Will the United States, the world’s oldest continuous democracy, make it to its 250th anniversary in 2026? This is not an unreasonable question because whoever occupies the White House that year will possibly be the determining factor in answering it. If that person is Donald Trump, we could be looking at game over—at least when it comes to the Constitution and what remains of the international system. But if it’s Joe Biden—or almost anyone else—it is entirely possible that the United States will celebrate its semiquincentennial as a stronger democracy, with more resilient institutions, than before. And presumably its allies abroad will collectively, finally, relax a little.

Believe it or not, there is a positive side to the unprecedented spectacle of a former U.S. president being indicted for criminal conspiracy to overturn an election. As tens of millions of his supporters rally to Trump’s side, and with the world watching in appalled amazement, the United States is about to go through a stress test reminiscent of what banks put themselves through (by order of the government, of course, under the Dodd-Frank Act): Can they survive the worst crisis the financial system could throw at them?

Bank stress tests, of course, are merely mathematical exercises. They’re like crashing in a flight simulator, where one can step out afterward and fix whatever went wrong. This is real-time history happening. If Trump succeeds in his campaign to defy the Justice Department (which, if he becomes president, he intends to dismantle a substantial portion of, along with the FBI), escape conviction, and win reelection by painting the several indictments against him as political weaponization comparable to Nazi Germany, then there may be no stepping out of this crash site. Still, stress tests almost invariably make institutions more crisis-proof: Recall that the stress-tested banks did survive the Silicon Valley Bank crisis thanks to shored-up capital resulting from previous exercises.

And it’s difficult to imagine that anything more testing could be thrown at the 247-year-old American experiment than this: In an atmosphere in which a substantial portion of the country no longer believes in facts coming from the federal government, and with a former leader who openly threatens to tear down the Constitution crushing his 2024 opposition in the latest polls, just about everything is at stake. The most fundamental pillars of U.S. democracy that go back to the Founding Fathers—starting with the peaceful transfer of power—are now up against demagogic and populist forces more threatening than anything the nation has seen. And still more indictments are to come, especially related to Trump’s alleged tampering of election results in Georgia—making the test of the U.S. system one that is occurring simultaneously on the federal, state, and local level. Americans today are truly living out that ancient Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times.” (And no doubt China’s leaders are watching these events—and the possible dissolution of its rival nation—with bemused anticipation.)

But what if—to invoke another famous aphorism, Friedrich Nietzsche’s most over-quoted one—what doesn’t kill the United States makes it stronger? Already there are some fixes underway. The huge demographic of angry Americans who embrace Trump do so largely because they mistrust the federal government. And the government is finally responding—Biden with his massive economic program favoring the suffering middle class and Congress with new laws ensuring fair and credible elections. In December 2022, Congress saw fit to clarify the wording of the Electoral Count Act—reaffirming that the vice president’s role in the counting of Electoral College votes in Congress is purely ceremonial and not something the vice president can block, as Trump wanted Mike Pence to do. At the same time, Congress made it far more difficult for anyone to oust a slate of electors—as Trump repeatedly tried to do, according to the indictment. The testimony of numerous senior Republicans, including some of Trump’s most senior aides, is being used against him in the latest indictment by special counsel Jack Smith.

Historically, this is hardly the first time the American experiment has faced an existential test—and arguably the republic came out of earlier crises stronger by shoring up its institutional pillars. Think of Shays’ Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion in the early years of the republic. The first uprising, in 1786-87, led by a disaffected Revolutionary War officer named Daniel Shays, quickened the realization that the Articles of Confederation wouldn’t do the trick, gaining more support for a stronger central government at the 1787 Constitutional Convention. The crushing of the second rebellion, over liquor taxes in 1791-94 also strengthened the federal government by authorizing the use of a militia force—read the National Guard today—to suppress violence domestically and legitimizing federal taxes.

