'National collapse' imminent as Trump reaches 'tipping point': analysis

According to longtime political analyst Max Burns, not only would the American Founding Fathers be “rolling in their graves” if they knew what President Donald Trump would do to the country they forged, but they specifically sought to limit the potential for such “aspiring strongmen” to do harm. This, writes Burns in the Hill, should be on all concerned Americans’ minds not only in the context of the country’s 250th birthday, but because the U.S. has reached a “tipping point” in regard to Trump’s quest for authoritarian rule.

“It’s popular these days to claim that the Founders simply could never have comprehended a character as venal and antidemocratic as President Trump,” says Burns, but this simply isn’t true. “Hucksters like Trump found power as irresistible in the 18th century as they do today — the Founders knew plenty of toxic Trumpian types.”

The framers of the Constitution knew, asserts Burns, that the “real test” of the country’s principles would come when the rights written down on paper come up against the will of some “charismatic and amoral leader.” And they had no shortage of examples. Even in the country’s earliest days, it was “awash in so many demagogues and aspiring strongmen” that as one Founder wrote of the “politics of division and hatred,” “Beware those who wish to influence your passions and to make you dupes to their resentments and little interests. Personal invectives can never persuade, but they always fix prejudices which candor might have removed.”

As Burns notes, this sounds suspiciously like the MAGA movement, which has been “characterized by a seemingly inexhaustible level of grievance and victimhood.” Alexander Hamilton warned that if a demagogue like Trump ran for the presidency, “wounded pride [and] irritated resentment would be apt to carry the states.”

What’s more, says Burns, while the Founders were aware of “the manipulative power of mass resentment,” they also knew that a politician willing to appeal to such sentiments wouldn’t hesitate to stomp on the Constitution if it meant enriching their friends and unjustly attacking their political enemies.

In a 1787 letter, one Founder put it like this: “The president … has the power of pardoning those who are guilty of treason. No treason was so likely to take place as that in which the president himself might be engaged — the attempt to assume to himself powers not given by the constitution … [and] to secure from punishment the creatures of his ambition, the associates and abettors of his treasonable practices.” And as Burns points out, Trump has proven a perfect example of this, pardoning scores of criminal political allies, fraudsters, and even violent insurrectionists.

Furthermore, “A Congress compromised by its fealty to Trump would have been the greatest of insults to a founding generation that prided itself on creating a system where the legislature stood proudly independent of the chief executive.” To that end, they would have been further horrified by the Supreme Court’s recent decisions expanding presidential power, and “worse still, Congress seemingly has no desire to reclaim its constitutional prerogatives from what now looks like a blatantly imperial presidency… Of all the disappointments of modern American government, the surrender of Congress to the White House may be the thing our Founding Fathers feared the most.”

As one Founder famously quoted the Scottish philosopher David Hume, “It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost at once. Slavery has so frightful an aspect to men accustomed to freedom, that it must steal upon them by degrees, and disguise itself in a thousand shapes in order to be received.” And according to Burns, “America finds itself celebrating its 250th birthday under the gathering clouds of that warning.”

He concludes on a dire note, writing, “Authoritarianism has stolen upon us by degrees and now is terrifyingly close to a tipping point that will forever change the shape of our republic — if what emerges can even be called a republic at all. If we are to live up to the promise of the American experiment, the people must come together and stop our national collapse before the light of our democracy flickers out.”

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