The current President of the United States, Donald Trump, has taken an extremely combative position verses our free press and generally expressed a disdain for traditional American principles. He has expressed admiration for bloody and cruel dictators around the world such as Duterte in the Philippines, Putin in Russia and Xi in China. While in China, he expressed great admiration for XI’s authoritarian state. There are differences between China and the United States however. While Xi has virtually suppressed the news media in China, Trump despite all of his harsh efforts has failed to discredit our free press and has actually made it stronger. The rule of law has always been a weak restraint on leaders in China but here institutions built up over the past 2 ½ centuries have continued to be able to restrain Trump for now. As Thomas Friedman said in the New York Times on May 9, 2018, “But they will have to hold for at least another 2 ½ years, and that will not be easy with a President like Trump who was surely not 100% joking when he said in March of President Xi ‘President for life…I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll want to give that a shot one day.’”
Our founders had some things to say about people like President Trump.
“A dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidding appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of Government. History will teach us that the former has been found a much more certain road to the introduction of despotism than the latter, and that of those men who have overturned the liberties of the republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people, commencing demagogues and ending tyrants.”
– Alexander Hamilton, 1788
“Some boast of being friends to Government; I am a friend to righteous government, to a government founded upon the principals of reason and justice; but I glory in publicly avowing my eternal enmity to tyranny.”
– John Hancock, 1774
“Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God”
– Benjamin Franklin, 1787
“I have sworn upon the alter of god eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”
– Thomas Jefferson, 1800
“The fundamental article of my political creed is that despotism, or unlimited sovereignty, or absolute power, is the same in the majority of a popular assembly, an aristocratical counsel, and an oligarchical junto, and a single emperor. Equally arbitrary, cruel, bloody and in every respect, diabolical.”
– John Adams, 1815
John Jay