Before we dive into what’s happened so far in 2025, we need to establish a baseline. Because the argument I’m making isn’t “I don’t like these policies” or “this isn’t how I want government to work.” The argument I’m making is much more specific: The American constitutional system has failed by the exact criteria its architects gave us to measure failure.
I need to start with kind of a weird, humorous caveat here: I’m Canadian, but technically I went to an American high school. My parents homeschooled me, and for my upper grades they used a program literally called the “American School of Correspondence”, based in Lansing, Illinois. That’s what I graduated from. And one of their basic requirements is American history, American civics, American politics.
So, I didn’t learn about Canada. I didn’t learn Canadian history or how our political system functions. I was immersed in the philosophies of the quote-unquote Founding Fathers of the USA, the colonies they represented, the War of Independence, the justification of their rebellion against the tyranny of King George the Third.
Later in life, I foolishly doubled down by attending a religious college in Idaho for my first year and a half of higher education. Again, several of my required foundation year classes were in American history and civics. Incidentally, I had excellent grades in those semesters.
That’s where I’m coming from. Everything I know about Canada, I’ve gathered outside of formal education. But the US? I’ve been immersed in their pseudo-religious, near-mythical depictions of their saintly founding fathers. I only learned later about their faults.
To be clear, they were not good people. Many of them were, by their own standards, monsters. Washington, Jefferson, and Madison were all slaveholders. Jefferson had at least six children with one of his slaves, actually his wife’s half-sister, and rather than freeing them, those children lived as his literal property. The founders participated in and profited from what was unarguably the deliberate genocide of Native Americans. The system they created constitutionally protected slavery, despite their hypocritical declaration that “all men are created equal before God.” They also excluded women entirely from political life, all while writing beautiful words that only ever applied to rich, white landowners like themselves.
Benjamin Franklin later became an abolitionist, and Adams and Hamilton were conversationally opposed to slavery, but none of them made it a political priority at the nation’s founding.
So, with all that in mind, let’s start with what they actually designed their system to do, and how they intended it to function.
The Founders weren’t dreamers. They weren’t optimists hoping human nature would somehow improve. They came together as engineers solving a very specific problem: How do you prevent tyranny when humans — flawed, ambitious, power-hungry humans — run the government? You may ask why this would be a priority for flawed, ambitious, already-powerful men. Well, they didn’t like or trust each other, that’s for sure, and so the entire project, from the start, was a hedged bet that one of them, or their descendants, would attempt to consolidate power.
Their solution wasn’t to find better people. It was to build a machine that would work even with terrible people operating it.
James Madison laid this out explicitly in Federalist 51. The Federalist Papers are a collection of 85 essays written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay. Published between 1787 and 1788, these essays provide detailed arguments for the new form of government, explaining the principles and structure of the Constitution, and are considered a foundational text for understanding American political philosophy and the intent behind the Constitution.
In Federalist 51, Madison wrote: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”
But since neither of those conditions applied — since we’re stuck with actual humans — he concluded that we need something else. We need government to control itself through structure, not virtue.
His solution was brilliant in its cynicism: “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.”
Think about what that means. Madison wasn’t asking politicians to be noble. He was assuming they’d be selfish. Legislators would want power. So would judges. So would presidents. The trick, an open trick that they debated, discussed, and strategized, was to set the branches of government against each other so that one person’s ambition would check another person’s ambition.
It’s mechanical. It’s automatic. It doesn’t rely on anyone being a good person.
Senators would defend Senate prerogatives because that’s where their power came from. The president would jealously guard executive authority. Judges would protect judicial independence. Not because they were virtuous, but because their institutional self-interest aligned with constitutional structure.
But Madison also knew that writing these principles down on paper wasn’t enough. In Federalist 48, he warned that “parchment barriers” — just words on a document — provide very little protection. He quoted Thomas Jefferson, who said the government they fought for wasn’t just one “founded on free principles,” but one where “the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among several bodies of magistracy as that no one could transcend their legal limits without being effectually checked and restrained by the others.”
That word — “effectually” — is doing a lot of work. It’s not enough for checks to exist on paper. They have to actually function. Someone has to stop you when you exceed your authority.
And here’s where it gets interesting: The Founders laid out exactly what failure would look like.
Madison gave us the test in Federalist 47: “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”
I’ll read that again. He didn’t say tyranny is when a bad person gets power. He said tyranny is when powers accumulate in the same hands — even if those hands were elected.
This is the key insight: You can have elected tyranny. You can have constitutional forms that persist while constitutional substance disappears. If one branch starts exercising powers that belong to another, and nobody stops them, you have tyranny by Madison’s definition — regardless of whether elections still happen.
