A republic, if you can keep it

“My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over. Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men”. So said Gerald Ford in his first speech as President, having ascended to the office following the resignation of his predecessor, Richard Nixon. 

Nixon’s resignation, of course, was in anticipation of certain impeachment and removal from office, a dramatic end to a dramatic decade in American history which saw the assassination of President Kennedy, the Vietnam War and Watergate. 

The last four years of American history haven’t perhaps been quite so awful. Historians might well look back on the last four years as a period of collective madness rather than genuine suffering. Americans, after all, have been through civil war, world war, the Great Depression and 9/11.

But the country which Biden is inheriting is in many senses even more troubled than the one Ford did. The last year of the Trump presidency alone saw the most expensive protests in insurance history and culminated in the storming of the US Capitol last week, something which has not happened since British troops burned down much of Washington DC in the War of 1812. Trump is the first President in US history to be impeached twice.

Fortunately, Joe Biden is in many ways a similar figure to Ford: moderate, likeable, a boy next door rather than a quasi-monarch and a return to normalcy” for the American people. His inaugural address next week will probably strike a similar tone to Ford’s. But, contrary to popular opinion, Trump is no Nixon, a self-made man who at least had the grace not to contest the result of the 1960 election, even though he actually was the victim of electoral fraud.

Has Trump been the worst President in American history? The most important job for the President, after all, is to preside, and he didn’t. Much like James Buchanan and Herbert Hoover, who respectively allowed America to descend into civil war and economic depression, Trump will rank as one of the worst simply for leaving a more perfect union” a lot less perfect. Just look at the titles of chronicles of his presidency: Fire and Fury, Fear, Siege, Rage.

Trump was also a very un-Republican President – the ultimate RINO – having disrespected the military, the law and the Constitution and offered little in the way of civility, virtue, economy or restraint. It is telling that the comparison oft made by anonymous White House sources is not with Nixon, but the very king whom the American colonists revolted against: George III.

And yet, believe it or not, Trump is not the first President to lie habitually, slander his opponents, intimidate staff, collude with foreign powers, attack the media, persecute minorities, incite the mob or be impeached. Alas, he’s also not the first President to have had a troubled upbringing or be called a psychopath and a tyrant. That’s why the Founding Fathers created the Constitution in the first place. 

Tyrants, of course, don’t tend to bequeath a thriving public sphere and record voter levels of voter turnout. Trump’s successor is the most voted-for President in US history and Trump himself is the second. During his presidency, newspaper subscriptions, television ratings and political book sales have hit record highs. Where would the likes of Bob Woodward be without Nixon or Trump?

Amid the fire and fury, there were also some notable achievements for the Trump administration: record levels of employment (especially for Hispanic and African Americans), the revival of American manufacturing and diplomatic achievements in the Middle and Far East. Biden’s priorities, of course, are to lead America out of the pandemic and heal the soul of the nation”, but he also looks set to continue Trump’s economic nationalism and tough approach on China. 

And yet, with a second civil war now seeming almost inevitable, and with China now expected to become the world’s biggest economy by the end of this decade, it remains to be seen whether America can Build Back Better”. Might we be witnessing the Decline and Fall of the American Empire?

In the midst of the first civil war, Abraham Lincoln famously proclaimed that a house divided against itself cannot stand”. A disunited States certainly won’t win a power struggle with China. With hyphenated Americans growing in numbers and power, and with whites set to become a minority in America in the coming decades, the scenes we have seen on American streets this year will not disappear. Some writers are already calling for Red States and Blue States to formally separate. 

Of course, the Democrats now control the presidency but their majorities in Congress are wafer thin and the Republicans will quite likely regain control of one, if not both houses, in the midterms. The Republicans still control the majority of state legislatures and governments and, of course, there is now a conservative majority on the Supreme Court. Will the Democrats seek to force their conservative opponents into submission, like the infamous Civil War general William T Sherman, or follow a more conciliatory approach, like Ulysses S Grant? 

In fact, the power struggle between Republicans and Democrats should be the least of their worries. Both parties are in something of an existential crisis, deeply divided between establishment and radical wings and held tentatively together only by the septuagenarians who currently lead them. Once Trump and Biden are off the scene, not to mention Pelosi and McConnell, the identity and future of both parties is uncertain.

Of course, Biden won the Democratic nomination because he was the only person who could bridge the divide between conservative and blue-collar Americans and their more progressive counterparts. Managing this as President is somewhat harder. Abraham Lincoln paid the ultimate price for his failure to do so, as did his successor, Andrew Johnson, who was impeached by his own supporters in Congress for not being radical enough.  

The state of the Union, then, is not especially good. On the first day of his presidency Trump promised an end to “American carnage”, only to unleash four years of it himself. But Trump is on his way out. America has a middle-of-the-road President and a fairly evenly divided government. The Constitution is working. As Benjamin Franklin replied, after being asked what form of government the United States would have: A republic, if you can keep it.” 

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