electoral College; it’s about Bolsonaro and Brexit and Babic and PiS and Fidez and all the other examples of inept blustering liars who achieve power by giving people simple-minded “solutions” to complex problems few understand and fewer still can imagine how to remedy. Trump is merely the USA’s local symptom of a deep and intractable global problem: representative democracy is no longer even vaguely adequate as an approach to governance.