A warning from the past – the founding fathers anticipated Trump and the susceptibility of the people

The al­le­ga­tions in the in­dict­ment of Don­ald Trump for con­spir­ing to over­turn the elec­tion of 2020 rep­re­sent the Amer­ican Founders’ night­mare.

A key con­cern of James Madi­son and Alexan­der Hamil­ton was that dem­agogues would in­cite mobs and fac­tions to defy the rule of law, over­turn free and fair elec­tions and un­der­mine Amer­i­can democracy. “The only path to a sub­ver­sion of the re­pub­li­can system f the Coun­try is, by flattering the prej­u­dices of the people , and ex­citing their jeal­ousies and ap­pre­hensions, to throw affairs into con­fu­sion, and bring on civil com­mo­tion,” Alexan­der Hamilton wrote in 1790. “When a man un­prin­ci­pled in pri­vate life, des­per­ate in his for­tune, bold in his tem­per…is seen to mount the hobby horse of pop­ular­ity,” Hamil­ton warned, “he may ‘ride the storm and di­rect the whirl-wind.’”

And norms about the peace­ful trans­fer of power, strength­ened by George Wash­ing­ton’s tow­er­ing ex­am­ple of vol­un­tar­ily step­ping down from of­fice af­ter two terms, would en­sure that no elected pres­i­dent could con­vert him­self, like Cae­sar, into an unelected dic­ta­tor. “The idea of in­tro­duc­ing a monar­chy or aris­toc­racy into this Coun­try,” Hamil-pton wrote, “is one of those vi­sion­ary things, that none but mad­men could med­i­tate,” as long as the Amer­i­can peo­ple resisted “con­vul­sions and dis­orders in con­se­quence of the acts of pop­u­lar dem­agogues.”

Excerpt from Essay, The Founders Anticipated the Threat of Trump, the Wall Street Journal August 4, 2023

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”
– Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism