If I underrated the degree of damage Trump would do in those first 100 days — the severity of DOGE was remarkable, and the attacks on free speech have been chilling — my thesis holds: Trump is steadily growing unpopular, and political gravity, over time, will keep tugging him down. He would undoubtedly relish becoming a genuine American fascist, but he simply isn’t. Not yet, anyway. Elections haven’t been canceled, public institutions, if cowed, are not blindly worshipping Trump, and the media still publish freely.

Trump has abused his executive authority in disturbing ways, but so did George W. Bush and FDR when it came to locking up American citizens. Trump is eroding American democracy, but the nation is greater than him. Some of the damage he’s doing might be permanent — reputationally, in terms of Washington’s relationship with the world — but much of it, with another Democratic president, could be reversible. What is ruined by executive fiat can be rebuilt by fiat.

MAGA doesn’t have to consider life after Trump right now, but that life will come. Time is undefeated. Trump will be 82 years old when he ends his second term. He could try for a third, but it’s hard to see him winning. And even if he pretends like he won an election he lost, he will struggle to subdue the military and the security apparatus in time to cling to power indefinitely as an unpopular monarch. On 21 January, 2029, would the American military really obey Trump and not the newly sworn-in president? Would ambitious Republicans who want to be president themselves want Trump lording over them into his 80s and beyond?

Anything is possible. But anything doesn’t have to be likely. Trump will leave the Oval Office, one way or the other, and there will be an American republic after him, however flawed. It will be here, though. Erosion isn’t destruction. If the Roman Empire dragged on for five centuries or so, the United States can at least range beyond 225 years.

In the short-term, Republicans will lose seats in the midterms next year. The operative question is how many. Given Trump’s unpopularity and the possibility that the GOP budget will impose draconian health-care and welfare cuts, Democrats will have much to campaign on in 2026. A repeat of the 2018 blue wave is plausible. I don’t gamble much, but I like the odds of current Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries as House speaker at the start of 2027.

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The world after Trump

By Ross Barkan

The Senate is a different story, with the Democratic slippage in rural states making the formation of a new majority quite difficult. If Democrats can’t become competitive in states like Iowa, Ohio, and Nebraska again, they will have a hard time forming a Senate majority. At best, it seems, they can claw to a narrow 50-50 split or 51-49 advantage, and even that will not be straightforward next year. They’ll have to play defense in Michigan, New Hampshire, and Georgia (all winnable) and try to flip Maine, where Susan Collins has been quite durable, and North Carolina, where dream recruit Roy Cooper would have a chance to knock out Thom Thillis.

There is no reason to believe Trumpism, as a style and even policy preference, won’t outlast the man. Tariffs will probably lose their appeal because no other Republican is so protectionist and the stock-market slump after Liberation Day actually rattled the political class. Still, on economics, the GOP seems to prefer the new populist flavoring to the decades of neoliberalism that peaked under Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. Robert F. Kennedy’s attacks on Big Pharma have fit seamlessly into the new Republican Party’s conception of itself.

At the same time, it’s worth wondering how seriously one should take this new populist GOP. If they’re for the common man, why are they trying to gut Medicaid? What about DOGE? That’s all conventionally Republican, even libertarian. Josh Hawley, the Missouri senator, has come out against the attempted Medicaid cuts, but most of the other Republicans have defaulted to their old median. We’ll see how it all shakes out. Beyond 2025 — and even beyond the Trump White House — it cannot be known how long MAGA will persist.

What is it, after all? It’s less political machine than loose movement built around one man. Trump will leave a legacy behind, and he will have, without a doubt, wrenched the GOP in a direction that was unimaginable a decade ago. Will that wrenching continue when he’s out of office? I’m not sure.

MAGA has another three full years in power. In one sense, that’s a very long time. It’s enough of a window for an unhinged executive to continue wrongly deporting people, attacking academic freedom, and eviscerating federal agencies. It’s enough time to blatantly ignore court orders. It’s enough time to behave like an authoritarian and indulge in McCarthyite tactics. It’s enough time to be grossly corrupt. These will be rough years. Even if Democrats have the House, there will be little they can do to combat executive orders beyond filing lawsuits and protesting. That is frightening. It’s important, though, to not give in to either nihilism or catastrophism. As dark as the moment might be, the United States has seen worse.

The first Red Scare in 1919 and 1920 led to the rapid arrest of 6,000 people across 36 cities, most of them Italian and Jewish immigrants with ties to Left-wing causes. The second Red Scare extended throughout much of the Forties and Fifties, obliterating countless careers across academia, media, and the arts, and outlasting Joe McCarthy himself. House Un-American Activities Committee hearings roved from city to city, terrorizing Americans who held liberal political views. The CIA and FBI, through programs like COINTELPRO and Operation CHAOS, spied on American citizens and infiltrated numerous civil-rights, labor, feminist, and student organizations.

They harassed and intimidated almost anyone who dared to associate with a cause deemed too progressive. And, of course, there was the Bush administration, which erected a vast surveillance state and illegally detained hundreds of individuals at Guantanamo Bay without any due process. Much of what Trump is doing now he learned from Bush the Younger, whose pointless wars brought about the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people across the Middle East and thousands of US service members. It’s important not to forget this.

