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America’s big birthday has come at a bad time. On Saturday it will be a divided nation that marks 250 years since 13 North American colonies declared their independence from the Great Britain of George III. Many will be anxious that the republic they established that day is fragile – not least because of the would-be emperor in the White House.
Some will console themselves that hope and angst have always been intertwined in the American story. From the very start, confidence in a bright, exceptional US future was combined with foreboding and doubt. At the close of the 1787 constitutional convention, a woman approached one of the founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin, to ask if the delegates had established a monarchy or a republic. Franklin’s answer: “A republic, if you can keep it.”
Some of that unease was the result, one hopes, of a quiet understanding that the new nation had arrived with a built-in defect, in the form of a terrible contradiction. The declaration proclaimed that “all men are created equal”, which excluded women and could not be squared with the fact that this new entity was founded on slavery. That text’s principal author, Thomas Jefferson, was himself a slave owner, and the knowledge of his hypocrisy haunted him. “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever,” he wrote.
But that fear for the future also owed something to the sheer scale of the founders’ ambition. As Tom Holland, historian of the ancient world, puts it, the US was “founded as a simulacrum of the early Roman republic. And the lesson of Roman history is that at some point, a republic will become an autocracy.” The ink was barely dry on the 4 July declaration, says Holland, when Americans started “dreading the emergence of a Caesar”.
All of which might encourage today’s Americans to be sanguine, reassured that their predecessors were similarly fearful, only for their apprehensions to prove unfounded. Take Donald Trump’s determination to gather ever greater powers to himself. On one reading, that is hardly unprecedented. Franklin Roosevelt was lambasted for constructing an imperial presidency, while even the secular saint that is Abraham Lincoln subjected protesters to martial law and suspended the right of habeas corpus (though he did have the excuse of a civil war). In his appetite for power, Trump could say he’s in very good company.
And so, the American in rose-tinted glasses could enjoy Saturday’s barbecues and fireworks displays, insisting that this too will pass. That yes, a crude, venal braggart is in the Oval Office – one who, we learned this week, personally pocketed $2.2bn in his first year back in office; and yes, he launched a disastrous war that has made one of America’s sworn enemies, Iran, stronger and the US weaker; and yes, he has set about dismantling a post-1945 rules-based international order from which the US only ever benefited, growing stronger and richer; and yes, he and his vice-president seem determined to replace their country’s animating “creedal” conception of national identity, in which citizenship is open to whoever subscribes to America’s core ideals, with a definition that instead demands blood-and-soil ethnic heritage – but all of that will pass. In this view, an America that has survived a civil war, Jim Crow racial segregation and the McCarthyite witchhunts of the 1940s and 1950s, can survive Trump and Trumpism.
Add to that the phenomenal might of the US military and US economy, both set to be handed a further advantage over their rivals thanks to the US head-start on AI, and the outlook is positively sunny.
And yet, I’m not convinced. For years, I maintained precisely the position I’ve just sketched out: that, sure, the US had egregious flaws and problems, but nothing that the US system itself could not overcome. My first book, published in the late 1990s, was a love letter of sorts to the American ideal, arguing that it was the fruit of a rebellion against an antiquated, British system of government under which we on this side of the Atlantic still laboured. The book was called Bring Home the Revolution, but the original subtitle was: How Britain Can Live the American Dream. When an interviewer, responding to the impeachment proceedings that had just begun against Bill Clinton, joked that, “It’s all a bit of a nightmare now, isn’t it?” I pushed back, insisting that, whatever the flaws in its realisation, the US ideal itself remained noble. No matter what problem ailed the US, the remedy was to be found in that marvel of a founding document, the US constitution.
This past decade has shifted my view. In Trump, the constitution has come face-to-face with exactly the kind of figure the founders feared – a president who seeks to rule as a monarch, enriching himself and his family in the process. The founders erected several barriers to such a person, whether emoluments clauses, to guard against the receipt of foreign gifts and the pursuit of earnings outside the job of serving the people as president, or an elaborate series of checks and balances to ensure powers were separated rather than concentrated in a single pair of hands. The result is a delicate, elaborate work of civic engineering, a complex piece of political machinery in which a weight or pressure in one place is offset by a counterweight or counterpressure somewhere else.
On paper, the US constitution is a thing of beauty. But Trump has revealed its great weakness. Which is that it cannot enforce itself. For all its hallowed status – and it is revered as a sacred text in the US – it relies on people, mere mortals of flesh and blood, to do its will. And what we have learned this past decade is that the people entrusted by the constitution with its enforcement will sometimes refuse to do their duty.
Vivid proof came after the attempted insurrection of 6 January 2021. Trump was impeached, as the constitution required – but Republican senators ducked their obligation to convict him and remove him from office. In this second term, Congress has watched as the president gathers more and more power to himself, stealing it from them, and they have not stirred. They have been supine.
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Meanwhile, the judges of the supreme court, whom the framers envisaged as the protectors of the constitution, have played their own part in enabling the Trump power grab. They have defied him here and there, but they have given him much more than they have withheld. Not content with granting the president near blanket legal immunity, this week they handed him the authority to fire the heads of supposedly independent federal agencies, thereby removing one more potential restraint on presidential power.
This, then, is the fatal flaw of the US constitution and therefore of the republic itself. As Franklin saw, the republic would not sustain itself; only human beings, committed to the essentials of liberal democracy, could do that. And in the age of Trump, those handed the task have shirked it.
Few would bet against the US bouncing back once Trump has gone; it has recovered, renewed and rebuilt itself before. But the man who turned 80 last month has exposed a weakness in the country that turns 250 on Saturday. Now we have glimpsed it, we cannot unsee it.
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Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
