John Adams famously wrote (quoting 17th-century political philosopher James Harrington) that a republic was “an Empire of Laws, and not of Men.” Donald Trump, if he has ever noticed that quotation or thought about it, thinks it’s a load of pious liberal crap. One of America’s big problems, at this moment of maximum existential and constitutional crisis, is that a whole lot of us believe, or suspect, that he isn’t entirely wrong.
Trump’s true genius, if we can call it that, lies in finding the weakness of his opponents — the chinks and crevices and loopholes through which he can force his greed, his hunger and his massive but fragile ego, like so much orange goo. Very often such weaknesses involve principles, since Trump has none, and so it is with his current opponent, the constitutional order of the United States of America, which was built upon a complicated set of interlocking principles that it only imperfectly upholds or, in many cases, does not uphold at all.
So many of us, perhaps most of us, recognize that Trump has at least half a point about the fragile or mythical nature of the rule of law, even if we wish it weren’t so. That includes many people who didn’t vote for him and never would, and have no desire to follow him into the savagely self-destructive land of MAGA fantasy.
In that realm, Trump’s first law is that there is no law. It’s fair to say he has faithfully observed that creed or dictum throughout his career as a shameless cheat and hustler in business, a many-times-accused sexual predator in personal life, and a pathological fabricator of sadistic lies in politics. He has inhaled from somewhere — certainly not from studying history — an immensely dumbed-down version of the philosophy that he imagines drove Napoleon and Hitler, and perhaps Alexander the Great and Peter the Great. (He’s probably not too clear on the difference.) Why doesn’t he get to be called “the Great”? If he changed the Gulf of Mexico’s name, he can change his own too.
For a deeper layer of irony, consider this 2017 article from the right-wing Claremont Review of Books, a consistent advocate of Trumpism, which further elucidates the Harrington quote above. The “empire of laws,” which Harrington (writing in the 1650s) imputed to ancient Athens and Rome, was contrasted to a more “modern” alternative, in which “some man, or some few men, subject a city or a nation, and rule it according to his or their private interest: which, because the laws in such cases are made according to the interest of a man, or of some few families, may be said to be the empire of men, and not of laws.” Cool story bro! That does sound somewhat familiar, and I’m honestly surprised Claremont hasn’t scrubbed it from their site.
For Trump, history is of course made by Great Men. (Is his eccentric capitalization sourced from chance encounters with founder-era prose?) Law is a convenient fiction, subject to their will and their whims, created to enslave lesser minds. That principle or state of mind — “l’état, c’est moi,” translated into idiocracy — is perhaps the best way to understand how and why Trump leapfrogs from one vainglorious delusion to the next, with no semblance of continuity or ideological consistency, like an unhappy toddler building wobbly towers of bricks and watching them fall down. He wants the Panama Canal; he wants to trade Puerto Rico for Greenland; he wants to develop a beach resort in Gaza; he wants Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the other 37 million Ukrainians to surrender their mineral rights and then surrender, period.
It’s not true that Donald Trump believes in nothing: He believes that there is no law and that his will can shape reality. This has yet to be disproven, to his or anyone else’s satisfaction.
Admittedly, how exactly Trump means to “make” history or make America, you know, great again remains a little fuzzy — if it’s any consolation, he’ll get tired of Elon Musk’s shtick sooner or later. But never mind: We can flash-forward through the next 30 or so years of Trump’s lifetime presidency and then fade out on his face atop Mount Rushmore. The end.
In a striking departure from usual practice, much of the mainstream media commentary on Trump’s renewed bromance with Vladimir Putin, and his evident attempt to settle the Ukraine war without Ukraine’s involvement, has been nuanced and intelligent. I don’t mean the overriding sense of outrage that Trump has upended the “post-war order” that has sustained 80 years of peace in Europe (more or less) and avoided a civilization-ending third world war. That’s been a little knee-jerk, and involves more than a little fudging on the details, given the obvious decay of both NATO and the European Union over the past two decades or so.
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What I mean is the shared understanding that Trump and his more intelligent allies have identified critical weaknesses in the current global order, and have arrived on the scene at exactly the right moment to exploit them. In a recent exchange for the New York Times, Russian expat Masha Gessen and paleoconservative Bret Stephens observed the improbable fact that they were largely in agreement. At one point, Gessen summarizes it this way:
Trump and Vance see a crisis in Europe that challenges the European Union’s foundational values — the two of them have undisguised contempt for the concepts of cooperation, openness, human rights, supranational legal mechanisms. The collapse of Europe would be a sort of proof of concept for Trumpism.
Similarly, I’m forced to admit that Times foreign policy columnist Thomas Friedman — whom I’m always inclined to define as wrong about literally everything, including the rules of grammar and whether Thursday follows Wednesday — has been admirably clear in discussing Trump’s “real upside” last week, that being a willingness to “shake up the game board” when it comes to stagnant and seemingly hopeless global problems like the Ukraine war or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But “what’s troubling,” Friedman concludes, “is his combination of being ready to ask really radical questions and then, when it comes to the answers, just buying everything Putin says.”