In short: America is drenched in sin, and America persists. America is not irredeemable; even now, I am proud to be a citizen, and believe in the promise of our Constitution.

To return to the humdrum of electoral politics: What comes next? As someone who is not too enamored with JD Vance, I predict that he is both the probable 2028 GOP nominee and someone who may preside over the crumbling of MAGA. Trump lost an election but pushed onward because he was Trump: he is in possession of an inarguable magnetism, that black magic, which holds the project together. One cannot look away from Trump. But many can look away from Vance, who underperformed in his Senate race and lucked onto the 2024 ticket.

Vance is smart person, even a serious one, but he does not possess Trump’s charisma. It is difficult to imagine him presiding over a rally of tens of thousands unless Trump is there to first lure the MAGA faithful into the tent. Hard, too, to conceive of how Vance will persuade so many millions of casual, disaffected voters to head to the polls for him like they did for Trump. One can’t quite be a fan of Vance, right? He’s not a WWE Hall of Famer.

To be sure, it wouldn’t be fair to count Vance out now, not when we don’t even know who the Democratic nominee in 2028 will be. The advantage Democrats will have, though, is that they won’t be the party of incumbency and Republicans will have little to run on unless there’s a great economic miracle in the next few years. In 2024, Trump benefited from pre-Covid nostalgia, and that playbook can’t be run again. The post-Trump GOP — or one held completely captive by the president — will have to find a new path to victory.

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Trump’s new world disorder

By Helen Thompson

No single political figure in modern times has dominated a political party like Trump has. If the Reagan and Nixon eras may still be more significantly historically, the Trump era, which began the moment he descended the golden escalator at his tower 10 years ago next month, rivals both for import. Assuming Trump remains healthy, he will have been president or running for president for more than 13 years. He loomed over Biden’s presidency, and for younger Republicans, he has supplanted Reagan in their pantheon of political heroes.

He is sanctified for all time. What this means for the movement he leads is another matter. It is difficult to see how he becomes more popular, as president, from this day forward. Second-term presidencies are a slog, and Trump’s has already proved alienating to a wide swath of people, including those who decided, without great passion, to give him another shot in 2024. Biden’s popularity never recovered from the Afghanistan withdrawal. Trump’s fall into the abyss might have begun with DOGE or the tariffs that wiped out all the stock market gains of the last year (mounting a cumbersome recovery since then). When he was running for president, Trump could always claim he presided over a booming 2010s economy with low inflation and nonexistent interest rates. Even though he was in the White House in 2020, most Americans thought of him as the last pre-pandemic president, and he exploited this to maximum effect.

The power of Trump’s personality permitted MAGA, to some extent, to not keep every promise to the voters who elected him. Trump winning and punishing his enemies was a form of deliverance. It feels, finally, that will no longer be enough. The US economy is still robust, as world economies go, but Trump can’t readily tame inflation, fix the housing market, and kickstart a new national industrial policy to make his tariff proposals workable. He doesn’t think that deeply. There are feints in the direction of bona-fide populism, like his executive order on drug prices, though it’s unclear how it will hold up in court.

Trump, unfortunately, is not terribly interested in dragging the GOP-run Congress towards legislation that might make permanent reforms to the health system. Biden, through the Inflation Reduction Act, allowed Medicare to negotiate drug prices for the first time. Trump is not leaning on Mike Johnson or John Thune to expand Medicaid, introduce a public option, or tackle monopolization in the health sector.

In fact, Republicans seem intent on undercutting the health care on offer for working-class and poor Americans. Assuming they follow through — and Trump is a willing accomplice — MAGA will lose ground. They will have accelerated the inevitable: the occlusion of one era, and a slow march into an unknowable future.

This essay was adapted from Substack.

Though President Trump appears to have slapped Musk’s wrist at a Cabinet meeting, it’s far from clear if DOGE, having taken on a life of its own, will slow down any time soon. Though billed as an “advisory body”, it is tearing through swathes of the federal bureaucracy with the reckless abandon that Silicon Valley applies to newly acquired firms. Yet critics and fans alike struggle to put DOGE into a historical context, which makes it difficult to see where it might lead.

Liberals have predictably fallen back on references to mid-century fascism, comparing the recent mass firings to the Nazi takeover of German state and society to ensure total loyalty. But this is wide of the mark, as even vocal Trump supporters within government have been sacked like all others. Then, too, as Musk himself has pointed out, a regime that “seeks to limit the size, scope and power of government” probably isn’t a fascist one.

The Right, meanwhile, hails DOGE as a continuation of conservative cost-cutting that aligns with longstanding GOP priorities. This view, too, isn’t quite right. It fails to appreciate the unprecedented scale of DOGE’s disruption, as well as the department’s wilfully indiscriminate approach, making it difficult to class alongside past, more cautious and strategic attempts at government reorganization.

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How, then, does one begin to grasp the deeper significance, and likely logical endpoint of DOGE? There is one historical reference point from the early republic that would seem to explain the aims and designs of DOGE better than most: the faction represented by “Philadelphiensis” — namely, the Anti-Federalists.

