Joanne Freeman on why Trump is an affront to the Founders
"This presidency is beyond anything the founding folk could have conceived of."
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On Wednesday, the Trump regime kicked off celebrations of America’s 250th birthday with a dismal event in Washington DC in which the president did his familiar rating and raving, and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy railed against “libtards.”
Instead of bringing people together to celebrate the laudable things about America, the sad spectacle reminded us of how MAGA is an affront to the very values our nation was founded upon.
To gain some expert insight on what America’s Founding Fathers would have to say about the current president, we connected with Dr. Joanne Freeman, professor of history at Yale University, who we spoke with last year about the Declaration of Independence’s warning for would-be autocrats like Trump.
“It’s a pretty terrifying time to be a political historian,” Freeman told us in our latest conversation.
“The people who were framing and founding the government believed that what made this government different from a monarchy was the degree to which it was grounded in public opinion,” she added. “But now, the president is openly profiting off the office while destroying and misusing the physical White House as though he owns it, even though it belongs to us. I am angry, because what we’re watching right now isn’t what a president is supposed to be.“
A transcript of Freeman’s chat with Public Notice contributor Thor Benson, lightly edited for clarity, follows. If you’d like to read all of it and aren’t already a paid subscriber, please consider becoming one. This newsletter (and my work in general) is entirely funded by readers, and paid subscribers are the only reason I’m able to keep everything we publish Monday through Friday free for everyone.
Thor Benson
There’s been a lot of focus lately on the 250th birthday of this country. What strikes me is the many ways, looking back to the Founders, in which Trump has gone against what they envisioned for the presidency. Is that front of mind for you too?
Joanne Freeman
Yeah. Speaking as an early American historian who spent decades immersed in what the founding generation thought about political power — specifically about executive power — this presidency is entirely out of bounds and beyond anything the founding folk could have conceived of. I’m not an originalist, and I don’t think every single thing they said and did in the founding era needs to be duplicated now, but this is a lot.
What they created in that moment were living documents in a living system. Our system is grounded on checks and balances — the entire system — and right now we have a Congress, with a Republican majority, that isn’t really standing up to do its duties. We have a Supreme Court that’s pretty much in line with the executive.
And then we have an executive and an administration that seem to believe they possess all of the power now. If there’s one thing that the founding folk made clear, particularly the framers of the Constitution, it was a lack of trust in a single individual having a massive amount of power.
