“Decline is a choice.”
That was Charles Krauthammer’s admonition and insight, offered in 2009 at the dawn of Barack Obama’s administration. The award-winning columnist noted that pronouncements regarding China’s inevitable march to global dominance were always accompanied by lamentations about America’s certain decline. As Beijing’s prospects went up, Washington’s would have to go down, as if by the rules of physics.
Krauthammer rejected the premise. “My thesis is simple,” he said. “The question of whether America is in decline cannot be answered ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ There is no ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ Both answers are wrong, because the assumption that somehow there exists some predetermined inevitable trajectory, the result of uncontrollable external forces, is wrong. Nothing is inevitable. Nothing is written. For America today, decline is not a condition. Decline is a choice.”
Krauthammer was correct then, and, although he is sadly no longer with us, his point is correct today. But the tectonic plates of American politics have shifted over the past 16 years. In 2009, Krauthammer served as the indispensable intellectual backstop of American conservatism, with advocates of managed decline mostly arrayed on the other side of the ideological spectrum. Fast forward four presidential election cycles, and Krauthammer’s worldview is now mocked and derided by the new leaders of the American right and Republican Party.
For the most ardent—and online—defenders of Donald Trump on the intellectual new right, “Make America Great Again” has been displaced as the organizing ideological slogan by, “Do you know what time it is?” The point of this juvenile rhetorical question is that the postliberal elite who support and staff the Trump administration have an almost gnostic insight invisible to the rest of us. In their invincible faith in what often seems like an unpatriotic love of political power, they insist that the old rules—of American global leadership, free markets, limited government, fidelity to the Constitution—have passed their sell-by date. What is required is “new thinking” and “fresh ideas.”
What are these new and fresh ideas? For some, they are literally monarchism or autocracy. For others, they are mercantilism and a division of the world into “spheres of influence.” In short, their foreign policy was ancient when Charlemagne was on the throne, and their economic philosophy was hatched in the 15th century.
In service of these ideas, Donald Trump has literally made America—and Americans—poorer, bringing the United States to the brink of a recession in recent weeks by threatening to unilaterally impose one of the most regressive tax hikes in U.S. history. He’s momentarily been talked into standing down, but an economic environment in which the whims of one famously mercurial man can upend the international trade system and wipe out trillions of dollars in stock market value is not one conducive to sustained growth. For the next 90 days—and really, for the remainder of Trump’s term—decision-makers at businesses across the country and the world will be forced to speculate: Are the president’s tariffs merely a negotiating tool, or an effort to fundamentally remake the global economy? Even key White House officials seem not to know.
But the financial volatility of recent days is just one symptom of a broader, more deliberate descent. Decline doesn’t solely mean impoverishment; it means degeneration, to sink backward and down. And that is what the United States’ current leadership class is choosing for this country by willfully dismantling the free-market system, abandoning America’s role as a global leader, and degrading the separation of powers and rule of law. Even worse, it is doing so based on a suite of false assumptions: that Americans are weak, unable to compete in an open market, and incapable of responding to any incentives or exhortations more high-minded than rank self-interest or partisan contempt. The underlying assumption, held by leaders across the political spectrum, is that appealing to America’s loftiest ideals for reasons unrelated to partisan advantage is for suckers.
We reject that premise. Those American ideals, inherited from the Founders and fortified by later generations, are what brought the United States to the heights from which it is now slouching.
Donald Trump may have decided on Wednesday to temporarily call off most of his blanket, so-called “reciprocal” tariffs, but that capitulation to reality does not change the fundamental truth: As evidenced by the past week—and past four decades—the president views trade as zero-sum, with clear winners and losers in every transaction. He believes the existence of a trade deficit in goods with any country renders the United States a loser, ignoring the fact that that, for the average American consumer, being able to buy a wider variety of food, clothes, cars, and medicines at lower prices is a clear victory for their wallets and way of life.