Thorns in the side of the authors of The Federalist, the Anti-Federalists opposed the very existence and legitimacy of the federal government, preferring instead the looser ties, lighter burdens, and wafer-thin national authority mandated by the Articles of Confederation, America’s basic law until the ratification of the current Constitution in 1788. They warned against making the change, believing it would lead to “despotism, thraldom, and confusion”.

Here is the thing, though: the Articles of Confederation were put into effect for eight years in the early republic. And they failed miserably, as the myriad fiscal, monetary, executive, and judicial affairs fell into disarray. That turn of events impelled the founders to take up the Constitution now in place, with its vision of a strong federal state.

This isn’t to suggest that Musk or any of his acolytes have ever read the works of George Mason, Melancton Smith, Patrick Henry, Samuel Bryan, Robert Yates, or other Anti-Federalist luminaries; the Muskians don’t read much beyond memes. Rather, it suffices to highlight the stark convergence of sentiment and disposition that unites DOGE with the opponents of the Constitution, and to see both factions as giving expression to a recurring militant anti-centralist tendency in American history.

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By Oren Cass

Insofar as there are contemporary thinkers who are able to articulate a larger vision around which DOGE’s actions might cohere, there is the writer Curtis Yarvin and the bitcoin investor Balaji Srinivasan. These men aren’t so much direct influences on the boy-hackers ransacking government IT systems, so much as the most advanced expositors of the common worldview that animates Silicon Valley. Examining that worldview reveals striking parallels (as well as notable differences) with Anti-Federalism.

Much like Anti-Federalism, the Silicon Valley ethos is premised on a vehement rejection of centralized power in favor of smaller units of political sovereignty that exist well below the level of the nation-state. But instead of states’ rights, the ideal is the agile tech firm. Such a firm retains the spirit of the small startup (no matter how big it actually gets), remains unencumbered by bureaucratic complexity, and perfectly reflects the Promethean will of its founder.

The firm ideal informs Silicon Valley’s understanding of all social and political order. If DOGE is “moving fast and breaking things” in Washington, it is with the goal of accelerating the process of effective decentralization. And if Srinivasan has gone the furthest in envisioning what this new normal could look like, in his treatise The Network State (2022), it is arguably Yarvin who has dwelt most fully on how state dissolution might be realized.

Yarvin has written of the sudden breakup and collapse of the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev as an instructive example for how a similar disintegration of federal power might be enacted in the United States. (“Maybe we could get to the same place in the same way?”) In Yarvin’s telling, the path to liberation goes through a paradox: the oppressive nexus of power that is the American government can only be undone by granting an even more awesome and unlimited power to a single autocratic figure, referred to in his writings as a “CEO”.

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This CEO could then be tasked with either disciplining or annihilating the civil service as functional body in what would amount to an “American perestroika”, which Yarvin defines, simplistically, as “any restructuring that renders the whole American government accountable”. That echoes the benign-sounding rationale that Musk has also employed in his defense of DOGE, telling reporters: “That’s what democracy is all about.”

The CEO figure, in this scheme, isn’t expected to be a manager or a builder, but a raider and a destroyer in the vein of GE’s Jack Welch, who hollowed out the once great industrial giant. Or indeed, Musk’s own slashing and burning at Twitter, now X, which has led to declining functionality, revenue, and engagement.

Seen from this vantage, the DOGE austerity blitzkrieg starts to make much more sense. The Anti-Federalists couldn’t accept the practical arguments, prompted by the failures of the articles, for a government that could assume greater responsibilities over financial management and national defense, viewing these as usurpations. Just so, DOGE rejects the premise that the “administrative state” has any business providing vital services that a large complex economy can hardly do without: basic research for the treatment of diseases, the collection and dissemination of weather forecasts, the prevention of financial fraud, the provision of assistance to vulnerable economic sectors, and much else of the kind.

These are, of course, the very functions that DOGE has either obliterated or severely undermined. (This, even as Musk built his own fortune off of such government assistance — and continues to do so even now.) But as many angry town halls and protests are asking: “who voted for this?” Are the American people really prepared to watch as their two-century-old national constitutional government goes the way of the old Soviet Union, rendered a relic of history?

Already, broad constituencies are banding to reassert the same logic that led the Founders to abandon the Articles of Confederation in favor of the stronger state envisioned by the actual US Constitution: veterans, farmers, consumers, workers, small business, bond holders, entitlement beneficiaries, and many others are threatened by DOGE’s dramatic gutting of state capacity and fiscal functionality. Furthermore, DOGE’s tinkering around with federal payment systems isn’t at all reassuring, as any disruption to Social Security and Treasury bond payments would all but seal America’s drift toward failed-state status.

Contra Yarvin, it should be remembered that what followed Gorbachev wasn’t a period of flourishing, but a protracted collapse in living standards and a power vacuum that led to oligarchs, warlords, and gangsters ruling the roost. It didn’t kill the Soviet deep state, but allowed it to come back later with a vengeance.

Nineties Russia, with its rapacious private client networks operating under a fatally weakened central state, is a more honest picture of what a quasi-anarchic “Network State” would look in practice than Srinivasan’s techno-utopia. Yet this is the direction in which DOGE is dragging the United States.

