This week, former President Donald Trump proclaimed in one of his Truth Social tirades that, "Our Founding Fathers are looking down at Biden with scorn right now. They’re looking down at Biden and this administration with disbelief.”
But the irony of this statement, wrote conservative commentator Charlie Sykes for The Bulwark on Friday, is that in fact, the founders spent an enormous amount of their writings preoccupied with the worry a person like Trump would take power. And indeed, Alexander Hamilton made an almost "prophetic" warning of a person like Trump in a letter to George Washington in 1792.
In the letter, Hamilton outlines his worries about a demagogue rising to power through unprincipled attacks on the entire governing class that went along with promises that he alone could fix what ails the nation.
"When a man unprincipled in private life desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, (possessed of considerable talents, having the advantage of military habits), despotic in his ordinary demeanor, known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty, when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity, to join in the cry of danger to liberty, to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion, to flatter and fall in with all the nonsense of the zealots of the day, It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind,’" stated the letter from Hamilton.
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This is not the first time that experts have warned Trump is the antithesis of the founders' vision for America, with former Defense Secretary William Cohen issuing the same warning.
Moreover, Trump, who is currently facing multiple criminal indictments for attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election, has often expressed disdain for the rule of law, attacking any authorities who are investigating his conduct and even at one point suggesting the "termination" of the Constitution in order to reinstall him as president.
Ultimately, Sykes concluded, founders like Hamilton would have no difficulty seeing Trump as the embodiment of the threat to liberty they feared. And "if the Founders are, in fact, watching all of this, I imagine that George Mason would like to have a word with James Madison" — as Mason was the one to warn that the president having pardon powers could give them a blank check to commit crimes and cover it up, as some experts fear Trump appears intent on doing.