George Washington famously reinforced this in his Farewell Address. Remember that he was so popular he could have served a third term as president. He chose not to, and established the two-term precedent that later became Constitutional Amendment 22. In his Farewell, he warned about “the spirit of encroachment” — the gradual tendency of power to consolidate. And he told us how it happens: Not through constitutional amendment, not through honest debate, but through usurpation. He said usurpation is “the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed.”
Usurpation means changing the system through practice and precedent rather than through the formal amendment process. You don’t rewrite the Constitution. You just start ignoring its limits until everyone forgets they existed.
Washington also warned about the “spirit of party” — what we’d call partisanship today. He predicted it would “become a Fire not to be quenched” that would eventually consume rather than warm. He understood that if party loyalty supersedes constitutional duty, the whole system collapses. Because then legislators won’t defend legislative power against executive encroachment — they’ll defend their party’s president instead.
And then there’s Benjamin Franklin’s famous line about what the US was at its founding: “A Republic, if you can keep it.”
This gets quoted a lot, usually to make some vague point about civic virtue. But I think we miss the real warning. Franklin spent the entire Constitutional Convention watching the half-sun carved on George Washington’s chair, wondering whether it was rising or setting. Even after they finished, even after they’d created what they thought was the best system possible, compromises and all, his optimism was tentative. Conditional. He knew it could fail.
They all knew it could fail. Most of the Founders became pessimistic later in life. Washington despaired over partisan faction. Jefferson feared the Union wouldn’t survive sectional divisions. John Adams wrote bitterly that what they’d created as a mixed government had become “to all intents and purposes, in Virtue, Spirit and effect a democracy” — by which he meant mob rule by majority faction.
Only Madison kept some hope, reasoning that if the Constitution survived its early crises, it might endure. But even he wasn’t certain.
So what were the specific failure conditions they identified?
First: Concentration of powers across branches. If one branch starts exercising another’s authorities, that’s definitional failure.
Second: Officials exceeding constitutional boundaries without resistance. It’s not enough for limits to exist — someone has to enforce them.
Third: Partisan loyalty superseding constitutional duty. When party trumps institution, Madison’s mechanical system breaks.
Fourth: Loss of accountability. The checking mechanisms have to actually check.
Fifth: Citizens losing the civic virtue necessary for self-government. This was the wildcard — they were aristocrats, but they knew the system required at least minimal engagement from the public.
Now here’s what’s crucial to understand: These aren’t my standards. These aren’t progressive or conservative standards. These are the standards the Founders themselves articulated. They told us what failure looks like. They built the system with specific architectural principles. They gave us tests to measure whether it’s working.
And what I’m going to show you over the next few episodes is that in October 2025, the current US administration is not just failing those tests, they are deliberately and systematically breaking down the founding principles. And they’re doing it because they hate the republic. They hate the regular exchange of power. They hate freedom of religion, and they hate the separation of church and state.
I don’t use the ol ‘H’ word lightly, and I wouldn’t if I didn’t think it was accurate. That is the emotion they are displaying, alongside contempt and arrogance and several others. These aren’t mild, easy-going people. They are vituperative, passionate, and fierce.
The accumulation of powers Madison warned about? Happening. The usurpation Washington identified? Documented. The partisan capture that destroys institutional loyalty? Admitted publicly by sitting senators. The loss of effective checking? Systematic and blatant.
But here’s what makes 2025 different from every previous crisis: This wasn’t improvised. This wasn’t a president getting into office and gradually pushing boundaries until someone stopped him. This was pre-planned.
There’s a blueprint. It’s 920 pages long. It was published in April 2023 by the Heritage Foundation. It’s called “Mandate for Leadership” — though everyone knows it as Project 2025. It was created by over 400 scholars with $22 million in funding. And the people who wrote it are now in power, and they are bragging about implementing it.
When James Madison, known as the “Father of the Constitution” for his central role, designed the system, he assumed ambition would counteract ambition because officials would defend their institutional prerogatives. But what happens when an entire ideological movement, backed by powerful organizations with billions of dollars, and religiously fanatic motivation, systematically plans how to eliminate those institutional defenses before even taking power?
What happens when they pre-write executive orders intended to exceed presidential authority, explicitly for the purpose of pushing and ultimately breaking the limits on that authority? When they pre-vet the personnel? When they train the political operatives, as if they were Russian sleeper agents? When they create a 180-day playbook specifying exactly what to do on Day One, and the days that follow?
What happens when instead of ambition counteracting ambition, you have coordinated ambition executing a script?
That’s the question we’re confronting. And the answer, I think, is that the system the Founders built wasn’t designed to handle this. They built it to resist improvised overreach by individual leaders. They didn’t anticipate wholesale institutional transformation planned years in advance by a coordinated movement that explicitly rejects the Founders’ constitutional design. These are king-makers, because they really do believe that democracy is, frankly, stupid. They believe that every time their opponents get into power through voting and elections, it’s a disaster. They believe they have been “called” to end this ongoing disaster.
