THE SHEER velocity of the wreckage is almost impossible to process.
“Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom,” Benjamin Franklin wrote.
In just the past few weeks, the American president has threatened military action against Denmark, a NATO ally, if it doesn’t surrender Greenland to the United States. He moved to punish a US senator — a retired Navy captain and combat veteran — for reminding service members they must not obey illegal orders. He posted a grotesquely cruel message on social media jeering the deaths of director Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele. He sent his press secretary to warn CBS News that unless it broadcast a presidential interview complete and unedited, “we’ll sue your ass off.” He deposed Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, then announced that the United States was now “in charge” of that country, and “we’re going to be taking oil.” He summoned Justice Department attorneys to berate them for not moving fast enough to prosecute his critics and opponents. And when an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis shot and killed Renee Good, an unarmed American citizen, the White House instantly pronounced her a “domestic terrorist” and refused to open an investigation into the shooting.
This is not normal political combat. It isn’t just more of the partisan roughness that Mr. Dooley had in mind when he remarked that “politics ain’t beanbag.” This is unabashed White House thuggishness, a vengeful aggressiveness that makes no effort to disguise itself by pretending to care about constitutional norms or democratic values. And all of it is cheered by tens of millions of Americans who cannot seem to get enough of President Trump’s cascade of gratuitous cruelty, insults, and threats.
When the president was asked in a recent interview whether he recognizes any check on his powers, he didn’t bother with euphemisms. “Yeah, there is one thing,” he said. “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
For anyone who takes the American constitutional system seriously, that statement is genuinely terrifying. Not because Trump is wrong but because — let’s face it — he’s right.
The British statesman William Gladstone praised the US Constitution as “the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man.” For more than two centuries, the self-correcting durability of the constitutional framework the Framers devised has rightly been regarded as a masterpiece of statesmanship.
But now the checks and balances on which that system depends are failing. For built into the constitutional architecture was an assumption of public virtue. It was not designed to contain a president who would openly declare himself restrained only by his own (nonexistent) morality and whose outrages would be endorsed by a major political party.
This isn’t a design flaw the Founders overlooked. It is one they were only too aware of, and to which they urgently called attention.
John Adams, in a 1798 letter to the Massachusetts militia, put it bluntly: “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Adams was stating a hard truth about political mechanics: A democratic republic depends on leaders who restrain themselves even when they have the power to act. Trump has announced he feels no such restraint.
George Washington’s Farewell Address warned against “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men” who would “subvert the power of the people” and usurp authority by flattering prejudices and inflaming passions. Read that warning, then read Trump’s social media feed. The first president described the 47th perfectly, 230 years in advance.
James Madison, addressing Virginia’s ratifying convention in 1788, stressed that the republic’s success depended far more on good voters than on good leaders. “To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people is a chimerical idea,” he said. He knew better than to expect politicians of “exalted integrity and sublime virtue.” But as long as moral standards remained strong among “the people who are to choose them,” the constitutional system would function as intended.
That was what Benjamin Franklin meant when he remarked in 1787 that the delegates in Philadelphia had created “a republic, if you can keep it.” In a letter earlier that year, he emphasized the crucial stipulation: “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom,” Franklin wrote.
The Founders, deep students of history and human nature, repeatedly underscored the point: Lose your virtue, lose your republic.
The Trump phenomenon isn’t an aberration our constitutional machinery can correct. It is the failure the Founders anticipated when they warned what happens after virtue collapses and applause replaces judgment. The Constitution still exists on paper. What is disappearing is the public will to enforce its meaning. A republic does not fall when a strongman declares himself unchecked. It falls when millions hear him say it — and approve.
Random stuff I find interesting and you may not.