A striking unsigned “leader” (or editorial) in The Economist, which is effectively the house organ of global capital — probably the work of editor in chief Zanny Minton Beddoes — stated things clearly enough:
Mr Trump’s every act demonstrates his belief that power is vested in him personally, and affirms that he is bent on amassing more. Ignoring the legislature, he is governing by decree. He asserts that the president can withhold money allocated by Congress. The framers had expected that branch of government to be the most powerful but this would diminish it. Because some of Mr Trump’s 70 or so executive orders are, on the face of it, brazenly unconstitutional, he also appears to be seeking a trial of strength with the judiciary.
Foreign Policy columnist Michael Hirsh dares to look past the Trump presidency — assuming, of course, that it will conclude on schedule in 2029 — to his potential successor and the next stage of the “unwinding of the U.S.-led global system”:
[Vice President JD Vance] and his MAGA supporters have as little love as Trump does for what they see as an all-too-leftist Europe. The fact that Vance could visit Dachau one day and meet the next day with Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany party (which has been criticized for its connections with openly neo-Nazi groups) — all without betraying any sense of historical irony — suggests that the postwar trans-Atlantic consensus may really be over.
What undergirds all this bracing commentary — one could cite many, many more examples — is a sober appreciation, to varying degrees, of Trump’s First Law: There is no law.
You can reject that law on principle, of course, or argue that it isn’t nearly as true as Trump thinks it is, or wants it to be. Both are reasonable positions, but I would content that there are four great truths of the Trump era that have made his first law come very close to enacting itself. I do not intend this as sarcasm or hyperbole; if America and the world do not acknowledge and confront these truths, an even larger one will overtake them: the final collapse of liberal democracy.
- The U.S. political system is hopelessly paralyzed
Since at least the time of Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich in the early 1990s, America’s two major political parties have been locked in a dance of death, trading power back and forth in regular rotation with virtually no ability to enact major legislation or address major social and economic issues. You don’t need me to drone on here about how poorly the Democrats have managed this period, or how much they have gambled and lost on being the party of norms, due process and supposed good government. The point is, a great many American voters were ready for someone, irrespective of party or professed ideology, who could cut the Gordian knot. Barack Obama was the first of those; we know how that turned out. The next such disruptive leader was … I hardly need to go on.
- America’s constitutional design is fatally flawed
It’s bad enough that a diverse, divided and geographically enormous nation of 340 million people is still governed by a document written by a group of 18th-century aristocratic farmers. What once looked like an advantage of the American system, compared to the unwritten constitution of the U.K., for example, is now an enormous liability. We are taught to revere the founders for their ingenious efforts to balance the three branches of government against each other, and it’s certainly true that they perceived the dangers of what we now call the “imperial presidency,” and tried to guard against the possibility of would-be despots acting in bad faith. But the relentless expansion of presidential power — beginning, honestly, with Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln, and sent into overdrive by Richard Nixon, George W. Bush and Obama — has rendered the “checks and balances” all but meaningless. There are no remaining “guardrails” against a president who rules through an onslaught of executive decrees and willfully defies the judicial branch, whose supposed power is now revealed as toothless.
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- The “rules-based” international order is a sham
Tom Friedman and other defenders of the post-World War II “pax Americana” will argue, with some justification, that during the Cold War and the ensuing unipolar era, the enormous military power of the U.S. and its NATO alliance prevented a third world war. But here’s the thing: Most American had no idea that the blatant hypocrisy of U.S. foreign policy was always evident to the rest of the world: “Democracy” and “tyranny” were terms of art, to be applied to allies and perceived foes as needed, and all the pearl-clutching about “human rights” was a similarly shallow exercise. Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and other autocrats professed no such values, but when they acridly observed that the “rules-based” order proclaimed by generations of American diplomats always assumed that the U.S. would write the rules to its own specifications — I mean, they had a point.
- Democracy faces an existential crisis of legitimacy, on a global scale
Do I really need to elaborate on this much-brooded-over topic? As I write this, voters in Germany are determining exactly how close to power the not-quite-Nazi Alternative for Germany party will come, with the eager support of JD Vance, Elon Musk and other deep-thinking bros of the new right. Giorgia Meloni’s far-right party already holds power in Austria, and it’s at least even money that Marine Le Pen will be the next president of France. There are effectively zero major Western-style democratic nations — including Britain, Canada, Japan and relative outliers like Brazil and India — where the postwar political order has not imploded to some significant degree. As Patrick Healy notes in the conversation with Gessen and Stephens, quoted above, when JD Vance delivered the Munich speech that shocked European leaders, he was declaring victory over “a collection of weak, failed or sclerotic economies” and “welfare-state clients of the U.S.,” a once-dominant continent that has now become “a weak target that Trump sees for the taking.”
Can all these things be addressed or corrected? That’s hard to say, but certainly not all at once. For Americans, citizens of the country that has created or supercharged all these problems, responsibility begins at home.
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