Who’s To Blame When Parties Really Get Out Of Hand? Who’s To Blame When Situations Degenerate?

Referencing to Trump’s white flag on electronics and his lame brained tariffs, Anne Applebaum wrote “He blinked. But we don’t really know why… This was his personal decision. His ‘instinct,’ as he put it. His whim. And his decision, instinct, or whim could bring the tariffs back again. The Republicans who lead Congress have refused to use the power of the legislative branch to stop him or moderate him, in this or almost any other matter. The Cabinet is composed of sycophants and loyalists who are willing to defend contradictory policies, even if doing so makes them look like fools. The courts haven’t decisively intervened yet either. No one, apparently, is willing to prevent a single man from destroying the world economy, wrecking financial markets, forcing this country and other countries into recession if that’s what he feels like doing when he gets up tomorrow morning.”

This is what arbitrary, absolute power looks like. And this is why the men who wrote the Constitution never wanted anyone to have it. In that famously hot, stuffy room in Philadelphia… they sweated and argued about how to limit the powers of the American executive. They arrived at the idea of dividing power between different branches of government. As James Madison wrote in “Federalist No. 47”: “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary in the same hands… may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

More than two centuries later, the system created by that first Constitutional Congress has comprehensively failed. The people and institutions that are supposed to check executive power are refusing to restrain this president. We now have a de facto tyrant who thinks he can bend reality to his will without taking any facts or any evidence into consideration, and without listening to any contrary views. And although the economic damage he has caused is easier to measure, he has inflicted the same level of harm to scientific research, to civil liberties, to health care, and to the civil service.

From this wasteful and destructive incident, one useful lesson can be drawn. In recent years, many people who live in democracies have become frustrated by their political systems, by the endless wrangling, the difficulty of creating compromise, the slow pace of decisions. Just as in the first half of the 20th century, would-be authoritarians have begun arguing that we would all be better off without these institutions. “The truth is that men are tired of liberty,” said Mussolini. Lenin spoke with scorn about the failings of so-called bourgeois democracy. In the United States, a brand-new school of techno-authoritarian thinkers find our political system inefficient and want to replace it with a “national CEO,” a dictator by a different name.

But in the past 48 hours, Donald Trump has just given us a pitch-perfect demonstration of why legislatures are necessary, why checks and balances are useful, and why most one-man dictatorships become poor and corrupt. If the Republican Party does not return Congress to the role it is meant to play and the courts don’t constrain the president, this cycle of destruction will continue and everyone on the planet will pay the price.

Today with MAGA Mike, the worst possible sycophant installed as Speaker, the House of Representatives— once the “people's house”— has become little more than a rubber stamp for the whims of one man: Señor Trumpanzyy. MAGA Mike, a man with no real mandate and no meaningful spine, owes his speakership not to merit or leadership, but to his willingness to prostrate himself before Trump’s altar. And in doing so, he has not only failed his constituents— many of whom will be among the first to suffer in the wake of Trump’s economic chaos— but has also abdicated his duty to the Constitution.

The legislative branch was designed to be co-equal, not co-dependent. But when Trump decides, on a whim, to upend global markets with arbitrary tariffs, MAGA Mike doesn’t push back— he praises it. When Trump threatens to defy court rulings or dangle pardons before insurrectionists, MAGA Mike doesn’t defend the law— he echoes the lie. When Trump calls for the weaponization of government against his enemies, MAGA Mike doesn’t flinch— he complies.

The Constitution is not a suggestion. It’s a foundation of our republic. And MAGA Mike, along with far too many of his colleagues, has allowed himself to become an accessory to its slow unraveling. His job was never to be Trump’s lawyer or lackey; it was to represent the people and safeguard the system that guarantees their freedoms. What a laugh!

And yet, time and again, when faced with a choice between loyalty to Trump or loyalty to country, MAGA Mike chooses Trump. This isn’t leadership. It’s submission. And it has left our nation vulnerable— not just to economic disaster, but to the steady erosion of democratic norms that once held our institutions together. If a single man can dictate economic policy, override military decisions, flout judicial rulings, and command the fealty of lawmakers sworn to be a check on executive power, then what we’re living through is not a functioning democracy. It’s the early stages of something else entirely.

And when the history of this era is written, it won’t just be Trump who bears the blame. It will be those who enabled him—those like Mike Johnson, who knew better and did nothing, or worse, did everything he asked. In law school he learned that the Constitution isn’t just a document— it’s a guardrail. And it’s one that the Speaker and his Republican colleagues in Congress have repeatedly driven over in their desperate scramble to stay in Trump’s good graces. With the 2024 midterms approaching, their abdication of responsibility becomes not just cowardice, but complicity.

This isn't some abstract civics-class debate. Trump's erratic decisions— like suddenly lifting tariffs only to threaten reimposing them on a whim— send markets into turmoil, destabilize international alliances, and cost ordinary Americans their jobs and savings. These are not policy disagreements; they are the predictable consequences of one man wielding unchecked power, enabled by a party that has abandoned its constitutional role. Republican leaders know this. They see it. And yet, rather than defending the country from economic sabotage, democratic backsliding and authoritarian drift, they fall in line. MAGA Mike, a constitutional lawyer by training, surely understands the danger of this dynamic. But he has chosen fealty to Trump over fidelity to the Constitution.

The upcoming elections are more than a contest over policy— they should be a referendum on whether this nation still believes in separation of powers, democratic accountability, and the idea that no one man is above the law. Voters in gerrymandered Republican-held districts must ask themselves: are their representatives protecting their interests— or just protecting Donald Trump? Because if we don’t stop this now, the next time Trump acts on a whim, there may be no one left in government with the courage— or even a semblance of the authority— to stop him.