Aisle 47 – Installment 3 – POTUS – Avoiding Future Dictators

This is the third installment in the short blog series, Cleanup on Aisle 47, which is meant to present ideas on rebuilding and strengthening U.S. democracy.

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POTUS Breaking Every Democratic Norm

Donald J. Trump is a piece of work, isn’t he? He has broken every democratic norm and law he can think of, taking a metaphorical wrecking ball to the Constitution and a literal one to the East Wing of the White House. He has unilaterally declared war on Iran and Venezuela. In Venezuela, he had the president and his wife kidnapped, this after having 163 people killed on 47 boat strikes in international waters since September 2025, including an illegal double-tap killing of survivors from a stricken boat. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_strikes_on_alleged_drug_traffickers_during_Operation_Southern_Spear)

In Iran, his cosplaying Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, (who ordered the double-tap killing of the aforementioned boat) has brushed off the U.S. bombing of a girls’ school that killed 168 children. Trump, in his desperation to end this unnecessary and illegal war that has closed the Strait of Hormuz and throttled the global oil supply, has threatened genocide against Iran and the country’s civilian infrastructure if it doesn’t capitulate to his demands. All of this breaks U.S. and international laws, with the double-tap killing and threat of genocide being international war crimes. He has lost his war in Iran, signing an agreement that gained the U.S. absolutely nothing and Iranian leaders everything they wanted, and more. The agreement has since been shredded and the war continues, with Iran now targeting the Bab el-Mandeb Strait for closure. (https://time.com/article/2026/07/15/iran-war-bab-el-mandeb-strait-trade-route-houthis-threat/)

Trump has been impeached twice, convicted of 34 counts of business fraud, stolen classified documents, was found by a jury in a civil trial to have sexually abused a journalist, attempted to overthrow the U.S. election by urging his supporters to attack the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and is working hard to keep the public from finding out his involvement with convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. He has shared an AI image of himself as Jesus healing a sick man and attacked Pope Leo in multiple social media rants.

His ICE agents have kidnapped immigrants and citizens alike off the streets and detained them in horrible conditions in concentration camps. On January 7, 2026, one of his ICE agents murdered Renee Nicole Good at point blank range in Minneapolis. On January 24, 2026, a group of his ICE agents murdered Alex Pretti, shooting multiple times into his lifeless body. Trump has sent thousands of ICE agents to the Minnesota and other states to intimidate residents with violent and lawless actions, violating our constitutional rights and indiscriminately arresting whoever gets in their way, sending them to concentration camps with horrifying and deadly conditions or deporting them as fast as possible, often to countries where they have no connections. They have also targeted CHILDREN, lurking at bus stops and schools to kidnap them, and used one 5 year old as bait to detain his father. This is unconscionable.

ICE’s killing spree continues. Within the past week, ICE has murdered three more people, including Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Texas, Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Maine, and an unidentified man in Florida. (https://prospect.org/2026/07/15/ice-murders-continue/)

Trump’s list of criminal offenses against the U.S. Constitution, federal laws, the American people, immigrants, and democracy is so long it will take many books worth of future analysis to catalog them all. But, catalog them, we must. Naming his crimes is part of holding him accountable for them.

Preventing POTUS’s Abuses of Power

To prevent these sorts of abuses in the future, we need to implement new and updated laws and provide mechanisms for strict accountability, beyond simply cataloging them. No more of this pardoning of criminal presidents (like Richard Nixon) or impeachment without removal from office (Trump twice). The what-about-ists will also bring up Bill Clinton’s impeachment for his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Because of the power differential between Clinton and Lewinsky, this was an abuse of the office and, in my opinion, warranted Clinton’s removal, as well.

However, we need to be careful because a situation could arise where the majority party in Congress could decide to impeach a president of another party for political (not criminal) reasons and have them removed. Instead, we should have different levels of accountability depending on the severity of the behavior or action. So, different forms of censure and restitution, with impeachment and removal being the highest level. If a president is found guilty of murder and/or international crimes, prison (including at The Hague) should also be an option. (The U.S. is not currently part of the International Criminal Court, but should be, so our leaders can be held accountable for international war crimes. https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/09/02/qa-international-criminal-court-and-united-states, https://www.justice.gov/ag/media/1450826/dl)

No one, not even the president, is above the law in the United States. This should be written in plain language in the Constitution. 

Which leads to the first of many things we need to do to keep dictators from taking over the country. We need to overturn Trump v. United States, a decision by the Supreme Court that allows the president full immunity from illegal acts committed while in office. (https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-939_e2pg.pdf) The six pro-Trump members of SCOTUS made this decision, though likely only for Donald Trump. I can’t imagine they would have done so for a president who was a Democrat.

We also need to reject the idea of a unitary or all-powerful executive branch that overwhelms the other branches. The framers of the Constitution never intended for this and were correct in creating three co-equal branches of government to provide checks and balances on each other, the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial branches. However, they didn’t foresee two branches giving their power up to the third branch. There need to be changes in Congress and SCOTUS to bring them back to their checks-and-balances power.

There also need to be some independent government agencies that are protected from the whims of the president, like the Department of Justice and Federal Reserve. Now that SCOTUS has decided that all federal employees (except those at the Federal Reserve) can be fired by Trump at will by overturning Humphrey’s Executor, we’ve got to fix that, too. (https://www.npr.org/2026/06/29/nx-s1-5816232/supreme-court-ftc-independent-agencies-humphreys-executor, https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-332_qn12.pdf) These independent agencies need to be bolstered and protected, so they can’t be taken over by the president.

