There is a phrase that peppers analysis of Donald Trump so often that one might suspect it’s the product of a keyboard shortcut: “This is not normal”. There is no playbook for his behaviour and approach to government, we are told, time and again. There are obvious ways in which this is true, ways in which Trump is a singular and sinister figure in the history of the American presidency.
But there’s a strange lacuna in all this coverage. Not only are Trump’s attempts at subverting the US Constitution and expanding his power far from unprecedented, but the United States as it currently exists, both territorially and politically, is solely due to such subversions.
To cover the obvious point first, the contradiction between ideas and actions is the very seed of US self-conception. Thomas Jefferson — the author of the 1776 Declaration of Independence, with its revolutionary notions of the “self-evident” equality of all men and of governmental authority derived only from the “consent of the governed” — enslaved more than 600 people in his lifetime (almost certainly including his own children). He was far from alone among the framers of the Constitution, who were otherwise so committed to individual emancipation and as such allowed less than 2% of the US population of the time to vote for their first president, George Washington.
Apprehensions about the possibility of “demagogues” in the new republic dominated early debates around the Constitution. Future president James Madison twice alluded to “the danger of demagogues” during the constitutional convention, and Alexander Hamilton warned that “History will teach us 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.”
Constantly discussed in the press during Washington’s reign was this fear of the new office of president turning the US into a pseudo-monarchy, not helped by the suggestions of vice-president John Adams that the president’s title be “His Elective Majesty”, “His Mightiness” or “His Highness, the President of the United States of America and the Protector of their Liberties”.
In the bitter election of 1800, Jefferson campaigned against big government, a campaign that, partly thanks to the endorsement of Alexander Hamilton (you’ve seen the musical, right?), made him the third US president. Hamilton backed Jefferson — whose ideology he opposed in every way — over Aaron Burr (who had received the same number of electoral votes as Jefferson) because he thought Burr would govern only “to get power by any means and to keep it by all means”.
Jefferson rewarded this endorsement by almost immediately violating the Constitution. Setting in motion America’s first foreign war — sending the US Navy to “patrol” the coast of North Africa, the “barbary states” whose piracy he sought to put down — he didn’t seek congressional approval until the fleet was too far gone to recall. America has been fighting “undeclared wars” ever since. In 1803, in another huge and arguably unconstitutional expansion of executive power, he doubled the size of the US via the Louisiana Purchase and added tens of thousands of people to be governed without their consent.
Finally, to skip over many decades — and the, let’s say, constitutionally iffy acquisition of Texas and California from Mexico via conquest — we arrive at Lincoln, by consensus the greatest of American presidents. In 1838 a 28-year-old Abraham Lincoln, then a state representative in Illinois, addressed the Young Men’s Lyceum about the recent, growing acts of mob-led, pro-slavery violence and other threats to US institutions. He warned that Americans’ crumbling faith in their government might one day lead to the emergence of “an Alexander, a Caesar, or a Napoleon”. The remedy was for “the people to be united with each other, attached to the government and laws” and to treat the constitution and the rule of law as “a political religion”.
In 1861, he narrowly won office. During his presidency, citing the military necessity of the American Civil War, Lincoln closed down newspapers, arrested editors, suspended habeas corpus, and, for good measure, also engaged the military without congressional oversight. He has frequently been referred to, then and now, as a dictator.
The US Constitution never said anything about who could vote. It was the individual states who had decided with near uniformity to allow the franchise only to white men of property. But it’s worth noting that in the minuscule number of exceptions — say, the state constitution of New Jersey — it was property, not race or gender, that was the dealbreaker.
So who better to turn to, as the scenery of the republic collapses, than a crooked property developer to carry on some of the country’s oldest political traditions?
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