Dana Milbank in today's Washington Post:
Unfortunately, a large portion of our voting population, with an assist from the archaic Electoral College, opted for the candidate with "talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity." Hamilton also never met the base of the rotted out Republican Party.When the framers used the phrase “crimes and misdemeanors,” borrowed from English law, they weren’t using misdemeanors in the sense of trespassing, or other crimes below felonies. They were talking about bad behavior; impeachment, James Madison wrote, was protection against a president’s “incapacity, negligence, or perfidy.”The framers assumed a president would be upstanding. Federalist Paper No. 68 says future presidents would likely be “characters preeminent for ability and virtue,” reasoning that the electoral process would eliminate those who had only “talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity.”Alexander Hamilton never met Donald Trump.
