Button up! Trump plays with fire

America's constitution allows for the impeachment and removal of presidents and vice-presidents only when they have been found guilty of “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors”.

America's constitution allows for the impeachment and removal of presidents and vice-presidents only when they have been found guilty of “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors”.

The optimism of the Founding Fathers encouraged them to set the bar that high, their assumption being that clowns would never be elected — they didn’t see Twitter coming down the tracks.

The country, though, has endured and survived leaders who could not be saluted as the brightest and the best.

A sanitised account has Lyndon Johnson describing Gerald Ford as a man unable to walk and chew gum simultaneously. George Bush Jr noted that that the “vast majority of our imports come from outside”, and felt sorry for the French because they didn’t have a word for entrepreneur.

Vice-president Dan Quayle couldn’t spell potato.

Donald Trump, the current incumbent in the White House, who recently felt the need to explain that Puerto Rico is an “island surrounded by water”, is setting new standards for buffoonery, claiming via Twitter personal responsibility for America’s unblemished aviation safety performance in 2017, and telling North Korea that his nuclear button is “much bigger and more powerful” than Kim Jong-un’s.

Just school playground bragging, or a warning that his big button is dangerously close to a tiny mind?