The refrain was not just a grace note; his congratulations were a reminder to his fellow citizens of their responsibility for a working democracy.
Toward the end of each day, I would put away the manuscript and watch Donald Trump’s briefing from the White House. His objective, as always, was to congratulate himself. His toughness is that of a bully. He made sure that the world thought he was a genius who could outsmart the experts. Divide and conquer has been his grand strategy. Discipline meant absolute fealty to his caprices. His self-love is so cavernous that there is little space for anyone or anything else. He spews hatred at those who oppose him or get in the way of his personal vanities and goals.
These deformations were also on gruesome display when a Minneapolis police officer choked to death George Floyd, a Black man, in broad daylight. Trump urged an indiscriminate crackdown against mostly peaceful protests and threatened to put the country under martial law.
There was an eerie overlap between a global pestilence and another case of lethal police brutality against a Black person. As American fatalities rose beyond a hundred thousand, many of the victims died because, like George Floyd, they couldn’t breathe. His last cries echoed the anguish of his race.
In Trump’s 2017 inaugural address, he accused his precursors of “this American carnage,” and he vowed he would “end it right here and now,” whatever it was. That gratuitous slur will haunt him now that he has stoked two real tragedies.
Before the virus sneaked into coastal America and a chance recording of George Floyd’s death went viral from the heartland to the world, Trump had already grievously damaged our polity, society, and nation’s reputation in the world.
The body politic of our country has been panting through four years of Trump’s reign. Multiple sectors in the U.S. electorate have a vital stake in defeating Trump. They will be looking to the future, but they will also be surrogates for the founders of the American republic. Those long-dead men did their best to ensure a set of noble principles and durable institutions for their successors to steward.
They were worried. Their letters and speeches were often flares shot over the horizon in the hope that posterity would heed their warnings.
In these pages, I have tried to refresh the memory of what our founders did, as well as why and how they did it. I hope, within that historical context, Trumpism can be seen more clearly as a concerted effort to undo the foundation of our government.
I am a student of history, not a historian. My first and longest profession was journalism. The term makes explicit that the news is new, ripe for the day. After more than two decades at Time magazine, I was recruited into government in the 1990s, then think-tankery. Both pursuits dealt with the here-and-now. My previous experience as a reporter helped me uncover the nub of a coherent, accurate story and explain why it mattered.
There is another advantage for a newshound retelling the story of America’s origin: the protagonists were ahead of their time. They were not just waiting to see what the future would bring—they were planning for it, building it.
Reading primary sources has often felt as though I was interviewing the founders. Their personalities are still vivid, their assertions articulate, their debates vigorous.
Still, I have leaned heavily on patient historians who have explored for decades the goals, attitudes, values, and decisions that brought forth a country, an ideology, and a movement abroad. Scholars explaining the eighteenth century avoid what they call presentism. For most of us, the past is a foreign country. Those who lived there had different mores, fears, prejudices, and hopes. Even some evocative English words have different meanings now.
My present-day tutors have aided my understanding of those distant but eloquent voices. Afterall, the founders’ exploits, innovations, dreams, fears—and warnings—are not just woven into the national memory; they are part of the backstory of our current predicament.
Americans of my generation are, for the second time, living through a constitutional crisis created by a rogue president. In 1974, I was a rookie in Time’s Washington bureau, assigned to a burgeoning investigation into Richard Nixon’s cover-up of a burglary at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Hotel. The American people and their representatives dealt with the challenge successfully. When the two parties recognized that a crime was initiated in the Oval Office, Nixon’s presidency self-destructed.
The capital returned to its normal level of modulated frenzy, and the nation and the world gave a deep sigh. Words like plumbers and unindicted co-conspirator had become part of the popular vocabulary. So had idioms of the day: “What did the President know and when did he know it?” and “a cancer on the presidency.”
After Gerald Ford took the oath of office, he said, “My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over. Our Constitution works. Our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule.” His words had a soothing effect on the nation.
Not only did the two parties come together in the Congress, they also had done historical homework. The Committee on the Judiciary in the House of Representatives commissioned a taskforce of academic experts to compile a crash course on scandals and controversies under all previous presidents. The professors worked intensely under the chairmanship of C. Vann Woodward, a renowned historian at Yale. In the introduction of the published report, he elevated the founder-presidents to a class by themselves. They were, he wrote, “[m]en of enormous prestige and formidable integrity, [who] held rigid standards of conduct and scrupulous regard for the Constitution. They or their friends had written it.”1
By the time the Woodward report was published, America was preparing to celebrate the bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence. Readers wanted elevating fare that matched the mood. They turned to a bumper crop of books about that early drama and its heroes. Inspiring biographies kept coming.
Two decades later, the Obama phenomenon—the man and the diverse citizenry that elected him—kept optimism and progress alive. The system worked, or so it seemed.
Then, forty-two years after the bicentennial, came the Trump insurgency. A 2018 New Yorker article lifted the Woodward book from obscurity. The author, Jill Lepore, contacted several contributors. Among them was William McFeely, an emeritus professor at the University of Georgia. She asked him to compare Nixon’s and Trump’s miscreancies: “I think Nixon was pretty bad, but I think that even he had a respect for the Constitution, and for a constitutional sense of the value of the presidency. Trump trounces on those.”2
McFeely died at 89 in Sleepy Hollow, New York, on December 11, 2019, a week before the House of Representatives impeached Trump, knowing that the Senate would acquit him. More than that, the majority turned the process into a farcical prosecution of the Constitution. Trump and his allies played the outcome as a vindication of his malignant persona and agenda.
Then the world seemed to shift on its axis, throwing Trump on the defensive. But at the time of this writing, I wouldn’t say that the system is working.
SPRINGS, NEW YORK
June 24, 2020
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The Man Who Would Be King
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