A Clear Threat to American Democracy
The Trump-Musk war on our Constitution
Back in late October, in the days leading up to the election, I wrote a long Substack essay I titled “Democracy in America: An Endorsement Against Donald Trump.” This essay was not my attempt to make a case for why you should vote for Kamala Harris; instead, it was my case for why we needed to reject the re-election of Donald Trump, for the sake of American constitutional democracy. In that piece, I wrote this:
“[H]ere I am, less than a month before the election, and I’m ready to declare publicly – late, perhaps – that this election is a hinge point for American democracy, that the pundits and the partisans were correct, even if inadvertently: American democracy is under real threat of being dismantled if we elect Donald Trump to the presidency for a second time. Just like last time, his election is not normal, and we shouldn’t act like it. But, whereas last time he was qualitatively different due to his lack of fitness for office and his unique indifference to the gravity of the office he assumed, this time the difference concerns the nature of democracy and the future prospects of our experiment in self-government.”
I highlight this not as a told-you-so, but as a reminder that none of what is currently happening in our government was unforeseen or unexpected. There were many of us – millions of us – worried, and warning about the dangers of a second Trump administration, on the grounds that returning him to office would be an existential threat to American democracy as we know it. This fear wasn’t based on exaggeration or overblown anxiety. It was based on the examples of his first presidency, the way it ended on January 6th, and everything he and his supporters had done and said over the last four years he was out of office.
A lot of alarming things have happened over this first month of the Trump presidency. These statements about the judiciary – two of them from no less than the Vice President of the United States – are perhaps the most alarming and shocking things we have experienced. The federal judiciary and its power as a check on executive and legislative overreach is core to the proper and safe functioning of our constitutional democracy. The legal theory of judicial review, by which the courts reserve to themselves the power to assess and make determinations of constitutionality of laws and actions, isn’t a recent innovation of an activist or progressive judiciary stocked by Democrats and liberals. No, judicial review stretches back to the very words of the Constitution itself, and of court cases involving the actions of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. The role of the court as the neutral arbiter and level-headed check on power is crucial to who we are as Americans.
What JD Vance and Elon Musk are advancing here is no less than a coup, a stripping of the power of checks and balances that ensures a tyrannical executive cannot run roughshod over the rights of the American people as embodied in the Congress and the courts. The executive is the least democratic wing of the government. Our rights, and our powers, as a people rest in the legislative and judicial branches. What Donald Trump has done over the last four weeks is maximize the dismantling of democracy that has been slowly occurring over the last fifty years. He has fast tracked executive autocracy. Every bit of power that is leached away from the legislative and judicial branches is a bit of your rights that are undermined and trampled.
These statements from the Vice President and from an unelected billionaire are not throwaway quips on social media. They are advancing a radical restructuring of American governance, a revolution, an ideological coup tearing down our republic and the democratic processes underpinning it, in favor of an even more ambitious and powerful executive autocrat, who can singlehandedly wield the power of the government in whatever way he sees fit. You may think this is ok, when it’s Donald Trump holding those reins. But what about when its not? What about when its someone with even worse ideas about who is and isn’t worthy of government protections? What about if the broken bounds of democratic power are overwhelmed by someone with infinitely more focus that Trump and harder-to-parse intentions? What about if it was an extreme, radical leftist? These norms and institutions are in place to check and impede the use of power, because while it may be your preferred side that is in power and throwing around democracy right now, there is no guarantee that it will always be that way. Our Constitution limits power for the sake of us all. We should not be so quick to abandon those limits because it benefits us today. It might not do so tomorrow.
I am at the point of pleading with my conservative brothers and sisters: please wake up, and recognize what it happening to this democracy you claim to love so much. America does not matter without the essence of who we are: a democratic people, ruled by laws and not personalities, subject to the Constitution and the norms of democracy, willing to abdicate power and control, subject to one another, free in the truest way we can be, in our consciences and our souls, not just our pocketbooks and our passions. Please understand, democracy doesn’t just snap back from these moments like a rubber band. Once you’ve undone these norms, they are nearly impossible to put back together. Trump isn’t suspending the normal way of things for a short time to put things right, and then hand things back over in a few years. To believe that is to fall into one of the oldest traps in history, the same trap the supporters of Caesar fell into two thousand years ago. We must learn from history, and recognize what is happening. And we must have a longer view of things than merely what makes us feel good on Facebook or when we turn on Fox News. This is a hinge point in the American democratic project, and I don’t know if we come back from it.