The Dispatch
Thursday, April 10, 2025
“Decline is a choice.”
That was Charles Krauthammer’s admonition and insight, offered in 2009 at the dawn of
Barack Obama’s administration. The award-winning columnist noted that
pronouncements regarding China’s inevitable march to global dominance were
always accompanied by lamentations about America’s certain decline. As
Beijing’s prospects went up, Washington’s would have to go down, as if by the
rules of physics.
Krauthammer rejected the premise. “My thesis is simple,”
he said. “The question of whether America is in decline cannot be answered
‘yes’ or ‘no.’ There is no ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ Both answers are wrong, because the
assumption that somehow there exists some predetermined inevitable trajectory,
the result of uncontrollable external forces, is wrong. Nothing is inevitable.
Nothing is written. For America today, decline is not a condition. Decline is a
choice.”
Krauthammer was correct then, and, although he is sadly
no longer with us, his point is correct today. But the tectonic plates of
American politics have shifted over the past 16 years. In 2009, Krauthammer
served as the indispensable intellectual backstop of American conservatism,
with advocates of managed decline mostly arrayed on the other side of the
ideological spectrum. Fast forward four presidential election cycles, and
Krauthammer’s worldview is now mocked and derided by the new leaders of the American
right and Republican Party.
For the most ardent—and online—defenders of Donald Trump
on the intellectual new right, “Make America Great Again” has been displaced
as the organizing ideological slogan by, “Do you know what time it is?” The
point of this juvenile rhetorical question is that the postliberal elite who
support and staff the Trump administration have an almost gnostic insight
invisible to the rest of us. In their invincible faith in what often seems like
an unpatriotic love of political power, they insist that the old rules—of
American global leadership, free markets, limited government, fidelity to the
Constitution—have passed their sell-by date. What is required is “new thinking”
and “fresh ideas.”
What are these new and fresh ideas? For some, they are literally
monarchism or autocracy. For others, they are mercantilism and a division
of the world into “spheres of influence.” In short, their foreign policy was
ancient when Charlemagne was on the throne, and their economic philosophy was
hatched in the 15th century.
In service of these ideas, Donald Trump has literally
made America—and Americans—poorer, bringing the United States to the brink
of a recession in recent weeks by threatening to unilaterally impose one of
the most regressive tax hikes in U.S. history. He’s momentarily been talked
into standing down, but an economic environment in which the whims of one
famously mercurial man can upend the international trade system and wipe out trillions
of dollars in stock market value is not one conducive to sustained growth.
For the next 90 days—and really, for the remainder of Trump’s
term—decision-makers at businesses across the country and the world will be
forced to speculate: Are the president’s tariffs merely a negotiating tool, or
an effort to fundamentally remake the global economy? Even key White House
officials seem not to know.
But the financial volatility of recent days is just one
symptom of a broader, more deliberate descent. Decline doesn’t solely mean
impoverishment; it means degeneration, to sink backward and down. And that is
what the United States’ current leadership class is choosing for this country
by willfully dismantling the free-market system, abandoning America’s role as a
global leader, and degrading the separation of powers and rule of law. Even
worse, it is doing so based on a suite of false assumptions: that Americans are
weak, unable to compete in an open market, and incapable of responding to any
incentives or exhortations more high-minded than rank self-interest or partisan
contempt. The underlying assumption, held by leaders across the political
spectrum, is that appealing to America’s loftiest ideals for reasons unrelated
to partisan advantage is for suckers.
We reject that premise. Those American ideals, inherited
from the Founders and fortified by later generations, are what brought the
United States to the heights from which it is now slouching.
Donald Trump may have decided
on Wednesday to temporarily call off most of his blanket, so-called
“reciprocal” tariffs, but that capitulation to reality does not change the
fundamental truth: As evidenced by the past week—and past
four decades—the
president views
trade as zero-sum, with clear winners and losers in every transaction. He
believes the
existence of a trade deficit in goods with any country renders the United
States a loser, ignoring the fact that that, for the average American consumer,
being able to buy a wider variety of food, clothes, cars, and medicines at
lower prices is a clear victory for their wallets and way of life.
