Until recently, i.e., until the arrival of Donald Trump and his MAGA clones and the Woke speech police, the United States was a democracy legally balanced (more precariously than most Americans realized) between law and long-standing custom.

Over time some of those customs were changed by law or codified into law, but far from all of them. Although the separation of church and state is mandated by the Constitution, that separation was maintained as much by custom as by law.

What we’ve seen over the last few years is a war between the extremists of the right and the extremists of the left, a war exploited for his personal benefit by Donald Trump, which is bad enough, but what is even worse is the tactic he’s used to great effect.

That tactic is simply seeking out customs and practices that used to have a certain force, almost of law, and overriding them because they’re not enshrined in law. This is nothing new. It’s happened before, but never on the scale pursued by Trump.

Trump tears down the east wing of the White House because there’s no law specifically forbidding it. He orders the militarization of national guard units and attacks on foreign boats and ships as part of a “war” against supposed drug cartels, because there’s not a clear legal definition of “war.”

The U.S. legal system was never designed to have to respond to such acts on a short-term and timely fashion, which is one of the principal reasons why he’s getting away with so much.

The other reason is because extremists control too much of each major party, and the two parties are deadlocked because the party leaders are effectively controlled by their extremists, even though most Americans don’t want the extremes of either party.

As a result of Trump’s tactics, even without Trump, the U.S. will still face the problem he’s exploiting, and that’s the fact that, at present, it appears as if corporations, presidents, and bureaucrats can damn well do anything that’s not definitively prohibited by law – and that to stop that will effectively require an authoritarian state controlling everything because the majority of Americans either don’t care, don’t understand the problem, or support one or the other extreme.