While the current grassroots ferment against DOGE is heartening, what’s needed is a new political narrative that connects the ideal of a strong, stable, reliable, and competent federal government to the survival of the American nation as a cohesive entity handed down by the founders. For what Fisher Ames said at the 1788 convention of Massachusetts resonates ever more today: “The Union is essential to our being as a nation. The pillars that prop it are crumbling to powder”.

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There is, after all, a reason why the Anti-Federalists, despite honorable contributions to American life, chiefly the Bill of Rights, are not generally seen as high-ranking founders, while those who endeavored to solidify the foundations of the federal union are venerated almost unequivocally as nation-builders: the Federalists, of course, but also Lincoln Republicans, New Deal Democrats, and the GOP’s postwar Nixon-Eisenhower tradition.

To be sure, government bloat, waste, and overreach are perennial problems that definitely need fixing. But they call for a judicious approach that recognizes the many intricate interdependencies that exist between the federal government and various sectors of American society. Or as Trump himself put it recently, what’s needed is a “scalpel” not a “hatchet”.

But what our Silicon Valley overlords are up to isn’t a genuine search for efficiency, but rather destruction for the sake of it. Left unopposed, these latter-day Anti-Federalists might finally trash the federal union as the nation approaches its 250th anniversary next year. What comes after could well be too grim to contemplate.

But there is a strong constitutional and moral case for limiting birthright citizenship. It’s the argument that led the Trump administration to issue an executive order that defines a new status quo: going forward, children of illegal aliens won’t receive recognition of their citizenship by the US Department of State or any other executive agency.

Start with the Constitution. The question of birthright citizenship goes back to the 14th Amendment, one of the three ratified in the immediate wake of the Civil War. The relevant portion reads: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” The phrase at issue is “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” (known as the jurisdiction clause). Proponents of birthright maintain that the phrase merely means subject to the laws and courts of the United States.

Yet the debates over the 1866 Civil Rights Act, the legislation that led to the 14th Amendment, as well as the principles of the American founding, suggest a different interpretation.

The 1866 act was meant to secure the full benefits of citizenship for recently freed slaves and their descendants — and all black citizens, for that matter. The law’s proponents were determined to convert it from legislation to constitutional text, thus insulating its protections from change by a future Congress. Hence, the 14th Amendment. This means that the legislative history of the 1866 act can help illuminate what the 14th Amendment was supposed to be all about.

The 1866 legislation’s citizenship clause read: “All persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States.” A few months later, when the 14th Amendment was debated, the floor manager, Sen. Jacob Howard, described it as “simply declaratory of what I regard as the law of the land already”, namely, that “every person born within the limits of the United States, and subject to their jurisdiction, is by virtue of natural law and national law a citizen of the United States. This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers.”

By the “law of the land already”, Howard meant the recently passed 1866 Civil Rights Act. The then-chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Lyman Trumbull, addressing an objection over the absence of the Civil Rights Act’s phrase “Indians not taxed” from the 14th Amendment, stated that it was obvious that Indians were not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States “in the sense of owing allegiance solely to the United States”.

In such language from some of the 14th Amendment’s chief proponents, we can discern the outlines of an argument that the jurisdiction clause meant more than merely being subject to the law and courts on US soil. It had to do with a fundamental tenet of citizenship: loyalty or allegiance.

So how did we end up with the children of even illegal aliens receiving automatic citizenship? The US Supreme Court first addressed the meaning of the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment in an 1898 case. It concerned the fate of Wong Kim Ark, a child of Chinese nationals who were permanent US residents. In a 6-2 decision drafted by Justice Horace Gray, the high court held that the common law was the proper interpretive guide to the US Constitution’s text. Since the common law mandated birthright citizenship — jus soli as opposed jus sanguine, “right of soil” instead of “right of blood” — the child was a citizen under the 14th Amendment.

To this day, the case remains the controlling precedent for the maximalist position on birthright citizenship, cited by sympathetic judges and law professors on both sides of the aisle. Yet the dissenting opinion, written by Chief Justice Melville Fuller, offers an interpretation of the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause that is more consonant with American principles of just government than Justice Gray’s opinion.

Fuller argued that the common law couldn’t be the controlling authority, because in separating from the British Crown in 1776, the American colonists had elevated the principles of the Declaration of Independence over the common law. The common law of England contemplated subjects owing perpetual allegiance, rather than citizens of a government based on consent.

Fuller was right. The common law didn’t come up at all during the debate over the 14th Amendment. There were no references to Sir Edward Coke or to Blackstone, the eminent English authorities on common law, and the lawmakers were much more comfortable speaking of the interaction between the principles of America and her institutions than they were citing English precedents on jus soli.

They believed that the principles of the Declaration would control — and, where necessary, overrule — the common law of England. If human equality is a fact of nature, then nobody may rule another without their consent. All ought to enjoy their liberties and the pursuit of happiness alike. The existence of slavery, the ensuing crisis brought on by the conflicts between these principles and American practice, and the subsequent Civil War are the historical context for the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. American citizenship, defined constitutionally for the first time in the 1860s, was never based in blood. But crucially, it was never based in soil, either.

