In 1814, John Adams issued a warning that sounds today like the tolling of a distant but familiar bell: “Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” It was not hyperbole, but the crystallization of decades of reflection by a man who had helped forge a republic from revolution. Adams saw clearly that the greatest danger to democratic self-government would not come from without, but from within—from the corrosive forces of passion, faction, and unchecked ambition. The American experiment, in his eyes, was not invincible. It was mortal.
He was not alone in this belief. The founders, though often in fierce disagreement, shared a common dread: that the republic they had built could be undone by its own people, either through demagoguery, institutional erosion, or civic decay. James Madison, the architect of the Constitution, feared the tyranny of the majority and the rise of factionalism. “The instability, injustice, and confusion introduced into the public councils,” he wrote in Federalist No. 10, “have, in truth, been the mortal diseases under which popular governments have everywhere perished.” He believed liberty required not only popular consent but a robust framework of institutional restraint—precisely what is now under threat.
Donald Trump’s rise, his presidency, and the political infrastructure he continues to build all reflect the kind of danger Madison feared: a faction animated not by policy but by personal loyalty, a movement that sees law not as a common standard but as an obstacle to power. Trump has not only challenged the outcomes of elections; he has sought to subvert the very mechanisms by which legitimacy is determined. He has turned public institutions into targets for ridicule, retribution, or capture. The judiciary, long the ballast of constitutional order, has become a punching bag for his grievances. Judges who rule against him are branded political enemies. Entire courts are dismissed as rigged. This is not principled disagreement. It is a deliberate attempt to delegitimize the final arbiter of the law when it ceases to serve his personal interests.
George Washington, in his Farewell Address, foresaw this precise danger. “The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge,” he wrote, “is itself a frightful despotism.” Washington feared the collapse of public trust in institutions, particularly when one party or figure attempts to bend the machinery of government to partisan will. He did not imagine despotism arriving with a crown or a sword, but with the cheering of crowds, the weakening of checks, and the unmooring of political conduct from principle.
Nowhere is this clearer than in Trump’s approach to the Department of Justice. During his first term, he sought not merely to direct its policy but to enlist it as a tool for personal and political ends. He publicly called for the prosecution of his rivals and the exoneration of his allies. His aides pressured officials to manufacture investigations, to “just say the election was corrupt,” as he demanded of the acting attorney general in 2020. This was not an aberration. It was a dry run. Project 2025, a blueprint developed by Trump-aligned institutions in preparation for his return to power, proposes remaking the executive branch into a weaponized, loyalist apparatus. The DOJ, in this vision, would no longer be an instrument of blind justice but a direct extension of the president’s hand. That is what it has become in Trump’s second term.
This is precisely what Alexander Hamilton feared. Though often caricatured as favoring strong executive power, Hamilton understood its dangers intimately. “Of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics,” he wrote, “the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people … becoming the tyrants of the people.” He saw how demagogues could manipulate popular sentiment to erode institutional constraints, centralize power, and ultimately dismantle the republic they claimed to serve. It is no wonder that Trump recently adopted the rallying cry of the lawyer bashers that misread Shakespeare’s quote from Henry VI— “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” Instinctively, he realizes lawyers are an obstacle to his malevolent designs.
Trump’s hostility extends beyond law enforcement and the courts. He has directed similar contempt toward universities and other centers of cultural and scientific knowledge. Higher education, which Thomas Jefferson saw as a pillar of republican self-rule, is now framed as a corrupt and dangerous breeding ground for “radical leftists.” Jefferson, who believed that an informed citizenry was the only true safeguard against tyranny, would have seen in these attacks an ominous sign. “The natural progress of things,” he wrote, “is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.” But it is not government per se that is now gaining ground. It is a single will, a single voice, seeking to shout down the pluralism of ideas and the deliberation of reason.
Project 2025’s ambitions make plain the desire not merely to influence the federal bureaucracy, but to transform it. Civil servants are dismissed and replaced with loyalists. Federal agencies, including those responsible for education, science, and civil rights, are gutted or reoriented toward ideological missions. The independence of the executive branch’s internal structures—long seen as essential to professional, apolitical governance—are swept away. Benjamin Franklin, asked in 1787 what form of government the Constitutional Convention had created, famously replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” The conditional remains the moral core of that statement. A republic is not kept by slogans, nor by rituals. It is kept by laws, norms, and the daily sacrifices of ego to principle.
In our own time, these principles are being eroded not with open violence, but with slow corrosion. When courts are disparaged, when judges, lawyers, and prosecutors are menaced, when scholars are censored, when bureaucracies and their institutional memories are purged, when elections are challenged simply for producing an undesirable result, and when the president grants clemency or the commutation of sentences to 1500 individuals convicted of offenses related to the January 6th Capitol attack, the republic begins to bleed internally. The suicide Adams feared is not theatrical. It is administrative, bureaucratic, cultural—a long campaign of exhaustion and institutional sabotage.
We are not yet lost. The genius of the American system lies in its resilience. But that resilience depends on people—citizens and leaders alike—who understand that democracy is not the enemy of order, and that liberty is not a license to destroy the foundations of government. The founders left us not a finished nation, but a fragile architecture of possibility. They warned us with one voice that the fall would not come from an outside army, but from within—from apathy, from vanity, from unchecked ambition, and from the belief that power, once gained, is more important than the rules that bind it.
What we are seeing now is not the birth of a new era, but the test of whether we still deserve the one we inherited. It is not too late to choose constitutional government over charismatic power. But history does not wait long for those who hesitate. If we do not resist now—decisively, legally, and morally—we may find ourselves at the very moment Adams predicted: watching democracy’s funeral and calling it reform.
There have been demagogues in American history before—ambitious figures who sought to bend the republic to their personal vision. But until now, they have been thwarted, not only by the strength of institutions, but by political parties that, however flawed, retained a baseline respect for constitutional order and the norms of democratic governance. The system held because enough people, across the spectrum, believed that the rule of law must outlast the ambitions of any one individual. At this moment, however, one of the two ruling parties does not seem to share in that belief.
The United States still commands the goodwill of many around the world—nations, peoples, and individuals who look to its promise with cautious hope. They can only watch now and trust that Americans will see autocracy for what it is, not in theory but in practice, and reject it before it calcifies into something irreparable. If the republic is to endure, it must rediscover not only its institutions, but its moral center. Only then will the country truly live up to its founding ideals—and only then will it have earned the right to call itself great again.