Fat Boy Has Fallen

I guess our best bet now is that Trump suffers a fatal heart attack between now and his inauguration.  I mean, he is a fat bastard, I say fat, but grossly obese would  be a better description, and we're constantly being told by the medical profession that being overweight is a one-way ticket to all sorts of fatal shit.  Except that there seem to be a Hell of a lot of fat bastards wandering around with no sign of popping their clogs, leading me to seriously question medical opinion, (not for the first time).  But to get back to the point, even if Trump was to shuffle off this mortal coil, it still wouldn't do us much good, as all that would happen is that JD Vance would step up to the Oval Office - which is possibly an even worse prospect than another four years of the Fat Boy (I'm unreliably informed that that's what his Secret Service security detail call him).  As I've noted before, in any political system, there are so many layers to government that, in order to ensure fundamental change, just assassinating the figure head is unlikely to change anything.  Under the US system, for instance, you'd have to simultaneously get rid of the President, Vice President, Speaker and pretty much all of the cabinet in order to completely remove all of the existing chain of succession - most of whom would, as most of them are appointed by the sitting President, simply represent continuity.  So, right now, a 'Fat Boy Has Fallen' situation would not, in itself, be sufficient to ensure change.

Which is why, everywhere other than in dictatorships, political assassination is very ineffective tool for effecting radical change.  Indeed, where the leader is targeted because they are perceived as being too oppressive, it can have the opposite outcome, with their hand-picked successor using the assassination of his predecessor as a pretext for further repression.  Which is why, where democratic regimes are concerned, military coups tend to be the preferred method of radical change, as they remove completely the entire top level of government and circumvent all existing political norms, allowing democracy itself to be suspended while the new regime rewrites constitutional arrangements either to favour themselves or try to prevent the democratic process from being captured by extremists in future elections.  Obviously, all of this is academic as, no matter how much we might loathe the likes of Trump and the ways in which they manipulate democratic systems to their own advantage, political assassination and military coups are clearly an unacceptable way to effect change.  We should, instead, have faith that the system can survive blips like Trump and eventually correct itself.  That's the text book answer but, are there ever circumstances where, in a democracy, it would be legitimate to remove an elected leader by force?  At what point does a regime become so repressive and reactionary that the use of violence against it could be justified?  Because the weakness of democracies is that they are based upon the premise that the people who seek election are reasonable individuals committed to maintaining the norms of the system.  But what if someone comes to power who doesn't respect these norms and either disregards them or changes the system completely, to circumvent the usual safeguards that restrict their power and the rights of citizens?  Just how far down such a road would we have to go before their violent removal would be legitimate?  I suspect that this is a question that Americans might find themselves having to ponder over the next four years.