The election of the 45th President of the United States is being unusual for several reasons. One is that for the first time one of the contenders is a woman. But the biggest oddity comes from the serious doubts the other candidate, Donald Trump, has generated throughout the very long campaign. Doubts that cast shadows even on his democratic qualities. Doubts that stem from his hurtful statements about the generality of Hispanics, women or immigrants, from his smug ignorance of strategic and fundamental aspects of both national and international politics, or from his promises not to recognise the election results unless he is the winner. But is Trump the problem or just the symptom of a political system with hidden flaws? The fact is that almost 70 years ago, the logician Kurt Gödel warned of possible deficiencies in the American Constitution in this regard.
Gödel was a loner who spent most of his life thinking, probing the subtle world of sets, searching for the boundaries of what is logically admissible: whether in Hilbert’s formal systems, or in the universes that Einstein’s equations of general relativity allow, or even in the Constitution of the United States.
Of the few friends Gödel had, one was Einstein, with whom he used to walk almost daily in Princeton from 1942 until the physicist’s death in 1955. It was surprising to many that two such different personalities could be so close; according to Ernst Straus, who served for a time as Einstein’s assistant in Princeton, he was “sociable, happy, a sea of laughter and common sense”, 
whilst Gödel was “solemn in the extreme, very serious, rather solitary, and distrustful of common sense as a tool for reaching the truth”. But some who got to know both men quite well, pointed to another reason for the friendship; John Dawson, Gödel’s main biographer, wrote: “Einstein recognised that Gödel needed someone to look after him and gladly offered to be his protector”. As did John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern – the famous Austrian economist who wrote with von Neumann the first book on game theory.
Einstein and Morgenstern acted as witnesses when Gödel became a naturalised American citizen. A hearing was mandatory where the judge could ask the person concerned about certain aspects of the American Constitution before the oath of allegiance. Gödel was very concerned, as he claimed to have found a contradiction in the Constitution that could lead the country to a dictatorship like the one Hitler imposed on Germany. It should be recalled that Gödel became an American citizen in December 1947.
In fact, during his hearing with Judge Philip Forman, Gödel began to talk to him about such a delicate matter and, in view of the way the discussion was going, Einstein and Morgenstern had to intervene. Fortunately, the judge was the same one who had administered the oath to Einstein when he became a naturalised American a few years earlier, and the matter was brought back on track.
Apart from being a great logician, the best of all times, Gödel was also a great paranoid. He had, for example, serious problems with two of the most basic human needs: eating and excreting. He made his constipation problems obsessive, and for the last thirty years of his life he kept a meticulous daily record – five detailed notebooks have survived – of the laxatives and/or enemas he took. And he almost had to be forced to eat; possibly because of an ulcer, he kept to a strict diet for much of his life – otherwise he was afflicted with stomach problems. And it was not uncommon for him to become malnourished. Obsessed with a suspected poisoning, he stopped eating for several periods of time in the last years of his life. In fact, he died of starvation, a self-imposed starvation: according to his death certificate, Gödel died of malnutrition and starvation as a result of a personality disorder.
To what should one attribute these alleged contradictions that Gödel found in the American Constitution, which could lead the country into a dictatorship – logic or paranoia? Listening to everything Trump has said throughout this campaign, and seeing how he has come to the end with some chance of winning, one tends to think that Gödel’s predictions owe more to logic than to paranoia.
References
A.J. Durán, Pasiones, piojos, dioses… y matemáticas, Destino, Barcelona, 2009.
No dudo de las altísimas capacidades para la lógica de Gödel, de quien ya había leído antes. Por ello me resulta cuanto menos paradójico que a la vez fuese tan propenso a la paranoia, que no se suele caracterizar por tener algún tipo de fundamento lógico precisamente.