A postcard from a spectator of a constitutional crisis
How things look in June 2025
A favourite quotation for this blog can be roughly translated as follows:
“History is a box of tricks we play upon the dead.”
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In other words: those alive at the time of certain events may be bemused or bewildered by what later historians - and public opinion - make of those events. For it did not seem like that at the time.
None of us have any idea what historians - and public opinion - will one day make of what is currently happening in the United States.
(If we survive that long, types a reply-guy.)
We may have views on what we would like historians - and public opinion - to one day make of what was happening, not least to assure us that we and not our opponents are on the “right side of history”.
But it may well be that our descendants will form very different views about their ancestors.
That said, there is merit on putting down markers as to what things seemed like at the time, for what is happening in the United States is extraordinary and many of us are watching events unfold from afar with fascination or horror or both.
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The United States is now in a full constitutional crisis. There is no doubt about that, just like there should be no doubt that Marley is dead to begin with.
There was a moment at the start of the second Donald Trump presidency when it seemed there was constitutional drama but not (yet) a crisis, but that soon passed. Indeed, a perhaps better view is that the United States has been in a constitutional crisis since the failure to convict Trump on impeachment after the 6 January 2021 attack on the Capitol. Some would say that the crisis started before then.
A crisis is a volatile situation the outcome of which cannot be confidently forecast. If you can predict what will happen next - or even the range of what events may happen next - then it is not a crisis.
But in the United States it is now difficult to even keep up with the constitutional trespasses and contradictions.
You have a President using - or seeking to use - emergency legislation to change the world trading system and to send individuals to foreign gulags. He is now even mobilising troops against United States citizens. So-called executive orders are being used to dismantle entire rafts of Congressionally approved spending and activities. Court orders are being flouted. Individuals and firms are being targeted. Masked federal agents are kidnapping people on the streets.
A martian looking down on the United States would assume one possible outcome of all this could be a civil war. That martian may well be right.
Perhaps Congress and the Courts will assert themselves and put Trump back in his box. After all little of what Trump is doing is based on the inherent powers of the presidency, but his misuse and abuse of legislation and the exploitation of the latitude that he has been given by the courts.
Perhaps it will keep getting slowly worse, with no flashpoints of rebellion or opposition, until there is nothing but the tyranny of whatever Trump (and his circle) want to do. Like the urban myth of the boiled frogs, nobody is going to do any jumping to stop it.
Nobody knows what will happen next. It may well be something we cannot even imagine.
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Yet almost nothing of what Trump is doing is unpreventable. Congress and the courts could stop him, if they wanted to do so.
So the real problem is not so much Trump - there are always Trumps of one kind or another - but the failure of the gatekeepers.
And there is the unwelcome and inconvenient fact that, regardless of all Trump’s antics and misdemeanours, a solid bloc of the electorate support him now and will always support him.
This means that until and unless the opponents of Trump can put together a broader coalition of support and/or break down the bloc supporting him, then this is a situation that can only continue, either under Trump or someone like him.
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One thing which is noticeable in this crisis is the lack of drama - each move by Trump now seems normalised, hardly a news item for more than a few hours. Some may think crises must be dramatic, but this is humdrum.
Many are getting used to the United States government purporting to rely on emergency legislation regarding economic affairs, migration and (soon) “insurrection”. Any sensible legal analysis points to this emergency legislation not providing a sound basis at all, but that does not matter. Many are also getting used to court orders being ignored and federal agents acting without legal authority.
The constitution of the United States is in crisis, and there are shrugs rather than pitchforks.
Maybe in a few weeks or months or years there will be events which no pundit can now confidently predict, but which the same pundits will then opine were inevitable all along.
For that is the nature of much punditry: a box of tricks you play upon their readers.
But from the perspective of this blog, the outcome of what is now happening in the United States is not certain.
Only the future historians will know what, if anything, happens next.
(If we survive that long, types a reply-guy.)