Aside from his criminal behavior, Trump is obviously suffering from serious physical ailments, including advanced dementia. The 25th Amendment to the Constitution has a process for removing a president who is unable to carry out their duties, but it doesn’t allow for an independent medical evaluation of a president’s physical and mental health. It’s all on the president, vice president “and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide” to make that determination. With Congress stacked with Republicans who support Trump, we see how well this amendment works. It may as well not exist at all, except the section that says the vice president takes over if the president dies or resigns, and that’s actually covered in Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution. Given the circumstances with Trump’s dementia and the discussion over the effects of aging on President Biden, the 25th Amendment needs to be updated to provide for an independent evaluation of competency.

I’ll go even further and suggest that we may need an upper age limit on serving as president. With Biden being criticized for his age (he was 81) until he dropped out of the 2024 presidential race and Trump exhibiting all sorts of age-related issues at the age of 80, I’d say our upper tolerance for the age of the president is 80. I’ll admit, this is ageist and makes me uncomfortable, though we do have a starting age for being eligible to be president – 35 – because we recognize there has to be some life experience to serve in such a position. As a middle-aged person who is feeling the effects of aging myself, I can’t imagine having the stamina at 80 to lead the United States.

We could do without an upper age limit on the president if independent evaluations of a presidential candidate’s health were required and made public prior to election, as well as requiring regular independent health evaluations of the president while in office. Independent evaluation and a public report are key here. None of this keeping your health a secret and allowing your personal physician to lie about your condition. If you are going to serve as president and your health determines your level of service, the American people need to know the situation.

That doesn’t mean someone with a serious health condition can’t serve. President Franklin Roosevelt had polio (and kept it secret) and served four terms. But, we should be aware of what’s going on and how the president’s health is being managed. Further, we should be told whether presidential candidates are exhibiting dictatorial qualities, such as narcissism, a lack of empathy, sadism, vindictiveness, and paranoia, so we know who we are voting for.

Because Trump has been cagey with his finances throughout his life and is enriching himself through the presidency with bribes, suing the IRS so he can steal taxpayer money (the case he settled with himself in order to create the $1.776 million slush fund to pay off the January 6 criminals who attacked the Capitol), stealing Venezuelan oil and personally pocketing the proceeds, engaging in cryptocurrency markets, goosing the stock market with announcements about ending the Iran war, and back-door deals the likes of which we probably won’t know until after he is out of office, we need to require presidential candidates to release their tax forms and provide other financial disclosures. We’d have to determine how many years of tax forms to require (7, 10, 15?). We can no longer leave this up to candidates to decide whether they will provide them. If they refuse to provide them, they are disqualified from running.

Further, POTUS must divest of all stocks and personal investments. No gaming the monetary system for personal gain or illegally accepting bribes and gifts, or turning financial and business interests over to family members to run. Trump has done all of these and, according to Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution, should have been removed from office. That he hasn’t been shows this part of our democratic system has been broken and needs to be fixed. I think a number of things could help with this, including improving the functioning of Congress and SCOTUS.

There need to be limits placed on Executive Orders. Trump and the goons in his regime have decided that if he writes an Executive Order, it is automatically law. This is not the case. Executive Orders that go against current law are not allowed, but everyone seems to believe they are law because Trump says so. So, then, we need to shore this area up and put more stringent limits on Executive Orders, plus determine sanctions if a president writes an Executive Order that is in defiance of the law.

Another place we need limits is with presidential pardons. Trump should not have been allowed to pardon the January 6 participants, particularly because he was being investigated for encouraging them to attack the Capitol. Nor should he be accepting bribes for pardons. He and any future president should be impeached and removed from office for doing so. Here is a nice explainer on presidential pardons for further background: https://govfacts.org/criminal-justice-public-safety/criminal-courts-legal-process/pardons-clemency/the-presidential-pardon-power/ What other limits would you put on presidential pardons?

So many of Trump’s criminal activities as president are new to us in terms of scope and severity. While he was running for president for the 2024 election, he was under federal criminal indictment for his role in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and for taking classified documents after his first term as president. There have been other presidential candidates under federal indictment, but none for trying to overthrow the government. (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2023/04/01/trump-presidential-candidates-ran-under-indictment/11582983002/)

Obviously, we need some way of dealing with this situation if it occurs again in the future. At the very least, if a presidential candidate is under federal indictment for criminal activities related to time in federal office, this case should be fast-tracked through the legal system. No allowing the president to delay, delay, delay until he is elected and the case is dropped. The other option is to allow the case to move forward even if the candidate is elected and hold them accountable while in office.

Something new with Trump is his rule by social media, where he issues edicts and fires government personnel via social media posts on Truth Social or X. This has got to stop. Anything POTUS says on social media should not automatically become law or have an effect on government in terms of firing people & etc. There should be laws limiting the use of social media by politicians for government purposes. Such posts should not automatically become policy. Further, the president should be held accountable or sanctioned for inflammatory, dishonest, or libelous posts.

Okay, this is a lot to digest, so I’ll stop here and hand it over to you.

What other ideas do you have for limiting the president’s powers and preventing the position from being taken over by an anti-democratic/dictatorial or incompetent person? How would you build on or change what I’ve suggested here?