American citizenship was based on consent. Wong Kim Ark, then, should be overturned, and we should have a robust national debate about citizenship, immigration, and national allegiance. Congress is well within its enforcement powers under section 5 of the 14th Amendment to restrict birthright citizenship much more than it does currently.

Let’s start with two issues on which we might reach a broad national consensus: illegal immigration and birth tourism. It seems to go against common sense to allow a million or two immigrants to cross our southern border illegally and then to confer citizenship upon the children they may have here.

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Children of foreign soldiers born on US soil have always been excluded from birthright citizenship, in the same way as the children of ambassadors and diplomats. It’s controversial to call the flood of economic migrants of recent years a slow-moving invasion — but what of the subset of that group that constitute criminals, foreign spies, and terrorists? Does it redound to American national interest or civic health to confer citizenship on any children they may produce on US soil?

Is it prudent, let alone just, to allow wealthy foreigners from China or Russia to purchase birth-tourism packages costing as much as $100,000 and including a final-trimester hospital stay in Florida or California as well as a fresh US passport for the new babies? Should we be in the business of exporting tens of thousands of newly minted Americans every year, with all the attendant privileges and benefits, to the homelands of our foreign adversaries?

To be sure, the meaning of the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause is contested. The prospects for overturning Wong Kim Ark any time soon are remote. But even under the Wong Kim Ark precedent, controlling emphasis was placed on the importance of Ark’s parents being “permanently domiciled” in the United States. Let’s update and apply that precedent to a world transformed by transportation technology in the ensuing 127 years. If you are not a lawful permanent resident, any children you may have in the United States are permanent residents with you, not automatic citizens.

The next step after Trump’s executive order will be to get the American people more involved, which means Congress should debate, openly and with great fanfare, the meaning of the 14th Amendment on the relationship between birth, citizenship, and government by consent. None of these issues is as settled or obvious as defenders of birthright citizenship insist.

Andrew Sullivan: When I went back and looked at that big essay I wrote in 2016, I asked myself: what were the things I was specifically worried he would do, and did he actually did those things? To me the most promises that he made in 2016 were authoritarian in nature: the pledges to round up and deport 11 million unauthorised immigrants, to ban all Muslim immigrants from the United States. He threatened his opponents with either killing them or prosecuting them, including Hillary Clinton. And of course, he was also a huge enthusiast for war crimes. He loves torture. He’s a depraved human being. But nonetheless, all those things he didn’t do. Did he violate a supreme court order? No. Did he exceed his authority? Yes — he did send the military down to the border with funding that wasn’t allocated by Congress. But that is not exactly the kind of terrifying thing that one feared back in 2016. 

FS: So the authoritarian rhetoric didn’t materialise. Do you think that’s because it was always just talk, part of a tough guy image? Or do you think he just wasn’t capable of executing it?

AS: I don’t think he actually likes the exercise of power. He’s not that interested in controlling the lives of everyone around him, or indeed most Americans. He’s concerned primarily with his own ego, with his own glory, and with his own sense of being right in a particular moment. And so when it comes to difficult things, like rounding up 11 million people, he didn’t even try. There was some increased enforcement from ICE, but not much. We know how much wall he built, which is about a few hundred feet; we know how much Mexico paid for it, which was zero.

The worry was that he could declare a state of emergency when faced with a crisis, assume all sorts of powers and run the country like a dictator. Well, there were two moments when that was possible. The first was when Covid happened — in fact, his instincts were not to assume all the powers, and in fact, he did rather conventional things. Then, after the Floyd riots in 2020, half the country’s cities went up in flames, but did he take the opportunity to send tanks into the streets? No — if anything the police were under-enforcing the law in that period and there was mayhem. So all the great fears and panics about him seizing total power turned out to be overblown. And I think it’s worth saying that.

FS: Some people have accused you of “Trump derangement syndrome” for the level of your concern. In retrospect, do you feel like you had a mild case of it?

AS: No. The former President Donald Trump is himself deranged, that is where the source of the derangement is. All we’re doing is responding to what he says and what he does. And what he said was: I intend to upend the entire Constitution of the United States and run it as a dictator. He didn’t do it. Now, the question is, why didn’t he do it? And some people say, well, he was checked by others. And he was. But my sense is he doesn’t actually want that kind of control. It’s too much responsibility.

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FS: It’s an incredibly important point that, isn’t it? That, contrary to those fears, there is something intrinsic to Donald Trump that is un-serious, or even, as you wrote recently, almost comic.

AS: It’s always been hard to wrap your head around him because on the one hand he’s talking like Mussolini; on the other hand he’s talking like a cable news host. And you’re not quite sure whether he’s commenting on the news or aiming to be a dictator. But there is one element in which he is dangerous, very dangerous to a constitutional republic, which is that he really doesn’t believe that law applies to him.

In fact, he has recently been calling for total immunity for the President for everything he does in office, including murdering political opponents. That’s his public position, that he wants total immunity. Whenever he has been caught out personally, whenever he has been investigated personally, he has responded unconstitutionally: he attempted to obstruct justice, he attempted to get rid of various attorneys general. He clearly tried to rig the election by using foreign policy to get Biden in trouble with Ukraine. Of course, the ultimate example is January 6th, where he sits there and allows the Capitol of the United States to be ransacked and a riot to take place in order to slow and defer the certification of the election.

