I think a lot of US citizens believe that once Trump leaves the White House magically things will improve. They fail to see that Trump is merely a local symptom of a global problem: the rise of populism. That’s why we have Brexit, Le Pen, Babic, Salvini, AfD, Bolsonaro, et al. All democratic systems are falling to blustering charlatans who incite the dull-eyed drooling howling mob, just as Plato explained will always happen to every democracy in time.

Brexit and Trump demonstrated to everyone everywhere that pathetically infantile lies and impossible promises will always sway the mob provided they are delivered in simple-minded sound-bites that even the most intellectually under-privileged can memorize and happily chant for years to come.

At least things are moving quite rapidly now, so we can watch the final stages of representative democracy turn into de facto tyranny and finally surrender our absurd fetishization of an approach to governance that is utterly incapable of functioning in a complex inter-connected global world. Unfortunately the horrors to come may last centuries rather than mere decades.