The Crisis That Made Trump Possible Didn’t Start with Trump

There are two crises of American democracy. The first, the crisis of the moment, is what you see in the news. It is the story of Donald Trump’s assault on some of the most important institutions and principles of American government. The second crisis gets less attention but matters more in the long run. This crisis has to do with the fundamental design of the American political system: a design that made the Trump presidency possible in the first place and which will continue generating political instability long after he is gone. This second crisis—the crisis of design—is one for which American liberals must accept much responsibility. Let’s acknowledge that the crisis of the moment is real. Trump has wreaked havoc since his inauguration. He has demolished alliances and hobbled the global economy. He has gutted federal agencies; threatened governors, mayors, and university presidents; deported non-citizens without cause; and flouted federal courts. He has talked about a third term, even though the US constitution prohibits it. All this is deplorable. But it does not signal the imminent collapse of American democracy, as some critics claim. The crisis of the moment is largely about central government in the United States. There are more than 90,000 other governments in the US—state, regional, and local—led by more than half a million elected officials. That is the bedrock of American democracy, which will not shatter easily.

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Nor should we read too much into Trump’s talk about a third term. For Trump, it is good theatre. Third-term talk deters Washington from treating him like a lame duck. But the US constitution is an almost unchangeable document. And a coup d’état is unlikely. A coup requires planning and coordination—two words not usually associated with Trump presidencies. It also requires a monopoly on the use of force, which Trump could never achieve. Even if the US army agreed to enforce Trump’s rule within the country, it would confront the reality that state governments, cities, and citizens are heavily armed too. While watching the chaos in Washington, we must also remember that much of what Trump is doing is not law breaking. In many cases, he has invoked long-established powers of the presidency and followed precedents set by earlier presidents. None of this makes his policies less noxious. But it does present a paradox. If we understand anything about American political culture, it is that Americans hate centralized power. The US was forged in revolt against a king—“a royal brute,” as Thomas Paine called him in 1776. But if our understanding is right, how has the country ended up with another brute in 2025? The surprising answer is that well-meaning liberals made Trump possible. Over the span of ninety years, liberal reformers overhauled the American political order. The grand theme of this reform project was centralization: first, shifting power from state capitals to Washington; and second, shifting power in Washington from Congress to the president. Liberals had noble goals when they launched this reform project. At home, they wanted to construct an American version of the just society. Abroad, they wanted to promote a more humane and prosperous world. Centralization seemed like the best way of achieving these goals. Unfortunately, this reform project works only with the right kind of presidents. Twentieth-century reformers never anticipated that someone like Trump might hold the reins. This great reform project really got its start in 1933. Before then, Washington played a small role in American life, and presidents were important but hardly dominant players in Washington. The Great Depression changed the game. After the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Washington’s role in economic and social policy grew. Roosevelt’s stature as president grew as well. He revived emergency laws from the First World War to justify his actions and called on Congress to grant him more powers. Some felt Roosevelt was acting like a dictator, but this was not meant as criticism. Voicing a common sentiment, one senator had said before Roosevelt’s election: “If this country ever needed a Mussolini, it needs one now.” The liberal justification for centralization in the 1930s was that the country would collapse otherwise. State governments seemed incompetent and even reactionary. Most reformers trusted that Roosevelt would use his new-found powers responsibly. Centralization continued during the Second World War and the Cold War. Internationally, the US defined itself as the bulwark of a new liberal order. The American presidency, one commentator suggested in 1948, could serve as “a mighty weapon of freedom.” At home, liberals invoked national security as a justification for federal action on civil rights, education spending, and highway construction. In 1960, John F. Kennedy declared that the presidency had become “the vital center of action in our whole scheme of government.” Presidential discretion—to make alliances, adjust tariffs and sanctions, bestow foreign aid, and decide on visas—was consolidated in the 1950s and ’60s. Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, further expanded Washington’s role. Johnson launched an FDR-style campaign to protect civil rights and grow the welfare state. As in the 1930s, the liberal complaint was that states had failed. Political scientist William Riker said federalism was just a shield for white supremacy in the south. The liberal project of centralization was mainstreamed by the end of the 1960s. It was a Republican president, Richard Nixon, who signed laws creating the Environmental Protection Agency, regulating workplace and consumer safety, and prohibiting gender discrimination in universities. Later Republicans tried to roll back federal powers, without much success. After the 9/11 terror attacks, George W. Bush actually amplified Washington’s powers and presidential authority as well. Mid-century liberals wanted to change party politics as well as government. Political parties, they complained, were flimsy assemblages of state and local organizations. In a world where Washington played the leading role, parties lacked a national outlook and a coherent platform. Reformers argued that parties should be more Washington focused and ideologically disciplined. The party system that exists in the US today is what reformers wanted in the 1950s. But the world has changed in unexpected ways since then. Mid-century liberals took for granted some things that cooled down party competition, such as a bipartisan Washington establishment and a media environment dominated by centrist broadcasters and newspapers. These checks on party warfare dissolved after the 1990s. Washington entered the era of polarization and gridlock. Gridlock fuelled the American public’s frustration with Washington. It also became a pretext for more aggressive use of presidential powers. When Congress failed to act on Democratic president Barack Obama’s call for overhaul of education law, Obama invoked his discretion under existing law to implement his own plan for education reform. He relied on presidential discretion again in 2012, when Congress failed to protect unauthorized immigrants who had arrived in the US as children. Many liberals argued that Obama’s actions were justified because Congress had defaulted on its responsibilities. The same logic was applied in 2022, when President Joe Biden, another Democrat, launched a $400 billion (US) student debt relief program that relied on emergency powers granted after 9/11. The Supreme Court said in 2023 that Biden had stretched the law too far. The Supreme Court will also judge whether Trump has gone too far since January. Critics complain that he is upending the American political order. But we might also say that Trump is merely exploiting the potentialities of the existing order, as it has evolved over ninety years. The presidency has become the “beating heart” of American power. That is a phrase from the Project 2025 report, a blueprint for the second Trump administration. But it could have been said by any mid-century liberal as well. Of course, mid-century liberals did not anticipate a president like Trump. Their worst-case scenario was Barry Goldwater, who was crushed by Johnson in the 1964 presidential election. The 1964 election seemed to prove that American voters had no stomach for right-wing populism. We are in a different world today. The American polity is divided into two camps, roughly equal in strength, holding sharply divergent ideas about the role of government. The American political system, as it has evolved since the 1930s, is not built to manage this tension. Today, centralization of power stokes political divisions rather than dampening them. Presidential elections were not generally perceived as existential conflicts in the ’50s and ’60s, but they certainly are today. Centralization stokes policy instability too, as rival parties alternate in control of the presidency and try to exploit their advantage as aggressively as possible. For many players outside Washington—leaders of other countries, US governors and mayors, university presidents, business executives, and others—the challenge will be managing the unpredictability of federal policy. Some will try appeasement, while others will try disengagement. This challenge will persist for a long time. It took a century for well-meaning reformers to build the dysfunctional system that exists today, and it will take decades to repair it. And that assumes that people agree on the need for systemic reform. Presently, it doesn’t look like they do. Most Americans are preoccupied with the crisis of the moment, reacting to one Trump outrage after another. Of course, Trump revels in this sort of politics, while a hyperactive media environment reinforces this fixation on the present. But the crisis of design is what really matters. A flawed system gave Trump his power. And even if he were to leave the White House by January 2029, the same system might install another Trump in his place. The post The Crisis That Made Trump Possible Didn’t Start with Trump first appeared on The Walrus.