How’d We Get Here?
Don’t Say We Weren’t Warned
UPDATE: Only a few days since the Supreme Court’s decision eliminating majority-minority Congressional districts there’s been a mad rush by both parties to redraw their districts with extreme partisanship the driving force. How extreme? Tennessee lawmakers eliminated the state’s only dominant minority district. South Carolina is planning to carve up Rep. James Clyburn’s district.
This sudden turn of events will place renewed focus on state legislatures, which draw districts, as well as state supreme courts that have the power to approve or reject revised boundaries (see Virginia).
The takeaway from this is hard to overstate: a nation already sharply divided politically will become even more partisan. It promises to be ruthless and unending, unfolding before a citizenry that despises political no-holds-bar warfare.
Ever since Trump launched his second term as President of the United States, the question most often heard has been, “How did we get here?”
Amid constant reports of rampant corruption, $4.50 gas prices, numbing changes in direction from the top, and a war hardly anyone wants, the question is no longer rhetorical. Across the board, Americans express growing anxiety about where the nation is headed . . . and something more existential, although no less real: how can we possibly reverse course?
I decided to tackle these questions, as best I can, by returning to the Founding Fathers' initial assumptions and hopes. I choose this approach because so much of our early national history has been obscured by mythical claptrap, making it difficult to separate the truth from misinformation and outright lies.
My focus is on the intentions of the Founding Fathers in several foundational topics that were controversial 250 years ago, and remain so today:
Voting
The Nation’s Religious Underpinnings
The Electoral College
An All-Powerful President
A note on fact-gathering and analysis: I revisited several books in early American history that ignited my lifelong interest in how a new nation took form. These include volumes by Dorothy Kearns Goodwin, Gordon Wood, Eric Foner, David McCullough, David Blight and Joseph Ellis, among others. As a fact-check, I used Claude AI, which, in my view, is the most reliable content platform for online research. The interpretations are my own. Finally, I have drawn upon my involvement as a founding member of Cincinnati’s National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. It was there that I learned in depth the entwined historical experience of the Constitution and slavery, a relationship that reverberates today.
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My most basic takeaway is hardly surprising, but well worth emphasizing. Nothing in 250 years of the United States has matched the political counterrevolution underway under the current administration.
It is clearly determined to turn back the clock to an earlier time — the ‘Gilded Age” of the 1880s — when America was a rambunctious, volatile, unregulated, mosh pit of excessive wealth side by side with indescribable poverty. Post-Reconstruction changes had reinstated racial animosity, and lynchings reached an all-time high, while millions of children worked in brutal conditions in mining, track-laying, textile mills, and on impoverished farms. It was anything but golden for most Americans.
Donald Trump often speaks with fondness of the Gilded Age. His administration rejects the welcomed and much-needed reforms accomplished over the past many decades, preferring a darker, less fair, and more savagely brutal society dominated by wealthy oligarchs with scant regard for the vast majority of citizens and voters.
I doubt many modern-day citizens want to go backward, but that’s what we are facing. In laying out the facts as I understand them, I hope to show how so far off the rails we’ve come at the hands of a demagogue of the kind the Founders most feared.
The revolutionary idea of voting
Jefferson’s soaring declaration that “all men are created equal” is the perfect place to start.
The majority of historians explain that the Founders understood "all men are created equal" as a revolutionary aspiration rather than a description of the contemporary reality of the 1770s. In this interpretation, Jefferson and others were articulating a philosophical principle intended as a direct slap at hereditary aristocracy, in which voting was nonexistent. Jefferson’s assertion of equality was meant as a moral standard that the new nation would display to the world.
As it came to actual voting, and who could or should vote, the Founders' opinions varied. In general, limiting voting to only white men of independent means ensured that elections would be (they thought) the product of prudent men exercising reasoned political judgment. Those dependent on wages, charity, or who were females, were deemed to be unreliable and susceptible to coercion or manipulation.
Many of the Founders recognized the contradiction, but judged it as a practical safeguard to prevent the fledgling republic’s disintegration. Needless to say, the rationale for limiting voting was gradually dismantled through the 19th and early 20th centuries. Eventually, the idea that all men are created equal became the philosophical engine behind abolitionism, women's suffrage, and civil rights.
The Trump administration is going back on these principles — it’s as simple as that. It aims to limit voting access for black and brown citizens under the assumption that they are either voting fraudulently or as tools of the Democratic Party. The ‘Save Act’ and other initiatives would dramatically restrict mail-in voting, impose absurdly bureaucratic obstacles to discourage voting, and limit when polls are open, leaving many unable to make it to their polling places.
Last week’s unconscionable Supreme Court decision makes the astonishing claim that partisan Congressional redistricting that eliminates majority-minority districts is exactly what the Constitution intended. It’s a backward-facing construct hiding a racially-tinged excuse that destroys the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and reopens the cellar door to white majority advantages in states with sizable black and brown populations.
The Court’s majority opinion is not only poorly justified legally, but is also an abject dismemberment of our nation’s centuries-long commitment to a just, fair, and equitable society. It elevates partisan manipulation, enabling politicians to choose their voters instead of the other way around. The decision sanctions nakedly political aims, an idea that would have repelled and angered Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton, and Madison.