In the current period, many pundits have wondered whether the United States is so profoundly divided that another civil war could occur, but history is instructive here as well. Most people believe the Civil War ended in 1865, but in fact it raged on politically for at least another 10 years, threatening the foundations of government in ways not unlike today. The Ku Klux Klan and other violent insurrectionists in the South opposed the outcome—and constitutional fixes such as the 13th and 14th amendments—to the point where, in Hamburg, South Carolina, in 1876, a ragtag army of Southerners led by a former Confederate general massacred Black people who insisted on exercising their right to vote. As a result of the federal government’s crisis of credibility, the 1876 election between Rutherford Hayes and Samuel Tilden was a deadlock, with Tilden winning the popular vote, until a compromise was negotiated that removed federal troops from the South and handed Hayes the presidency. Nearly a century of Jim Crow followed, but the nation survived and later fought and won two world wars—and a major cold one—largely unified and undeniably stronger, emerging as the world’s lone superpower.

It is especially noteworthy that the latest electoral reforms passed by Congress in response to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol were an update of the 1887 Electoral Count Act, which was passed to prevent a future constitutional crisis like that of 1876. So, at least the wording is getting better. According to Reuters, one of the new federal charges against Trump—conspiring to deprive citizens of constitutional or legal rights—is also based on a post-Civil War Reconstruction law in 1870. If he’s convicted, that will be a useful precedent for the future as well.

Strikingly, the crisis now facing the United States is pretty close to the perfect storm that the Founders feared when they designed the U.S. constitutional system. As Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist Paper No. 1:

Among the most formidable of the obstacles which the new Constitution will have to encounter may readily be distinguished the obvious interest of a certain class of men in every State to resist all changes which may hazard a diminution of the power, emolument, and consequence of the offices they hold under the State establishments; and the perverted ambition of another class of men, who will either hope to aggrandize themselves by the confusions of their country, or will flatter themselves with fairer prospects of elevation from the subdivision of the empire into several partial confederacies than from its union under one government.

Once you dispense with the 18th-century flourishes, you pretty much end up here with Trump: a man of “perverted ambition” who hopes to aggrandize himself by the “confusions” of his country and its division into several “partial confederacies.” In a later paper, Hamilton wrote of the danger that the states would become “dismembered and alienated from each other”—more or less what we have now, with the two political parties divided starkly into red and blue states. And in the famous Federalist Paper No. 10, James Madison also anticipated the factionalism that later became the party system and set the stage for today’s political divide. His Federalist co-author John Jay, meanwhile, warned of the dangers of foreign interference in subverting U.S. democracy. This did not include Russian disinformation, naturally, but rather a far more existential threat involving choosing the wrong great power to side with abroad—a problem that bedeviled the first U.S. presidents, George Washington and John Adams, as they dealt with warring France and England. Occasionally, there was overreach—most notably the Alien and Sedition Acts—but the Constitution survived handily. And arguably grew more resilient.

So, let’s not get too gloomy about the current state of affairs. As I’ve written myself, Trump has unquestionably been a major change agent in a country whose political system failed its middle class. But, honestly, how many pathological narcissists like him do we really think are going to come along and openly put personal aggrandizement ahead of the Constitution? Even Richard Nixon, a president of dubious moral character, didn’t do that. And what of the millions of Trumpist partisans? Recall the Tea Party. Leaderless, it faded away (or was absorbed by the Trump movement). Once Trump passes from the scene (by whatever means, legal or otherwise), his minions are likely to disperse as well, their anger simmering once again over the kitchen table and in the living room.

Moreover, it’s not as if anyone else in the world is looking much better. On the other side of the globe, we are watching autocrats fail today in much the way they have always failed. Vladimir Putin, suffering under some sort of neo-imperialist delusion that he is still living in the 19th century, has in a little over a year since his Ukraine invasion all but destroyed Russia’s power and prestige in the 21st century. Xi Jinping, consolidating his status as the next Mao Zedong—an absolute dictator—has thrown out so many of the lessons of marketization left to him by Mao’s reformist successor, Deng Xiaoping, that Xi’s “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” is in danger of achieving the opposite.

All of which reminds us of what Abraham Lincoln once said (presciently, of course) when he declared in an 1838 speech that no military power could really threaten the United States—that a foreign nation “could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.” No, Lincoln said, “if destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.”

The United States’ lot may be up for grabs again, but it’s still entirely up to Americans to decide whether they will be authors of its self-destruction or survival. Perhaps, even, coming out on the other side stronger than before.