As long as Trump’s machinations continue
to cause confusion and uncertainty, access to foreign markets is going to
dry up, goods will become more expensive, and a policy sold as an effort to
secure the American Dream will have the result of putting it further out of
reach for millions of Americans. If Trump’s first term is any indication, he
will then attempt
to divert taxpayer dollars—or drive the country further into debt—to
subsidize the very industries his trade policies have targeted.
Those trade policies don’t put Americans first;
they put his pet theories of global scorekeeping first. Our trade deficit with
Canada, for example, would not exist but for the fact that it provides a safe
and reliable supply of oil, which it sells
us below global market prices. Lower oil prices are good for Americans, but
according to Trump’s scorecard, it’s proof we’re getting “ripped off” by our
democratic neighbor and ally.
Trump claims
his tariffs will generate so much revenue for the government that federal
income taxes will become unnecessary. But the United States has tried this
before and abandoned the system—not just because it proved to be an inefficient
and counterproductive impediment to growth, but because protectionism fueled
massive political corruption, as business interests lobbied, bribed, and
bought public officials to circumvent tariffs or see them punitively applied to
competitors. This dynamic seems to be a feature, not a bug, for the president
who likes nothing more than to be beseeched
for favors—for a price.
This type of thinking has infected Trump’s view of
geopolitics as well. Rather than committing to meeting the challenges incumbent
upon leaders of the free world, the White House and its ideological allies seem
dead set on shedding the job title entirely, as if it were just another target
of the Department of Government Efficiency. Instead, they seem to accept the
inevitable rise of our adversaries as the new stewards of a very different
international order—one organized around the ancient imperial practice of
“spheres of influence.” Gone is the idea of burden-sharing with allies to
protect our interests and values; in its place is a kind of burden-sharing with
our foes, where each has undisputed dominion over its region.
Under this system, we
are told, America will finally put its own interests first again. But
passing off isolationism as “America First” assumes all competing approaches to
foreign policy—not to mention trade policy and immigration policy—are contrary
to America’s self-interest. The Trump administration views alliances,
international
trade, and the expenditure of energy or resources promoting
our values—even
rhetorically—as inherently at odds with America’s bottom line. By this
logic, the Marshall Plan, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and even the Cold
War itself would have been dismissed as unmanly do-goodery at our expense, the
way support
for Ukraine’s war effort has.
Indeed, the White House had made clear that it views
Ukrainians not as allies desperately fighting for their freedom and survival,
but as freeloaders whose only utility now is as a potential profit center. When
you see the world as an arena to be carved up by rival mob bosses, those
nations on our turf cease to be democratic allies, dependent on a system we
created, and start to become targets for economic exploitation or even
territorial expansion. How else to explain the administration’s refusal to rule
out the use of force to annex Greenland or Canada?
But nowhere is the evidence of the new right’s willful
decline more obvious than in its rejection of fidelity to the rule of law and
the Constitution. As the Trump administration ignores
due process, encroaches
upon press freedom, and subverts
the independence of the judiciary—all central pillars of
self-government—top executive branch officials and Republican members of
Congress turn a blind eye, or cheer it on. And let us be clear: The previous
administration was no paragon of civic health either. Our own Sarah Isgur argued earlier
this year that Joe Biden left office in January having caused more damage
to the rule of law than any of his predecessors. But the Biden administration’s
myriad failures and abuses are not a warrant for this administration to do
worse in the spirit of “retribution.”
Take, for example, the administration’s ongoing campaign
of intimidation against law firms. These executive orders may have begun as
an exercise in retaliation, but their initial success at extracting concessions
and capitulation has given way to both a shakedown operation and a means of
hacking the rule of law and the constitutional order. Lawyers who might want to
take on clients targeted by this administration have, in effect, been told,
“That’s a nice little law firm you have there, it’d be a shame if something
happened to it.”
But the administration’s most disturbing assault on the
Constitution is the one it cynically touts as a patriotic defense of it: a
president’s unchecked power. There is plenty of scholarship
supporting the theories of the unitary executive; at a basic level, the
arguments are uncontroversial and defensible. But the idea of the unitary
executive is not, and has never been, a warrant for what Edmund Burke, John
Locke, and the Founders called “arbitrary power.” As James Madison wrote in Federalist
47, “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary,
in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary,
self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of
tyranny.”
