The Constitution's Authors Had a Blind Spot, and Trump Is Exposing It
The Constitution's Authors Had a Blind Spot, and Trump Is Exposing It
By Adam Liptak; May 25, 2026
The men who drafted the Constitution knew they were playing with fire when they created a novel and powerful new office: the president of the United States.
“The first man put at the helm will be a good one,” Benjamin Franklin said at the Constitutional Convention in June 1787, referring to George Washington. “No body knows what sort may come afterward. The executive will be always increasing here, as elsewhere, till it ends in a monarchy.”
The framers were not blind to the danger that they were creating a new kind of king, and the Constitution they adopted a few months later tried to strike a balance in inventing what was then a wholly novel office. They wanted a president who was decisive, responsive and responsible. But they also sought to establish a constitutional structure able to constrain a president who aspired to be a monarch.
They differed about how to achieve that balance. Alexander Hamilton, who argued in favor of an exceptionally strong president at the convention — he proposed, for instance, that they should serve for life — wrote in The Federalist Papers that there was more to fear from populists than from those committed to a firm and efficient government.
“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; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.”
The Constitution’s framers were doubtless brilliant, and the document they drafted has endured. It is the oldest written national constitution still in force anywhere in the world. But, as the nation commemorates its 250th anniversary, some constitutional scholars say the second Trump presidency is calling into question whether the nation’s founding charter and sacred text truly provides the balance the founders wanted.
President Trump has used the power of the federal government to bully universities, law firms and news outlets; undermined the independence of the Justice Department by instructing it to prosecute his political enemies; defied Congress by impounding money it had instructed him to spend; flouted countless court orders; and cut off funding to states led by Democrats.
That list is hardly exhaustive, and it is certainly possible to quarrel with given items in the bill of particulars. And it is not as though other presidents have always been punctilious in following the Constitution’s commands.
Still, the second Trump presidency is different in kind, legal scholars said, one that approaches the maximalist view of presidential power that Franklin and other founders feared.
Saikrishna Prakash, a law professor at the University of Virginia and the author of “The Living Presidency: An Originalist Argument Against Its Ever-Expanding Powers,” said the modern presidency would be unrecognizable to the framers.
“I think they’d be astonished, not merely by Trump, but by the br…
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