Unfinished Revolution

The November 2025 issue of the Atlantic Magazine is titled “The Unfinished Revolution” memorializing the coming 250^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. There were about twenty articles in that issue on various topics but one that caught my eye was, “What the Founders would say now.” The article was not to be an interrogatory but an assertion. And the author was not a well-known historian but Fintan O’Toole, an Irish writer for the Irish Times. Intriguing. I thought it might be interesting to view the Founding Fathers from a different perspective but, unfortunately, Trump derangement syndrome is well entrenched on the other side of the Atlantic and Mr. O’Toole ‘s analysis is tainted by his bias (or as one of my favorite singers, Link Wray, would say, “through a foggy haze of blue”) .

Mr. O’Toole’s presumption is that the Founders would have disliked President Trump just as much as the author does. I would not be surprised if the Founders would have disliked President Trump, he is not a very likeable guy. But that’s not the point. The Founders were very aware that people like Donald Trump exist In the world and that such people would be attracted to the power latent in government. The Founders’ solution to the dangers posed by the attraction to government power was the dispersion of that power, first by creating three co-equal branches of government that provided checks to the accumulation of power. The second part of the solution was to limit the federal government to the powers enumerated in the Constitution dispersing other powers not so enumerated to the state and local governments.

President Trump has cited various crises as justification for an unconstitutional concentration of power in the White House using national security as a foil to allow punitive tariffs on friends and foes alike, federal agents backed by the national guard (or the threat of them) to police multiple cities in the search for illegal immigrants and a fentanyl epidemic to justify the extra-judicial killing of  suspected drug traffickers in the Caribbean. A gridlocked Congress and a shutdown bureaucracy seem powerless to stop him.

The only hope to stop President Trump’s concentration of power is the Supreme Court where originalist justices outnumber progressive justices six to three. Many fear that the Supreme Court will back President Trump’s accumulation of power. But originalists are conservatives and conservatives are not part of the MAGA movement which is anything but conservative as Trump transforms the political parties in the US, the American economy, and the post-war world order created by the United States.

Mr. O’Toole derides the ability of Supreme Court justices to view the modern world from the perspective of the Founders. He cites certain beliefs held by the Founders 250 years ago that have been disproven by more recent scientific discoveries. He further cites America’s failure to live up to the high-minded principles of its founding as a reason to discard the viewpoint and ideas of the Founders. He concludes that the inability of the Constitution to be adapted to current conditions (in other words to be a “living” document) and the continuation of “undemocratic” institutions such as the Electoral College and the US Senate along with the difficulty in amending the constitution as the reason our politics are such a mess.

But it seems to me that if all the progressive ideas Mr. O’Toole recommends for improving American democracy had been implemented, the second Trump administration would have had a much easier path toward the concentration of power. Mr. Trump won the popular vote, and MAGA Republicans won both the House and the Senate. If the originalist justices were as ideologically focused as the three progressive justices have proven to be, there would be no stopping President Trump.

The Supreme court has approved some of President Trump’s initiatives but has also blocked others. The legal basis for many of the key elements of his MAGA Movement have yet to be determined. Everything is being dumped onto the Court. Let us hope that Mr. O’Toole is wrong and that our originalist justices are able to decipher how our Founders would have supported the checks and balances that have preserved our republic for 250 years.

America’s founding principles are aspirational but our inherent human frailty means that we will often fall short of achieving those ideals. America’s “Unfinished Revolution” will always be a work in progress.