We are not there yet. Our sadly enfeebled institutions
and deteriorating commitment to republican government are not yet so enervated
as to permit outright tyranny, and we are encouraged by fledgling
efforts by lawmakers to reclaim some of the authority granted to the
legislative branch by Article I of the Constitution, however unlikely they are
to succeed. But the rhetoric coming out of the White House—and the logic
underpinning it—is moving rapidly in a dark direction. Donald Trump’s musings
about serving a third term or his promotion
of a Napoleon quote—“He who saves his Country does not violate any Law”—may
be discounted as trolling, but as our own Nick Catoggio has
noted, when it comes to Trump, “everything’s a joke until it isn’t.”
Trump’s conception of power and how to use it was old and
familiar when the Founders convened to draft the Constitution. If they wanted a
king, they could have had one in George Washington. But they wanted a republic,
and to that end, they created a new system of government recognizing God-given
rights that cannot be rescinded or trampled by mere politicians. The singular
obligation imposed by Article II of the Constitution is to “take Care that the
Laws be faithfully executed.”
But Trump’s theory of the unitary executive, combined
with his anti-constitutional claim of an all-encompassing
mandate because he carried the swing states, is an argument for arbitrary
power. Even if Trump had won a landslide victory in November, rather than the 44th-largest
margin of victory in the history of the Electoral College, the only mandate
he enjoys is to do the job as laid out in the Constitution. And that job is to
execute the laws duly enacted by Congress, not to make law through executive
order and infest government agencies with unqualified loyalists.
Speaking of Congress, the first—and supreme—branch of
government is in many ways the great villain of this political moment. The
American right may be choosing decline—again, in its truest meaning of decay
and rot—but so, too, has the legislative branch. Members of Congress have been
outsourcing their power and authority to the president and the courts for
decades, punting difficult decisions to judges and unaccountable bureaucracies
rather than taking positions that might upset some of their constituents back
home. This cowardice—exhibited in spades by Republicans and Democrats alike—has
placed a real strain on the federal government to operate as the Founders
intended.
To the extent that Trump’s true nature was ever a
mystery, it no longer is: As a White House aide recently
said, the president is “at the peak of just not giving a f— anymore” and
“going to do what he’s going to do.” Since retaking office in January, he has pardoned
violent felons solely because the violence they committed was on his
behalf. He has all but flipped
the United States’ official position on Russia’s war of aggression in
Ukraine. He has allowed Elon Musk to cripple
government functions and agencies enacted and authorized by Congress—some
of which do literally
lifesaving work. He has threatened
and vilified judges who—yes, sometimes in excess—are attempting to uphold
laws written by Congress or constitutional safeguards enshrined by the
Founders. Just yesterday afternoon, he directed
the Justice Department to open an investigation into Chris Krebs, a
widely-respected public servant who ran the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure
Security Agency in Trump’s first administration, because
Krebs “falsely and baselessly denied that the 2020 election was rigged and
stolen.”
Again, we have not yet arrived at unalloyed tyranny. But
we are getting closer, and that is bad enough.
There was a time when conservatives in elected office
would object to such usurpations of power and abuses of authority by the
president. That time was approximately
four months ago.
We’re not naive; we understand partisan
loyalty—particularly at a moment when the president has
the political winds at his back—demands a certain amount of tact and
discernment. And quibble as we may with his methods, Trump has brought about
some desperately needed change: Illegal border crossings have fallen
to their lowest level in decades; an ideology that supports explicit racial
discrimination is being rightfully extracted from the federal bureaucracy; and
progressive pieties are being
challenged at elite institutions.
But on the biggest questions, Donald Trump’s second
administration has already proven it will be a stark departure from his first,
and no more conservative—ideologically, dispositionally, philosophically—than
Joe Biden’s or Barack Obama’s. The sooner elected Republicans come to terms
with that reality—in public, not just in conversations they have with us when
the cameras are off—the better off we’ll all be.
Because just as Trump’s pursuit of American decline is a
choice, so, too, is refusing to object to it.
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