FS: We actually spoke two days after January 6th, on January 8 2021. And I remember very clearly at the time that you were very exercised by it. I was making the case that maybe it was more performative, or maybe it wasn’t a full attempt at revolution. And you were saying: don’t downplay this, Freddie, don’t make light of it. Do you now, in retrospect, feel that January 6th was as Republic-ending as it seemed at the time?

AS: Well, it didn’t end the Republic did it? That’s the main conclusion we have. All this was an attempt, not to seize power, but to appease his ego. He didn’t have links in the military to allow a coup to take place; he had no support in the Senate or the House to initiate some kind of coup. It was, in the end, kind of an empty gesture. But what it showed was that he was prepared to take the Republic to the very edge of the cliff, dangling over it, and then, according to his whim, whip it back to safety — or not. And that is an unacceptable level of risk for any society to tolerate. 

FS: The critique that you’re now making is basically that he’s fundamentally unserious, and craven in his own self-defence to the point where no rules are worth obeying if he can cheat them to get out of a sticky situation. Those traits aren’t unique to him as a politician. But the rhetoric that has come from the Democrats ever since 2016 — and still from Biden — is that he is an existential threat to the Republic, he’s a fascist, he’s a source of incredible danger. It’s a huge shift if we no longer think that that’s a risk.

AS: But we do think it’s a risk, for the following reason. The entire constitution of the United States is based upon the rule of law. The rule of law has to be applied and be seen to be applied, as far as possible, equally. He has openly stated that the President should be above and outside the law. If he is convicted of crimes, some of which are quite serious with respect to his political position, he doesn’t care. He will seek to be re-elected to overturn the rule of law with respect to himself. In other words, we will have an election in which he will say: it’s me, or it’s the rule of law.

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FS: So is that is your biggest fear looking forward? That some kind of constitutional break might happen either at the end of his time in office, if he wants to stay longer or something along those lines?

AS: Yes. He has never accepted the result of an election he didn’t like, whether it was his own, or anybody else’s: you can go through the record. He just doesn’t believe that he needs to play by the rules. And he believes that if he loses, it’s because it’s rigged. Now, when a President stands up and says, “The entire system is rigged, you shouldn’t trust it, you should only trust me,” are you really saying it’s a responsible thing to support that person? When he’s already shown that he is indifferent to a peaceful transfer of power? Once already he has tried to stop himself being removed from office. He’s told us in advance that he won’t even recognise the results of this coming election if he loses. So we’re headed for a constitutional crisis if he doesn’t win outright, clearly.

FS: We’re possibly headed for a constitutional crisis if he does win also. You may get all sorts of constitutional tinkering being proposed by governors of states who reject a President Trump. We might start seeing the reverse of what we’re now seeing in Texas — blue states defying the President. There’ll be people on the streets if Trump is re-elected, surely?

AS: Yes, I think that there will be. And he has already said that he’s prepared to invoke the Insurrection Act if such violence takes place. Of course, he won’t be able to in November because he won’t be president till January. So martial law will have to wait. But nonetheless, it’s a slightly alarming prospect. And the fact that we’re at a point where both sides are beginning to say they don’t trust this election at all, and will inflict violence or demonstrate against it afterwards, just shows you the lengths to which we’ve gone. I think it is simply not fair to blame others for this. Others do bear some of the blame, but the chief driver in the delegitimisation of the American constitutional order is Donald J. Trump, because he cannot bear a system that might in any way at any point overrule his own wishes and his own interests.

FS: Let’s posit that he wins anyway. What do you think would happen policy-wise? Everyone here in Europe is discussing the risk of isolationism: the sense that if Trump wins, Nato is imperiled and support for Ukraine will either just stop abruptly or gradually fade away, and Europe will pretty much have to fend for itself. Do you think that’s true?

AS: I do, pretty much. Not just because he feels that way, but because a large majority of his own party believes that too (at least the base of the party, not the elites that are still part of the 20th-century architecture of international law). No, I think if he’s elected, then Ukraine will be partitioned. And I think at some point, Taiwan will be given over to China. And I think a large number of Americans will regard that as a pretty sensible, sane way of moving forward in the world.

FS: And would you be one of that large number of Americans?

AS: I’d be pretty close to them, yes. I don’t think there is a desire in the United States, nor has there really been for the last 20 years, for long engagement in conflicts far away. The people whose kids go to fight those wars don’t want their kids to go fight those wars. And a lot of people just simply look at the state of the US-Mexico border and say: why are we spending billions of dollars on the border between the Russian-dominated provinces in Ukraine and the rest of it? Why, when we can’t do it for our own border? That’s an incredibly potent argument.

FS: The world order is certainly going through a seismic shift, one that may involve war or will conflict being evaded and a deal being struck. The argument of those who support Trump would be that he’s not so deeply ideological, he likes a deal and, as you say, he’s not seriously attached to a particular set of principles. And they say: that’s the kind of leader we need right now to smooth things over. 