So that’s our baseline. The American experiment was supposed to prevent tyranny, and the definition of that is the consolidation of power, rather than its equal balancing between branches.
There’s one more framework I want to give you. It’s a modern one, with the benefit of a lot more experience with democracy than the founders had. It comes from political scientists Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith, in a brilliantly pragmatic book called The Dictator’s Handbook.
Their insight is brutally simple: Every leader — whether they run a democracy or a dictatorship — stays in power the same way. They need to keep their essential supporters happy. That’s it. That’s the whole game.
But here’s what makes it interesting: The size of that group of essential supporters changes everything about how a country is governed.
They identify three groups in every political system:
First, there’s the selectorate — everyone who has at least some nominal say in choosing the leader. In a democracy, that’s all voters. In a dictatorship, it might be the military officer corps, or party officials, or tribal leaders.
Second, there’s the winning coalition — the subset of the selectorate whose support you absolutely need to stay in power. In a simple democracy, that’s 50% plus one of voters. In a dictatorship, it might be a dozen generals or a few hundred party officials.
Third, there are the interchangeables — members of the selectorate who aren’t currently in your winning coalition, but could be.
The core insight is this: Leaders survive by keeping their winning coalition loyal. And the way you keep people loyal depends entirely on how big that coalition is.
If your winning coalition is small — say, a dozen military commanders — you can keep them happy with private rewards. Give General A a mansion. Give General B control of the oil ministry. Give General C’s son a lucrative contract. This is relatively cheap and efficient. Putin, for example, is likely the richest person on the planet, even though he runs an oligarchy made up of other obscenely wealthy people who are all trying to get wealthier all the time. It works because you only need to pay off a handful of people.
But if your winning coalition is large — say, 70 million voters — private rewards become impossibly expensive. You can’t give 70 million people mansions. You can’t give everyone’s kid a government contract. The math doesn’t work.
So instead, you’re forced to provide public goods. You build roads everyone can use. You fund schools. You provide healthcare. Not because you’re virtuous, but because it’s the only economically feasible way to keep a large coalition satisfied.
This is why democracies tend to produce better governance than dictatorships — not because democratic leaders are better people, but because they need more people’s support, which forces them to provide public goods instead of private rewards. Democracy is, coming back to Madison’s legacy, mechanically suited to preventing predictable consolidations of power.
And here’s the terrifying part: The logic works in reverse.
If you can shrink your winning coalition, you can govern more cheaply and face less accountability. Instead of needing to satisfy millions of voters by actually solving problems, you only need to satisfy a smaller group with private benefits.
A leader who can shrink their winning coalition gains enormous advantages: They spend less on keeping supporters happy. They face fewer constraints on their behavior. They can extract more wealth for themselves. And most importantly, they become harder to remove from power, because anyone in the winning coalition knows that if they defect, they lose their private benefits — and there are plenty of interchangeables ready to take their place.
The book argues this is why dictators often make their countries poorer: Not because they’re economically incompetent, but because poverty is useful. A poor, desperate population is easier to control. When most people are struggling to survive, you only need to provide marginal improvements to a small winning coalition to stay in power.
And here’s the mechanism that matters most: To shrink your winning coalition, you need to eliminate alternative power centers. You need to destroy institutions that might organize opposition. You need to make it impossible for interchangeables to coordinate against you.
In practical terms, that means: Purge the civil service of anyone not personally loyal. Capture law enforcement so it punishes enemies and protects allies. Control or eliminate independent media. Weaken courts so they can’t constrain you. Make sure the military answers to you personally, not to institutional chains of command. Eliminate nonprofit organizations and civil society groups that might organize resistance.
Once you’ve done this, you no longer need 70 million voters to be satisfied. You only need to keep a few thousand key supporters happy — and you can do that with private goods, which you now have access to in abundance: Government contracts, immunity from prosecution, regulatory favors, access to lucrative opportunities.
This is the dictator’s handbook: Shrink your winning coalition, eliminate competing power centers, and govern through a small group of essential supporters who are richly rewarded for their loyalty and terrified of losing their position.
Again, I’m not drawing conclusions yet. I’m just laying out known, studied, well-documented frameworks. These aren’t surprises. These are predictable, even boringly predictable, like so much of human nature. From Turkiye to the Sudan, North Korea, Myanmar, Venezuela, on and on and on, we have dozens of current examples to study, to say nothing of our recorded history as a species. Keep this logic in mind as we look at what’s been happening since January 2025.
Because the question you should be asking yourself is: What would it look like if someone systematically tried to shrink their winning coalition in the American system? What institutions would you need to capture? What power centers would you need to eliminate? What mechanisms would you need to disable?
Hold that question. In the next chapter, we’ll look at the blueprint.
