Many supporters of 80-year-old President Donald Trump are now reacting with panic to his recent actions, which include launching late-night social media attacks on Iran and the Pope, promoting personal family wealth, and comparing himself to religious figures. However, these actions should not come as a surprise. Anyone who objectively observed his first term could have predicted this behavior. That initial presidency was defined by tens of thousands of false statements, a mismanaged pandemic resulting in a million American deaths, and an attempt to overturn a fair election that ultimately incited the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol.
However, the dangers of this moment were so blindingly obvious that the Founding Fathers saw them coming a quarter of a millennium ago. The U.S. Constitution was meticulously designed to protect the rights of the people against the rise of a would-be tyrant. The founders understood that they were embarking on a highly fragile, rebellious project that had never truly succeeded in human history; as John Adams scowled, “There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide”. Because of this profound historical pessimism, the founders explicitly warned future generations about the precise threats America faces today: the dangers of a demagogue, the poison of hyperpartisanship, the corrosive effects of corruption, the politicization of religion, and the erosion of the separation of powers.
In The Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay repeatedly cautioned that the greatest existential threat to a democracy was a demagogue who divided fellow citizens into warring tribes. In Federalist No. 1, Hamilton noted that “of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants”. Hamilton perfectly anticipated the exact psychological and political profile of Donald Trump in a 1792 letter to George Washington, warning of a man who was “unprincipled in private life, desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper” and known to scoff at the principles of liberty in private. Such a man, Hamilton predicted, would “flatter and fall in with all the nonsense of the zealots of the day” to throw the nation’s affairs into confusion, simply so he could “ride the storm and direct the whirlwind”. Today, America is experiencing the realization of Hamilton’s nightmare, as the president deploys populist appeals to prejudice that pit Americans against one another, amplified by digital algorithms that sow suspicion and confusion.
George Washington, who set the vital precedent for the peaceful transfer of power, used his Farewell Address to warn Americans about the forces that could destroy the republic. Washington chillingly predicted that hyperpartisanship and political tribalism would ultimately lead to “riot and insurrection”. That distant concern became a horrifying reality on January 6, 2021, when a partisan mob violently stormed the United States Capitol to stop the certification of the election. Today, the Trump administration is actively attempting to whitewash that history, pardoning the rioters who served as his shock troops and attempting to censor inconvenient facts.
James Madison, the primary architect of the Constitution, possessed an engineer’s understanding of the system’s inherent weaknesses. He warned that a democratic republic rests on the foundational principle that the people possess the virtue and intelligence to select wise leaders. “Is there no virtue among us?” Madison asked in 1788. “If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks — no form of government can render us secure”. Madison understood that constitutional guardrails are utterly meaningless without basic human character—a reality now exposed by the degradation of government through the acceptance of lies and absurd sycophancy from Trump appointees.
The systemic checks designed to restrain executive overreach are failing on multiple fronts. The Founders warned relentlessly against corruption and foreign influence, yet the modern executive branch is operating as a vehicle for unprecedented self-enrichment, with the president’s family making billions through opaque investments connected to sovereign wealth funds in the UAE and Qatar. The separation of church and state, a core tenet championed by Thomas Jefferson, is being actively dismantled by officials like the Secretary of Defense, who invoke Christian nationalism despite the 1796 Treaty of Tripoli explicitly stating that the U.S. government “is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion”.
Simultaneously, the separation of powers has collapsed. A spineless congressional leadership has openly delegated its constitutional oversight to the executive branch, abandoning its duties regarding tariffs and war powers. This abdication allowed President Trump to unilaterally launch a major war of choice against Iran without informing or seeking authorization from Congress. Compounding this institutional failure is a highly politicized Supreme Court that has abandoned precedent and effectively elevated the president to a king above the law by granting him absolute immunity from criminal prosecution.
It is a dark irony that the politicians who have most egregiously violated these fundamental warnings pretend to be “superpatriots”. They repeatedly confuse partisanship with patriotism, invoking a toxic, blood-and-soil nationalism that is the exact antithesis of the American constitutional promise. George Washington explicitly warned the country to “guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism,” recognizing that demagogues would drape themselves in the flag to seize absolute power.
Faced with the wreckage of these democratic norms, the worst possible response is civic despair. Concluding that the republic is broken beyond repair and that American democracy is not worth defending is exactly what those seeking to dismantle our institutions want the public to believe. Cynicism, depression, and apathy are the autocrat’s most powerful weapons.
To combat the conditions that enabled this demagogue’s rise, citizens must take power back from the extremes. This requires structural reforms: ending rigged redistricting, taming the social media algorithms that elevate conspiratorial voices, and passing the Kids Online Safety Act. To rein in unprecedented corruption, the nation must overturn the destructive Citizens United decision, remove dark money from politics, strengthen the emoluments clause, and pass the No Kings Act to reassert presidential accountability.
Since its earliest days, America has been torn between a defiant optimism and a profound pessimism regarding democracy’s odds of survival. But in a republic, citizens are not subjects, and they cannot wait for someone else to save them. As Benjamin Franklin ominously warned upon leaving the Constitutional Convention, the founders gifted us “a republic, if you can keep it”.