French: Trump doing long-lasting damage to America

By David French / The New York Times

President Trump is doing damage to America that could take a generation or more to repair. The next election cannot fix what Trump is breaking. Neither can the one after that.

To understand the gravity of the harm Trump has inflicted on the United States in the first month and a half of his presidency, a comparison with the Cold War is helpful. Republicans and Democrats often had sharp differences in their approach to the Soviet Union; very sharp. The parties would differ, for example, on the amount of military spending, on the approach to arms control and on U.S. military interventions against Soviet allies and their proxies.

Deep disagreement over Vietnam helped drive American political debate, both within and between parties, for more than a decade. During the Reagan era, there were fierce arguments over the MX, a powerful intercontinental ballistic missile, and over the deployment of intermediate-range missiles in Europe.

These differences were important, but they were less important than the many points of agreement. Both parties were committed to NATO. Both parties saw the Soviet Union as the grave national security threat it was. For decades, both parties were more or less committed to a strategy of containment that sought to keep Soviet tyranny at bay.

At no point did Americans go to the polls and choose between one candidate committed to NATO and another candidate sympathetic to the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. The very idea would have been fantastical. U.S. elections could reset our national security strategy, but they did not change our bedrock alliances. They did not change our fundamental identity.

Until now.

Consider what happened in the Oval Office on Friday. Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance ambushed President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine on live television. Vance accused Zelensky of being “disrespectful,” and Trump attacked him directly: “You’re gambling with the lives of millions of people. You’re gambling with World War III. You’re gambling with World War III and what you’re doing is very disrespectful to the country — this country — that’s backed you far more than a lot of people say they should.”

Trump’s attack on Zelensky is just the latest salvo against our allies. Back in office, Trump has taught our most important strategic partners a lesson they will not soon forget: America can — and will — change sides. Its voters may indeed choose a leader who will abandon our traditional alliances and actively support one of the world’s most dangerous and oppressive regimes.

Even if Democrats sweep the midterms in 2026 and defeat the Republican candidate in 2028, that lesson will still hold. Our allies will know that our alliances are only as stable as the next presidential election; and that promises are only good for one term (at most).

It’s extraordinarily difficult — if not impossible — to build a sustainable defense strategy under those circumstances. It’s impossible to enact sustainable trade policies. And it’s impossible to conduct any form of lasting diplomacy. If agreements are subject to immediate revocation with the advent of a new administration, will any sensible world power rely on America’s word; or America itself?

At the same time that Trump was turning on Ukraine, his administration canceled thousands of contracts funding malaria prevention, polio vaccine initiatives, tuberculosis treatments, Ebola surveillance and hospitals in refugee camps. If these cancellations stand, then the United States will essentially dismantle a vast humanitarian network that has saved millions of lives.

The same principle applies at home. Trump’s waves of layoffs in the federal government, his promiscuous pardons of political allies and his attempts to shutter statutorily created agencies mean that domestic policy is now just as contingent as foreign policy.

A nation cannot effectively serve its people if it is gutting and rebuilding the civil service every four years. It cannot close and reopen agencies with every election cycle.

Much ink has been spilled (including by me) outlining exactly how Trump is attempting what amounts to a constitutional revolution. Jan. 6 can now be seen for what it truly was: Trump exposed his will to power and his complete contempt for the law. He is attempting to upend the structure of the American government to place the president at the unquestioned pinnacle of American power.

As we experience the consequences of Trump’s actions, we’re learning exactly why the founders did not want the president to reign supreme. We’re reminded once again that they possessed keen insight into the perils of governing a large, fractious nation by executive fiat.

To properly grasp the Founders’ intentions, I highly recommend listening to my colleague Ezra Klein’s Feb. 5 interview with Yuval Levin, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. “The president is elected,” Levin said, “but the president was not thought of as a representative figure. That office is one person in a vast country. One person can’t really represent that vast country. That has to be done by a plural institution like Congress.”

And Congress isn’t designed to act on a dime. As Levin said, “The logic of the American Constitution is that only majority rule is legitimate, but that majorities are very dangerous to minorities. And that means that we want a system that forces majorities to grow and broaden before they are empowered.”

When the system is working, meaningful change is hard. It’s difficult to build the broad electoral majorities that forged the New Deal or the Great Society. But that also means that real change is also lasting change; and that’s a very good thing. Could you imagine a world in which the very existence of Social Security and Medicare hinged on a single president’s whims?

In reality, as Levin argues, the president exists chiefly as an administrator. He is to administer the institutions that Congress creates. He is to shepherd the treaties and alliances the Senate ratifies. He is not the person who decides whether those institutions or alliances should exist at all.

If Trump is able to accomplish his will, the chaos could revive the electoral prospects of the Democratic Party, but that alone won’t fix the problem, cure our instability or heal us as a nation.

That’s why the court battles that are unfolding now are so vital. The Supreme Court can’t make Trump support Ukraine, nor should it be able to, but it can enforce government contracts. It can protect civil servants from unlawful termination. It can protect congressionally created agencies from presidential destruction. In other words, it has an opportunity to defend the constitutional order.

But even as I type the words “constitutional order,” I worry that sounds too academic, too esoteric, for the moment. By challenging the constitutional order, Trump is challenging the stability of the American system itself.

Immense damage has already been done. How many presidential elections will it take before our closest allies once again believe we’re a reliable partner?

As a conservative, I’ve long respected the concept of “Chesterton’s fence,” named after G.K. Chesterton, a British writer, philosopher and Catholic apologist. Chesterton argued that the best and most careful approach to change required us to discern why, say, a fence might block a road and not to just tear it down.

“The more modern type of reformer,” Chesterton wrote, “goes gaily up to it and says, ‘I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.’ To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: ‘If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.’ ”

There is nothing conservative about Trump’s movement. He’s bulldozing Chesterton’s fence with glee.

As Trump destroys institutions, he destroys trust. And trust, once destroyed, is the most difficult thing to restore.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times, c.2025.