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DC Edit | Disruptor in White House

Sustaining freedom in the very country that has been a model to the rest of the free world in the post-modern era is under threat

The curious case of an anarchist sitting in the White House has become the biggest challenge to the American democratic election system that goes back to 1788.

This is also a unique affront to the orderly manner of electing a US President once in four years, a tradition that has managed to overcome a civil war, two World Wars and myriad natural calamities.

Sustaining freedom in the very country that has been a model to the rest of the free world in the post-modern era is under threat thanks to a truculent President who seems consumed by a morbid fear that he is not going to be re-elected.

Donald Trump’s obstruction of the first 2020 Presidential debate, which has been looked up to as a model platform for contestants to air their views on everything considered worthwhile under the sun, was clearly not “presidential”.

And that is a respectable description of the behaviour of an obstreperous businessman who seems to mock at every opportunity the very country that gave him a fair opportunity to go for the highest office.

So frustrated was his opponent, the former Vice President Joseph R. Biden, that the elder statesman lost his cool to say - "Why don’t you shut up, man." The badgering by Trump got worse to the extent Biden freely used various other epithets to counter someone clearly out of line.

It was not only the traditional decorum of the debate that Trump hit for six with his harrying tactics more in keeping with a boxing ring, his lies and the sneering derision he aimed at Biden.

Members of his own Republican Party members are now aiming to distance themselves from him because their President failed to rein in white supremacist groups.

In casting doubts on postal ballots and other inflammatory pronouncements on the legitimacy of the election, Trump may be opening it up to interference from outside elements, mainly from Russia. Right thinking people will agree that the only way out may be for the American people to vote overwhelmingly against a beneficiary of an honest democratic system

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