The Electoral College Mistake
The Founders got most things right, but utterly failed by creating an unwieldy process for electing presidents as a concession to slave-state politicians. The Electoral College, the overwhelming majority of historians agree, is an unholy mess unbecoming of a nation proclaiming its democratic superiority.
The EC came into being based on two miscalculations. One, advanced by Alexander Hamilton, envisioned electors as wise, informed, independent citizens who would exercise measured judgment about presidential fitness. They would not be bound by popular votes or party instructions. They would meet in their separate states, deliberately insulated from the mob pressures of a single national gathering, and use their independent judgment to select the person best qualified for the presidency.
The other miscalculation was thinking that the Electoral College would survive the test of time, even though they recognized its many flaws. Hardly before the ink was dry, partisan factions — the forerunners of political parties — began forming. Their purpose was cynical but effective: to gain control of the electors who choose the president. This is precisely what transpired, and the EC remains in place as a mockery of a representative republic.
The irony cannot be missed. The Founders were very skeptical of the ability of everyday citizens to elect the best, most capable, and most experienced presidents. But at least initially, they surmised that the Electoral College would succeed because of the judgment and capability of its delegates.
Something else about the Electoral College needs emphasis. It was the unfortunate outcome of the inability of the Founders to deal truthfully with slavery. The three-fifths clause in the Constitution (enabling slave states to count male slaves as three-fifths of a person) gave southern states substantially more electoral votes than their free population would have justified.
The three-fifths clause was later jettisoned, but the EC remains, nearly impossible to amend. The most egregious of its flaws is the winner-take-all provision. A typical example is North Carolina, which has 16 electoral college votes (two senators and 14 representatives). In 2024, Trump beat Kamala Harris with 2.9 million votes to Harris’ 2.7 million. But all 16 E.C. votes went to Trump, disenfranchising millions, especially in the state’s major metropolitan areas. That is simply not how we should choose presidents.
Is the United States a Christian Nation?
It defies belief that such a question is even asked, given our nation’s strong insistence on the separation of church and state. But it is a matter that has surfaced in Trump’s second term, with the president even portrayed as the modern Christ.
The truth is irrefutable. Whatever their spiritual grounding, the Founders were overwhelmingly opposed to establishing a state religion.
The first and most important point historians make is that the Founders were not theologically uniform in their religious beliefs. Several of the most prominent Founders were Deists. They believed in a God who created the universe but does not intervene in human affairs.
On the other hand, Patrick Henry was an earnest Anglican with evangelical sympathies. John Jay was a devout orthodox Christian. Samuel Adams was a Calvinist Puritan in the old Massachusetts tradition. John Adams was raised as a Congregationalist but drifted toward Unitarianism, rejecting the Trinity and the Calvinist doctrines of original sin and predestination. Three signers were Roman Catholics.
Jefferson presents the clearest case of a Founder rejecting Christian theology. He literally took a razor to the New Testament, cutting out all miracles and supernatural claims, leaving only Jesus’s moral teachings — producing what is now called the Jefferson Bible. He explicitly rejected the Trinity, the resurrection, and the divinity of Christ. He called orthodox Christianity a corruption of Jesus’s simpler moral philosophy.
Madison, the Constitution’s principal architect, was perhaps the most rigorous separationist of all the Founders. He opposed even congressional chaplains and government prayer proclamations as violations of the establishment principle.
Washington is perhaps the most debated. He attended church, used religious language publicly, and spoke frequently of “Providence” — but he almost never mentioned Jesus Christ specifically, avoided taking communion, and, in his private letters, suggested a Deist or, at best, a very heterodox Anglican.
Theological allegiance aside, the important point for today is that the historical evidence decisively weighs against the current claim that America is a Christian nation.
God is nowhere mentioned in the Constitution. The only references to religion are exclusionary — Article VI prohibits religious tests for public office, and the First Amendment bars Congress from establishing a state religion. This was a deliberate choice, not an oversight.
Here’s the clincher. The 1797 Treaty of Tripoli, negotiated under Washington and ratified unanimously by the Senate under Adams, explicitly states that “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”
To be sure, the broader population of that era was overwhelmingly Protestant Christian. The Founders believed — even if they were not personally devout — that religion was necessary to foster moral virtue in the population. Washington’s Farewell Address makes this argument explicitly, calling religion and morality “indispensable supports” of political prosperity. This is not the same as saying the government should be Christian — it is closer to a pragmatic argument for religion’s social function.
In sum, the Founders largely wanted a republic that was moral without being theocratic, and that protected religious liberty precisely because they had seen how religious establishment bred conflict and persecution in Europe.
The conservative narrative that America was founded as a Christian nation doesn’t hold water. That hasn’t prevented the Trump administration from forcing Christian tenets like the Ten Commandments into public school classrooms, or requiring Pentagon officers to sit through mandated Christian nationalist diatribes. Much of this activity reflects the influence of evangelical extremists who’ve invented the canard of a Christ-infused United States. Together, Trump and the radical religious right are attempting to turn our nation into a theocracy — the very thing the Founding Fathers abhorred.