AS: Yes. There are plenty of reasons, policy-wise, why I’d be happier with a Trump administration than a Biden one. There’s immigration, which I think the Democrats have completely screwed up. The numbers of people coming over are extraordinary at this point. And I think if he got a majority in the House and the Senate, he could easily pass immigration reform, and this time, unlike in 2016, he won’t be bamboozled by people like Paul Ryan into thinking that the most important thing is a tax cut for the super-wealthy.

I also think that regarding the wokeness stuff, even though I really find Trump horrid on so many levels, if he’s the only thing that can stop this stuff from being imposed across the country and across the United States Government, then you can see why I might prefer him over Biden, who is giving in to woke at every level. The federal government is involved in systematic DEI: in all of its capacities it now has putting equity at the heart of everything as a policy. He would remove that and there would be support for ending DEI in corporate America and in universities. He’s clearly taken out a position — even if he’s not interested in that stuff, he’ll find someone who is. And that’s a huge thing for the base. It would happen, I think.

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FS: And meanwhile, he’s not homophobic especially is he?

AS: I don’t think there’s much evidence that he’s anti-gay. I don’t think any of the core civil rights that we’ve won — the right to marry, the right to be in the military — are in any way in doubt. What is in doubt is whether we should fast-track children for sexual transition, which is a hugely controversial and difficult issue. And I think he might help put the brakes on that.

FS: By your account, it’s sounding pretty good so far! What’s not to like about Trump II?

AS: The end of the rule of law and the end of the American Constitution, which are far, far more important.

FS: What about the Left? Just as you are evolving and looking again at some of his traits, do you think the Left will learn from the mistakes of 2016-2020, when they only exacerbated the polarisation by completely freaking out about Trump’s victory?

AS: No, they’ll go absolutely bonkers. But let’s talk about which elements. The upper-middle class white people will go bonkers. But what’s fascinating is that on the policy measures, African Americans, Latinos, Asians, even some gays, are moving in the direction of Trump in ways that could be truly devastating. It is perfectly possible Trump will win in a landslide. I think that’s more likely than any other actual scenario.

But what the Biden people say is that when push comes to shove, the idea of four more years of that kind of chaos is all the argument that they need. Just don’t vote for chaos. Stay where you are. Things are actually improving: the economy has done better in the United States than anywhere else in the world over the last few years and we are making progress on climate. There’s all sorts of things they can say. But they have a doddering, ancient guy who can’t really command the public’s attention. You have the impact of inflation, you have the failure on immigration. I think it’s Trump’s for the taking, I really do. 

FS: It feels your heart and head are pointing in different directions. I asked about all the policy areas and you’re basically on board. But there’s this one principle, which you believe is most fundamental, which is that he doesn’t respect constitutional process. 

AS: But that is the core question. In our democracies, policies come and go. All sorts of things change. All sorts of governments get things wrong. But the constitutional process allows us to change government to sustain a pluralistic democracy, to have a system where everyone respects the rule of law. Those things are what ultimately matter in a society. 

FS: I’m going to leave it there because you’ve summed it up perfectly.

AS: Thank you for having me unspool all my conflicts in public. I do think it’s important for writers to do that occasionally. Because I don’t think my judgement was totally off, but I think it missed a few nuances, which you’ve now learned about. But I still cannot vote for Donald J. Trump.

But what makes America an old country is not just institutional continuity, but a politics shaped by a fixation with its own evermore distant moment of creation. For all the rhetoric of being a “new nation”, a tiny number of bewigged, silk-stockinged, well-fed gentlemen — many of them slaveholders and all of them dead — still have a powerful political voice. In America, we are so used to every political issue becoming a constitutional question, and to the sterile self-referential debates about the “original construction” of 18th-century documents, that we can easily forget how weird it all is. In Britain, debates about gun control or abortion never, so far as I know, centre on the views of the Second Marquess of Rockingham or William Pitt the Younger. To appropriate a famous metaphor, US political history sometimes seems like a boat beating against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

For the sons and grandsons of the founding generation, the defining fact of public life was the precious burden they had inherited. An example was Abraham Lincoln, who was born on the frontier of European settlement in 1809 and grew up with the stories of old men who had fought in the Revolutionary War, or who claimed to have done. In one of his first public lectures, given in 1838 at a “young men’s lyceum” in Springfield, Illinois, the future president laid out the intimidatingly high stakes for his generation. “We find ourselves,” he told the young men, “under the government of a system of political institutions, conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than any of which the history of former times tells us.” They could take no credit for this; it was no more than good fortune. “We toiled not in the acquirement or establishment” of these blessings, he pointed out, “they are a legacy bequeathed us, by a once hardy, brave, and patriotic, but now lamented and departed race of ancestors.” Americans — of course, he meant white, male Americans — had inherited the earth and therefore it was theirs to lose.

Very few people in American history have done anything other than venerate the constitutional settlement of 1787. And the few dissenters — such as the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who branded the constitution a “covenant with death and an agreement with hell” because of its protection of slaveholders — have been regarded as shocking iconoclasts.

