By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, July 28, 2025
“We have no government armed with power capable of
contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion,” John Adams
famously wrote. “Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry would break the
strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our
Constitution is designed only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly
inadequate for any other.”
Adams was speaking about the general pattern of our
government, but what he wrote is especially true of the presidency. At the time
the office was being created, there was some concern among the framers about
whether they were creating a chief executive that was too weak, insufficiently
grand—too republican, in essence, though as far as I know none of them put it
exactly that way, too common and too popular to stand eye-to-eye with the kings
and emperors who would be his peers. Adams himself made a number of ridiculous
(and justly ridiculed) proposals for forms of presidential address: His
Elective Majesty, His Mightiness, High Highness, the President of the United
States of America and the Protector of their Liberties, etc. A potentially weak
presidency was very much a concern for them.
Oops.
The genius of the American founding is that our
constitutional architecture takes account of the actual facts of human
nature—including that avarice and ambition that Adams wrote about—rather than
basing our system of government on some romantic ideal about what men could be
if only we pushed them in the right direction. (At the point of a bayonet or
under threat of guillotine if necessary.) While subsequent revolutionists from
France to Russia to Iran tried to remake the whole of life along utopian lines,
the American Founders were content simply to build an artfully designed
apparatus of national government—in their modesty, they found greatness.
But, of course, nobody gets it right every time or in
every jot and tittle. Adams has (in my mind, at least) a fair claim on being
the true father of American political conservatism, but he and many of his
colleagues were naïve (or maybe they just made the wrong bet) when it came to
the matter of the chief executive, his powers, his prerogatives, and his
stature.
Why did they get it so wrong?
There is a reason beyond politics that government under
the domination of a single paternal figure has been the norm across so many
radically different societies for millennia. The greatest English contribution
to liberty was the notion that even the king must be subject to the law, and
the American Revolution extended that principle by eliminating kings as such
and replacing them with a different kind of national father figure who is, in
theory, entirely a creature of the law, invested with power not by God’s favor
but by the Constitution and by the electors acting as the representatives of
the people. But such a singular figure was destined to be something like a
king, whatever we called him, and, maybe, something even worse.
Avarice, envy, servility, power worship, the spirit of
revenge—the American Founders accounted for these to an admirable degree. They
did not account for the diminishing democratic attention span, which grew
shorter throughout the 19th century and then radically shorter from
the middle of the 20th century through our own time, driven in part
by a series of advancements in communications technology, as first radio was
added to the arsenal of demagoguery, and then television, and then the
Internet. Beyond technology, there is the issue of the gross scale of the
American enterprise: 340 million Americans, 130 million or so households, 50
states with governors and legislators of their own, 3,144 counties, nearly
20,000 municipalities, more than 16,000 school districts, etc. Even people who
follow politics professionally must specialize, and there are many people who
can tell you everything there is to know about the politics of financial
regulation in Washington who have no idea what is going on in Austin or Denver
or Tallahassee, or with national security or agriculture policy.
The average American citizen has neither the time nor the
inclination to follow the comings and goings of the 700 or so people who are
closest to the center of our national government: 435 House members, 100
senators, nine Supreme Court justices, the president and the 26 members of the
Cabinet, the various key advisers and staffers who help to shape the executive,
legislative, and judicial agendas. It is natural—the theater critic in me is
tempted to argue that it is inevitable—that the nation’s political
attention should be focused on one man and that, as a result of this and in
direct contravention of our constitutional design, real power should
disproportionately cleave to that man and his office, including the vital
sovereign powers (lawmaking, declaring war, ratifying treaties) that are
explicitly invested in Congress.
The founding generation escaped the worst consequences of
having created an overpowering executive the only way human beings have ever
really solved a problem like that: with the aid of good men. They put George
Washington into the presidency and successfully relied on Washington’s personal
integrity, moral seriousness, patriotism, and republican sensibility not only
to keep the presidency in check during his own administration but also to set a
controlling example for future presidents. They did not fall into the error
that worried T. S. Eliot, “dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need
to be good.” But they did overestimate the supply of good men, just as they
underestimated Americans’ proclivity for elevating the other kind. After only a
half-dozen excellent-to-pretty-good presidents, the office was in the hands of
Andrew Jackson, who was, pace
John Yoo, a scoundrel, a demagogue, and a tyrant.
Ups and downs followed.
Eventually, Americans sent Donald Trump, a ridiculous
game-show host and quondam pornographer, to the White House in 2016. He
subsequently attempted to stage a coup d’état after losing the 2020
election, found himself convicted of a raft of felonies, and conducted himself
in the most contemptible and juvenile manner imaginable—and so Americans sent
him back to the White House in 2024 and are watching him spend his days trying
to explain away the fact that his personal life intersects at several points
with an infamous
child-sex-trafficking conspiracy. My progressive friends sometimes moan
about “normalizing” Trump, but Trump is utterly normal in the way
diabetes and rape and war are normal. Not good, but not unexpected.
Trump is part of a very long line of autocrats and
caudillos, exemplifying C.S. Lewis’ observation: “How monotonously alike all
the great tyrants and conquerors have been.” Trump has now accused one of his
predecessors, Barack Obama, of “treason,”
based on … nothing at all that is germane to treason. Trump’s Department of
Justice, so called, has opened an investigation into matters related to this
supposed treason. The “treason” consists entirely in having been a political
opponent of Donald Trump, who also has invented such fanciful legal notions as
“presidential harassment,” and who has been emboldened by our Supreme Court’s
absolutely idiotic invention of a presidential “immunity” found
nowhere in the Constitution. Accusing political critics and rivals of
treason is, of course, a strategy typical of tyrants ranging from Caligula to
Henry VIII. The notion that the chief is somehow above the law—even to the
modest degree contemplated by Chief Justice John Roberts in a decision that
Americans likely will regret for generations—is very old stuff, too. That Trump
practices these traditions while embracing
Neronic vulgarity and the marital values of Henry VIII is simply a new
layer of fecal frosting on the same old cake.
When chief executives start accusing their opponents of
treason, it is time to throw them out. But how could one trust in the same
Americans who were stupid and vicious enough to twice elect the man to suddenly
develop sufficient wisdom and patriotism at this late date?
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