I used to revere the great experiment that is the United States. After Trump, I'm not so sure

[Celerity]

On paper, the US constitution is a thing of beauty. But the would-be emperor in Washington has revealed its great weakness

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jul/03/united-states-constitution-donald-trump-washington-dc


The US Department of Labor building, Washington DC, 3 July 2026. Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

America’s big birthday has come at a bad time. On Saturday it will be a divided nation that marks 250 years since 13 North American colonies declared their independence from the Great Britain of George III. Many will be anxious that the republic they established that day is fragile – not least because of the would-be emperor in the White House. Some will console themselves that hope and angst have always been intertwined in the American story. From the very start, confidence in a bright, exceptional US future was combined with foreboding and doubt. At the close of the 1787 constitutional convention, a woman approached one of the founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin, to ask if the delegates had established a monarchy or a republic. Franklin’s answer: “A republic, if you can keep it.”

Some of that unease was the result, one hopes, of a quiet understanding that the new nation had arrived with a built-in defect, in the form of a terrible contradiction. The declaration proclaimed that “all men are created equal”, which excluded women and could not be squared with the fact that this new entity was founded on slavery. That text’s principal author, Thomas Jefferson, was himself a slave owner, and the knowledge of his hypocrisy haunted him. “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever,” he wrote. But that fear for the future also owed something to the sheer scale of the founders’ ambition. As Tom Holland, historian of the ancient world, puts it, the US was “founded as a simulacrum of the early Roman republic. And the lesson of Roman history is that at some point, a republic will become an autocracy.” The ink was barely dry on the 4 July declaration, says Holland, when Americans started “dreading the emergence of a Caesar”.

All of which might encourage today’s Americans to be sanguine, reassured that their predecessors were similarly fearful, only for their apprehensions to prove unfounded. Take Donald Trump’s determination to gather ever greater powers to himself. On one reading, that is hardly unprecedented. Franklin Roosevelt was lambasted for constructing an imperial presidency, while even the secular saint that is Abraham Lincoln subjected protesters to martial law and suspended the right of habeas corpus (though he did have the excuse of a civil war). In his appetite for power, Trump could say he’s in very good company.

And so, the American in rose-tinted glasses could enjoy Saturday’s barbecues and fireworks displays, insisting that this too will pass. That yes, a crude, venal braggart is in the Oval Office – one who, we learned this week, personally pocketed $2.2bn in his first year back in office; and yes, he launched a disastrous war that has made one of America’s sworn enemies, Iran, stronger and the US weaker; and yes, he has set about dismantling a post-1945 rules-based international order from which the US only ever benefited, growing stronger and richer; and yes, he and his vice-president seem determined to replace their country’s animating “creedal” conception of national identity, in which citizenship is open to whoever subscribes to America’s core ideals, with a definition that instead demands blood-and-soil ethnic heritage – but all of that will pass. In this view, an America that has survived a civil war, Jim Crow racial segregation and the McCarthyite witchhunts of the 1940s and 1950s, can survive Trump and Trumpism.

snip