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When I came home with a black eye after a fight as a kid, my father imparted to me one of those sticky paternal pearls of wisdom that continues to find new relevance beyond its intended purpose.
That afternoon, my dad took me outside, showed me how to keep my guard up and said, “Always protect your head and try to land the first shot on the nose. No matter how tough the other guy is, he’s gonna tear up long enough for you to do some damage. Fight dirty, fight fast, and get the hell out of there.”
My old man was right. Today, the tears are flowing, the damage is coming and the fighting is dirty and fast.
Like a telegraphed sock in the kisser, a long-anticipated fate — a second Trump administration — has brought with it near universal acquiescence across the spectrum of the political class and throughout two of the three branches of government.
The real story of this era is shaping up, and it will not be about how one man did what he said he would do, repeatedly and in detail. The story will be about how nearly the entirety of the political establishment had hardly any response to any of it. The story will be about how Congress, the first branch of government — not merely in its order of placement in the Constitution, but in its primacy in the minds of its creators, and in its jurisdiction and scope — was subsumed and disposed of by its lesser successor, the executive branch. After all, before the constitutional middle child grew up to swallow its older sibling, President Donald Trump had the foresight to first devour the third branch — the judiciary — for practice (not to mention a little extra “just in case” insurance).
President Trump’s expansion of executive chutzpah on display in the first weeks of the new administration has the hallmarks of a “What If…?” parlor game of hypotheticals so outlandish that we have never even bothered to codify an emergency contingency plan in the event we got here.
In fact, in all of my years in both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, I never saw a single serious proposal to secure and ensure the signature constitutional ideal of checks and balances. That’s because we never really thought we needed it. To be fair, one thing no one saw coming was Elon Musk plowing a Cybertuck through the Constitution.
That seems to have been a mistake. For, as hopeful as any may be for the triumph of the better angels of our nature, they too have their powerful counterparts whose ambitions soar just as high.
Standing at the gates and taking it all in are those leaders, self- and voter-anointed, who seem at most to have only sighs and disapproving head shakes to offer with each new abnormalization of the old norms. They seem stunned, listless, almost goofy.
They seem like the bumbling neighbor next door in a saccharine sitcom who loses his crush to the high school jock.
“Well, what can I do about it? She likes him better because he’s the Big Man on Campus!” Insert downward glance, crestfallen dropped shoulders and audience laugh track.
This particular group tends to proffer characteristic phrases such as, “We have to find ways to work together,” or, “We don’t have to agree on everything to find common ground for common sense solutions,” or, “In the end, we all want the same thing — to help the American people.”
Rest assured, we most certainly do not all want the same things.
Then there is the fidelity to fealty, a practice as ancient as our hominid form itself. We couldn’t all have been the first successful hunters. For every carcass brought back to a camp, there had to be armies of sycophants who bent over backward for some prime cuts. This same behavior can be observed with members of Congress when they — grown adults — play dress up and beg to be teacher’s pet en masse, the kind of classroom politics we all hoped we would one day outgrow and later laugh about at high school reunions.
The first few weeks of this new era (and it has only been a few weeks) have shown that America is ripe for an attempt at dictatorship — and in Trump and Musk, we have in place a dynamic duo to give it a try. Our historic timeline places our development right at the inflection point where other great attempted democratic republics have had their big hiccups from craven men doing craven things.
Historians and academics have had a field day mapping out the Roman equivalent of our time. I have come to the belief that the first Trump administration was akin to a more successful Catilinarian Conspiracy gone almost right, while this second term looks a little like the end of the Triumvirate. It’s too early to tell who will end up becoming Caesar and who will go the way of Pompey the Great: Trump or Musk? Neither had happy endings, nor did the Republic.
Too many memes have chest-thumped accusations about those who stood by and did nothing while centuries of what was believed to be progress toward a more humane, compassionate, accepting, open, and peace-oriented society slowly incinerated in burning heaps of history books. We certainly continuously strayed far afield from those ideals, but for a long time, the old moral arch seemed to be bending excruciatingly slowly in the right direction, ever since about four score ago when it really inverted itself during WWII.
Then, like now, we were witness to a revolution of sorts. This time, it is a Rollover Revolution. A revolution where an entire cultural presupposition about the rule of law and the basic liberties that sparked our revolution of national origin — our founding principles — have been seized with seemingly little outcry from the public or the powerful. It turns out that human nature is no different in America than any place else.
American exceptionalism has yielded to American acceptance.
We all know where we are sitting now, especially those of us in the cheap seats. Having seen inside the guts of one of those supposed backstops against tyranny for most of the last two decades, I am less comforted than I would like to be by my grandmother’s soothing survival axiom, “This too shall pass.”
Like many others, I am experiencing nearly as paralytic a response as one of those frozen iguanas that plummeted from Florida palms around the birth of our new America last month. In fact, I’m not entirely sure I’ve actually been conscious through all of this. These days have had all of the markings of a fever dream and have made about as much sense.
I’ve spent so much time analyzing how we got here. How the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body and The People’s House, could let two men, one a 34-time convicted felon and the other, the world’s richest man, run roughshod over their own power and all of us, especially after all we went through to create our democratic republic. Maybe it’s just a part of us. Maybe it’s just a thing that exists in our species.
The framers of the Constitution were so deeply concerned about the potential of those venial things we do that they developed a whole system of checks and balances to keep the whole system together. They knew that, sometimes, even the best and most hopeful things can end up going south in the wrong hands.
I always thought the point of our form of democracy was that we created a system to prevent someone from just taking over. Throughout my career, I witnessed that politicians’ egos were too precious to them to let anyone take their power away from them, which is what makes this release of authority by Congress in particular, so stunning.
In the 51st Federalist Paper, our old pal Publius (James Madison on this one) proffered that “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” in explaining the rationale behind the creation of a system of checks and balances. Has the nation ever seen less ambition from any politician than those who have ceded their own offices to a couple of billionaires?
Eighteen essays later, in Federalist 70, Alexander Hamilton, of Broadway fame, in an effort to assure newly-minted Americans that the president would not become a monarch wrote, “Perhaps the question now before the public may, in its consequences, afford melancholy proofs of the effects of this despicable frailty, or rather detestable vice, in the human character.”
I guess we’ll see if a subordinate Congress and a complicit judiciary and a complacent public — yes, we have some power too — will let perish from the earth the idea of “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” So far, they are showing plenty of “melancholy proofs of the effects of despicable frailty, or rather detestable vise, in the human character.”
If this all feels weird, it should. It feels like lurching between dimensions where time and space don’t quite align, like a sci-fi movie without a hero, or even an attempt to restore order to the universe.
Our once shining city on a hill is dimming with a whimper. What can we do about it anyway? We’re not the Big Man on Campus. Shucks, I guess that’s just the way it goes sometimes, right?
Ray Zaccaro is a Democratic strategist. He previously served as Strategic Adviser and Director of Public Affairs to the AFL-CIO, a Senior Adviser to U.S. Senator Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and three Members of the U.S. House of Representatives.
