Rolling Stone :: @RollingStone
The Founders Warned Us About A Man Like Trump As America turns 250, the warnings of Washington, Hamilton, and Madison read more like headlines. Commentary: https://rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/founding-fathers-warned-america-trump-1235577524/
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The Founders explicitly warned us about the dangers of a demagogue, the poison of hyper-partisanship, the corrosive effects of corruption and foreign influence, the politicization of religion, and the erosion of the separation of powers.
Yes, by those basic standards, we’re living through the founders’ nightmare. But the right response is not civic despair but a defiant resolve to reclaim American patriotism and fix what’s been broken so that we can strengthen our democracy to survive the next 250 years.
#AlexanderHamilton perfectly anticipated the figure of Donald Trump in a letter to George Washington in 1792:
“When a man unprincipled in private life, desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents ... despotic in his ordinary demeanour — known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty — when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity — to join in the cry of danger to liberty — to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government [and] bringing it under suspicion — to flatter and fall in with all the nonsense of the zealots of the day — it may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’ ”
Read that a second time to let it sink in. “Unprincipled in private life”: Check. “Bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents”: Check. “Known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty”: For sure. “Embarrassing the General Government [and] bringing it under suspicion — to flatter and fall in with all the nonsense of the zealots of the day”: Well, that’s almost too on the nose.
