I am not a citizen of the US and my understanding of that nation is abstract and relative. Its most characteristic feature is that it has no history, seen at least from my own perspective: some of my ancestors already many thousand years on this island, others here for only a thousand years. From this perspective, I would say that what most saves people from themselves is customary inertia, doing today what we did yesterday, while all the time wanting to do something else. And what maintains social coherence is the fact that most people do what their forebearers did, and that includes the ruling class - however you characterise this group, aristocratic, bourgeois, bureaucratic.
There is a degree of customary inertia in the US, but it has been imported from elsewhere - Europe and Asia - and so abstract in relation to the social whole. Because of this, its ruling class must operate through abstract values, centred on the idea of the integrity of the legal system, and organised intrinsically as a bureaucracy. Such a system is very fragile: at its core it is dependent upon language, not habit. It is an untrustworthy foundation, open to lies and misrepresentation.
The Comey Rule shows very clearly this fragility. The bureaucratic structure of US government is very apparent, there are rules for everything, and seniority within this system is based on knowledge of these rules. And what happens when someone is in a position to bend/ignore these rules?
Donald Trump is a businessman, and business can be seen as a form of legalised theft: profit means that you never get what you pay for. Donald Trump might be President, but he is still a businessman: so profit is still his motive-power. The novelty of this situation for Donald Trump is that for the first time in his life he is dealing for something other than more money. If he was a philosopher he would tell us - in his best-selling memoir of his presidency - that what he most learned from the exercise of pure power is that the Ego is absolute, with no limit to its appetite for enlargement.
Of course, there is a second lesson here, but whether Donald Trump could learn it, or if he did, could he admit to it, is not clear. It is this: Donald Trump's Ego is not merely Donald Trump. If Donald Trump comes to seem to be an empty windbag, then that will be a sign that his Ego has broken free.
Another four years of Donald Trump could well be a very interesting spectacle.
Points for the integrity of the acting and production, and most of all for the insight of the writers. Less points because portrayal of Donald Trump verged on the hammy.
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