As long as Trump’s machinations continue to cause confusion and uncertainty, access to foreign markets is going to dry up, goods will become more expensive, and a policy sold as an effort to secure the American Dream will have the result of putting it further out of reach for millions of Americans. If Trump’s first term is any indication, he will then attempt to divert taxpayer dollars—or drive the country further into debt—to subsidize the very industries his trade policies have targeted.
Those trade policies don’t put Americans first; they put his pet theories of global scorekeeping first. Our trade deficit with Canada, for example, would not exist but for the fact that it provides a safe and reliable supply of oil, which it sells us below global market prices. Lower oil prices are good for Americans, but according to Trump’s scorecard, it’s proof we’re getting “ripped off” by our democratic neighbor and ally.
Trump claims his tariffs will generate so much revenue for the government that federal income taxes will become unnecessary. But the United States has tried this before and abandoned the system—not just because it proved to be an inefficient and counterproductive impediment to growth, but because protectionism fueled massive political corruption, as business interests lobbied, bribed, and bought public officials to circumvent tariffs or see them punitively applied to competitors. This dynamic seems to be a feature, not a bug, for the president who likes nothing more than to be beseeched for favors—for a price.
This type of thinking has infected Trump’s view of geopolitics as well. Rather than committing to meeting the challenges incumbent upon leaders of the free world, the White House and its ideological allies seem dead set on shedding the job title entirely, as if it were just another target of the Department of Government Efficiency. Instead, they seem to accept the inevitable rise of our adversaries as the new stewards of a very different international order—one organized around the ancient imperial practice of “spheres of influence.” Gone is the idea of burden-sharing with allies to protect our interests and values; in its place is a kind of burden-sharing with our foes, where each has undisputed dominion over its region.
Under this system, we are told, America will finally put its own interests first again. But passing off isolationism as “America First” assumes all competing approaches to foreign policy—not to mention trade policy and immigration policy—are contrary to America’s self-interest. The Trump administration views alliances, international trade, and the expenditure of energy or resources promoting our values—even rhetorically—as inherently at odds with America’s bottom line. By this logic, the Marshall Plan, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and even the Cold War itself would have been dismissed as unmanly do-goodery at our expense, the way support for Ukraine’s war effort has.
Indeed, the White House had made clear that it views Ukrainians not as allies desperately fighting for their freedom and survival, but as freeloaders whose only utility now is as a potential profit center. When you see the world as an arena to be carved up by rival mob bosses, those nations on our turf cease to be democratic allies, dependent on a system we created, and start to become targets for economic exploitation or even territorial expansion. How else to explain the administration’s refusal to rule out the use of force to annex Greenland or Canada?
But nowhere is the evidence of the new right’s willful decline more obvious than in its rejection of fidelity to the rule of law and the Constitution. As the Trump administration ignores due process, encroaches upon press freedom, and subverts the independence of the judiciary—all central pillars of self-government—top executive branch officials and Republican members of Congress turn a blind eye, or cheer it on. And let us be clear: The previous administration was no paragon of civic health either. Our own Sarah Isgur argued earlier this year that Joe Biden left office in January having caused more damage to the rule of law than any of his predecessors. But the Biden administration’s myriad failures and abuses are not a warrant for this administration to do worse in the spirit of “retribution.”
Take, for example, the administration’s ongoing campaign of intimidation against law firms. These executive orders may have begun as an exercise in retaliation, but their initial success at extracting concessions and capitulation has given way to both a shakedown operation and a means of hacking the rule of law and the constitutional order. Lawyers who might want to take on clients targeted by this administration have, in effect, been told, “That’s a nice little law firm you have there, it’d be a shame if something happened to it.”