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This underlying conservatism, the pose of moving forward while looking back, is characteristic of nations founded in revolution. You see similar traits in the political culture of Cuba or the old Soviet Union. After all, if you believe your revolution inaugurated a new order in which despotism had been banished by the bright light of freedom, then any further revolution would be revanchism of the most insidious kind. As the novelist James Fenimore Cooper explained in the early 19th century: “Here [in America], the democrat is the conservative, and thank God he has something worth preserving.”

Yet, at key moments in its history, the fixation on its founding moment has paradoxically enabled creative transformation. This was even true of the nation’s only true existential crisis to date, the slaveholders’ rebellion of the 1860s, which subsequently became known as the Civil War.

William Lloyd Garrison rejected the constitutional settlement, but Lincoln, who also hated slavery, saw the matter differently. Even as a young man in 1838, when he urged his generation to let “support of the Constitution and Laws” become the “political religion of the nation”, Lincoln had understood the danger to the revolutionary settlement as coming more from enslavers than from radical abolitionists. The example uppermost in his mind was the recent murder in Alton, Illinois, of an abolitionist newspaper editor, Elijah P. Lovejoy, by a mob backed by the city’s mayor. A quarter of a century later, President Lincoln led an administration that raised mass armies, waged industrial-scale war, and emancipated four million enslaved people, all in the name of preserving the founders’ legacy.

The outcome of the Civil War, with the breaking of the power of the slaveholding class, the formal commitment to equal rights, and the strengthening of the potential power of the federal government, is sometimes referred to as America’s “Second Founding”. This is a helpful formulation in many ways, and yet at the time what seemed more important was not the replacement but the preservation of the founders’ legacy. The 13th, 14th and 15th amendments, passed in the wake of the Civil War, fundamentally re-cast the relationship between the national government and its citizens. The 14th amendment defined citizenship for the first time — in a way that included black people — and other subsequent transformations in American government such as the growth of the welfare state and the enforcement of civil rights in the 20th century depended upon it.

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Had America been more like France, the post-Civil War constitutional settlement might have been called the “Second American Republic”. But America is not France, as Americans never ceased to point out — fear of swivel-eyed, guillotine-wielding Jacobinism was the 19th-century equivalent of 20th-century America’s obsession with communists. No one of any significance in the post-Civil War United States called for an entirely new constitution. Having just waged an unimaginably bloody war to preserve the constitution, the last thing they were going to do was discard it. And so, the constitutional innovations of the post-Civil War years were achieved not in spite of the fundamentally conservative nature of American political culture, but because of it. Only by presenting transformation as a validation of the founding could real change happen.

The same was true in the US’s other revolutionary decade, the Thirties, when, in the face of terrifying levels of mass unemployment, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration massively expanded the federal government’s role in national life in order, once again, to keep the revolutionary settlement intact. The imagined approval of the bewigged gentlemen of the founding era was as important to Roosevelt as it had been to Lincoln, but, lo and behold, they turned out to be surprisingly sympathetic to change, so long as it was in the interests of preservation.

Today, however, such flexibility seems hard to imagine. The Declaration of Independence was signed 12 score and seven years ago. That’s at least eight generations of political leaders. But curiously, the more the founding moment recedes in time, the greater its ossifying grip on American politics seems to be. If America is an old country, it is showing its age: it’s crotchety, stuck in its ways, telling endless stories about the past. Institutional arthritis prevents the natural flexing that’s needed to deal with a rapidly changing society.

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It is now more than half a century since a significant constitutional amendment was passed (the 26th amendment allowing the reduction of the voting age to 18 was ratified in 1971, although there was also an uncontroversial amendment ratified in 1992 which delayed raises in congressional salaries until after the next election). With politics so polarised, and the parties so evenly balanced, any fundamental institutional reform now seems impossible.

In the Nineties, no one could imagine it being acceptable in the modern age for a president to be elected with only a minority of the popular vote because of the workings of the Electoral College. But then it happened in 2000, and again in 2016, and, after each, calls for an amendment to abolish the Electoral College went nowhere. The Senate ensures that voters in rural, sparsely populated states such as Wyoming are vastly more powerful in Washington than the voters of, say, California. And whatever the defence of this constitutional curiosity might be, the point is that it is practically impossible to change. With a majority on the Supreme Court now committed to the eccentric doctrine of judicial originalism, the ghostly chaps in silk stockings seem more than ever the pale-faced opponents of institutional innovation.

Obviously, the US is, despite its growing inequality, a remarkably successful, wealthy society. It is still capable of policy innovation, and even (contrary to what you might think if you don’t have a sense of historical and comparative perspective) one of the more successful multi-racial societies in human history. But at the same time, it is, to put it mildly, difficult to address issues of structural inequality when meaningful reform of the institutional structure is effectively off the table. How many presidents can be elected with fewer votes than their opponents before the system cracks? For how long can the Supreme Court retain authority if the perception continues that it makes hugely consequential decisions while being unrepresentative and unaccountable?

But the founding fathers have been flexible fellows in the past, and with their imagined blessing huge changes have been wrought. Perhaps even the oldest and crankiest country can rediscover its youthful capacity for reform, especially if it does so while insisting that it is doing so in order that the important things remain the same.