The All-Powerful President
Of all the decisions of the Founding Fathers, their crafting of the Constitution was crystal clear on one point: in the fledgling United States, no one person — not even the President — would be above the law.
In reaching this conclusion, the Founders discussed presidential power and immunity with considerable sophistication, and with a contemporary understanding of the dangers of unrestrained authority. This view held fast until arguably the Supreme Court’s most radical opinion in Trump v. United States (2024), which gave presidents criminal immunity for official acts.
The historical record on this is remarkably clear, and it cuts strongly against the majority opinion’s reasoning.
The Founders were almost uniformly insistent that no person in the republic — including and especially the president — was above the law. This was not peripheral to their thinking. It was absolutely central to their entire conception of republican government, specifically distinguishing it from monarchy.
Alexander Hamilton drew an extended comparison between the American president and the British king, arguing that the president ought to be far more constrained. The king was immune from prosecution — the president explicitly was not. Hamilton wrote that the president would be “liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary course of law.” This was not incidental — it was a central selling point of the constitution’s overall intent.
James Madison, the Constitution’s primary architect, was equally clear. The entire system of checks and balances was premised on the principle that no branch and no officer was beyond legal accountability. His notes from the Constitutional Convention show consistent concern about creating an executive that could escape accountability for misconduct.
As if this were not abundantly clear, the Founders strengthened their argument on how presidents could be impeached. Those provisions specify that impeachment and removal do not bar subsequent criminal prosecution — a caveat that makes no sense if presidents are already immune from prosecution for official acts. This was a key argument by the Court’s three-justice minority in the 2024 decision, to no avail.
About what constitutes “official acts” is the crux of the matter. Almost any presidential action can be characterized as an official act with sufficient creativity. A president who orders federal law enforcement to investigate political rivals is performing an official act. A president who uses the pardon power corruptly is performing an official act. A president who deploys the military against domestic political opponents is performing an official act. If official acts are immune from prosecution, the potential for abuse is essentially unlimited. This is exactly what Trump is doing, buttressed by a legally deficient Department of Justice.
Of all the signers of the Constitution, John Adams was the most vociferous in making presidents subject to the prevailing laws of the land. Adams was especially prescient about the consequences of near-total immunity. Adams feared legitimization — that if an executive successfully claimed immunity from legal accountability, that claim would gradually harden into accepted constitutional principle, making each subsequent expansion of power easier to justify. The 2024 decision's critics argue this is precisely the dynamic the majority opinion has initiated.
It should be apparent by now that Trump v United States was a profound misreading of “original intent” — a standard the current Court majority claims is the only true way to judge Constitutional issues, but which is completely ignored by giving presidents unbridled power.
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Taken together, these summaries describe a nation in stress as it moves away from the principles adopted at its founding by mortal men who yearned for freedom from royal rule.
I do not think we’ve paid sufficient attention to how radically just one administration and one Supreme Court have latched onto our traditions of responsible governance like a rabid honey badger, one of nature’s fiercest animals.
This post, ideally, anchors current political tides in the history of our republic. I recognize, however, that time marches on, and the past seems ever less relevant to modern-day audiences. Yet we are grappling with intensely political controversies, and without background and perspective, reversing course is almost impossible.
I join with many other observers in suggesting two reforms that could help us move away from radical far-right authoritarian ideology. Both can be enacted by Congress.
One would embrace rank-choice voting for Presidential elections. Voters would cast ballots for a slate of candidates, and the two highest vote-getters would then face off in the general election. The two candidates could both be Democrats or Republicans, or one from each party, or both independents. Voters in all 50 states would cast ballots in a national election separate from Congressional or state contests.
It isn’t a perfect solution, but it is far preferable to leaving the choice of whoever becomes President to highly partisan Electoral College delegates sworn to disregard the ballots of millions.
The second reform, also within Congressional purview, would impose staggered 18-year Supreme Court terms, replacing lifetime appointments that exist hardly anywhere in the world beyond authoritarian dictatorships. The Supreme Court Term Limits and Regular Appointments Act of 2025 advocates for 18-year non-renewable terms, with a new appointment every two years. The change would make appointments more predictable, improve turnover, and reduce partisan political maneuvering, ensuring every president gets two appointments per four-year term.
Limiting the terms of justices would not impact the Senate’s role of “advise and consent,” which has devolved into a highly partisan charade. But at least staggered terms would limit the damage that we are currently enduring.
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I cannot avoid ending this post with what I consider to be the most radical change in American history. Donald Trump is controlling elections to favor his party and his private interests. It is the single largest abuse of power in my life — and yours.
The gerrymandering gymnastics now underway are a perversion of democracy, and we’ve let it happen. As a nation, we have shot ourselves in the foot, and we will be limping along for generations unless or until rational men and women can win elective office for the benefit of all of us, not the wealthiest, or the most white, or the most registered Republicans.
Those on the moderate, progressive side of the political spectrum are hoping for a record turnout in the midterms that will effectively make Trump a wounded lame duck. Anything less would be a catastrophe for democracy and sully the dream of the Founding Fathers.