But the administration’s most disturbing assault on the Constitution is the one it cynically touts as a patriotic defense of it: a president’s unchecked power. There is plenty of scholarship supporting the theories of the unitary executive; at a basic level, the arguments are uncontroversial and defensible. But the idea of the unitary executive is not, and has never been, a warrant for what Edmund Burke, John Locke, and the Founders called “arbitrary power.” As James Madison wrote in Federalist 47, “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”
We are not there yet. Our sadly enfeebled institutions and deteriorating commitment to republican government are not yet so enervated as to permit outright tyranny, and we are encouraged by fledgling efforts by lawmakers to reclaim some of the authority granted to the legislative branch by Article I of the Constitution, however unlikely they are to succeed. But the rhetoric coming out of the White House—and the logic underpinning it—is moving rapidly in a dark direction. Donald Trump’s musings about serving a third term or his promotion of a Napoleon quote—“He who saves his Country does not violate any Law”—may be discounted as trolling, but as our own Nick Catoggio has noted, when it comes to Trump, “everything’s a joke until it isn’t.”
Trump’s conception of power and how to use it was old and familiar when the Founders convened to draft the Constitution. If they wanted a king, they could have had one in George Washington. But they wanted a republic, and to that end, they created a new system of government recognizing God-given rights that cannot be rescinded or trampled by mere politicians. The singular obligation imposed by Article II of the Constitution is to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”
But Trump’s theory of the unitary executive, combined with his anti-constitutional claim of an all-encompassing mandate because he carried the swing states, is an argument for arbitrary power. Even if Trump had won a landslide victory in November, rather than the 44th-largest margin of victory in the history of the Electoral College, the only mandate he enjoys is to do the job as laid out in the Constitution. And that job is to execute the laws duly enacted by Congress, not to make law through executive order and infest government agencies with unqualified loyalists.
Speaking of Congress, the first—and supreme—branch of government is in many ways the great villain of this political moment. The American right may be choosing decline—again, in its truest meaning of decay and rot—but so, too, has the legislative branch. Members of Congress have been outsourcing their power and authority to the president and the courts for decades, punting difficult decisions to judges and unaccountable bureaucracies rather than taking positions that might upset some of their constituents back home. This cowardice—exhibited in spades by Republicans and Democrats alike—has placed a real strain on the federal government to operate as the Founders intended.
To the extent that Trump’s true nature was ever a mystery, it no longer is: As a White House aide recently said, the president is “at the peak of just not giving a f— anymore” and “going to do what he’s going to do.” Since retaking office in January, he has pardoned violent felons solely because the violence they committed was on his behalf. He has all but flipped the United States’ official position on Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine. He has allowed Elon Musk to cripple government functions and agencies enacted and authorized by Congress—some of which do literally lifesaving work. He has threatened and vilified judges who—yes, sometimes in excess—are attempting to uphold laws written by Congress or constitutional safeguards enshrined by the Founders. Just yesterday afternoon, he directed the Justice Department to open an investigation into Chris Krebs, a widely-respected public servant who ran the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in Trump’s first administration, because Krebs “falsely and baselessly denied that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen.”
Again, we have not yet arrived at unalloyed tyranny. But we are getting closer, and that is bad enough.
There was a time when conservatives in elected office would object to such usurpations of power and abuses of authority by the president. That time was approximately four months ago.
We’re not naive; we understand partisan loyalty—particularly at a moment when the president has the political winds at his back—demands a certain amount of tact and discernment. And quibble as we may with his methods, Trump has brought about some desperately needed change: Illegal border crossings have fallen to their lowest level in decades; an ideology that supports explicit racial discrimination is being rightfully extracted from the federal bureaucracy; and progressive pieties are being challenged at elite institutions.
But on the biggest questions, Donald Trump’s second administration has already proven it will be a stark departure from his first, and no more conservative—ideologically, dispositionally, philosophically—than Joe Biden’s or Barack Obama’s. The sooner elected Republicans come to terms with that reality—in public, not just in conversations they have with us when the cameras are off—the better off we’ll all be.
Because just as Trump’s pursuit of American decline is a choice, so, too, is refusing to object to it.
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