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How the Founders tried to prevent a Donald Trump

How the Founders tried to prevent a Donald Trump

Last updated on: April 5, 2016 at 7:00 am by Gene Veith

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How the Founders tried to prevent a Donald Trump 2016-04-05T07:00:07-04:00 Gene Veith

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If Republicans pull some convention maneuvering to prevent the nomination of Donald Trump, wouldn’t that thwart the will of the people? Well, historian Andrew Trees shows that the Founders of our nation who wrote the Constitution believed that the will of the people often needed to be thwarted, or at least checked and balanced. The Founders feared that the public would be tempted to vote according to their “passions,” thus allowing themselves to be manipulated by a “demagogue” who would stir up these passions to put himself into power. (Sound familiar?) This is why the Founders built non-Democratic safeguards into our Republic, such as having the president be elected not by the public but by the Electoral College.

Many of those safeguards have been gotten rid of, unfortunately. (Perhaps the coming debacle will encourage us to bring them back: If political parties are corrupt, something both angry voters today and the original Founders would agree on, let’s remove the presidency from politics. Let’s vote state-by-state for delegates to the Electoral College, without any of them stating whom they would be voting for. They would then deliberate on who would be the best person for the job. That would be returning to what the Founders intended.)

From Andrew Trees, The Founders would have dumped Trump: Column, USA Today:

Each day seems to bring a new reason for Republican leaders to contemplate how they might derail Donald Trump at the GOP convention, along with hand-wringing over whether it would be appropriate to violate the will of the people — or at least the will of most Republican primary voters. But there is one group that would wholeheartedly support party officials: the Founding Fathers.

The Founders were far more worried about a demagogue seizing power than they were about following the voice of the people. Most important, they clearly intended the election of the president to be well-insulated from a direct expression of the popular will. That is why we have the Electoral College, which was designed to temper the sometimes clamorous voice of the people.

Although this has led several times to candidates winning the popular vote but losing the election, most recently in the case of Al Gore in 2000, the Founders would not necessarily have had a problem with such a result. They were far more worried about too much democracy than they were about too little democracy.

The reason for this was simple: The Founders did not entirely trust the people, who were too likely to be ruled by their passions, rather than guided by their reason. As James Madison wrote, “It is a misfortune, inseparable from human affairs, that public measures are rarely investigated with that spirit of moderation which is essential to a just estimate of their real tendency to advance or obstruct the public good; and that this spirit is more apt to be diminished than promoted by those occasions which require an unusual exercise of it.”. . .

The figure whom the Founders most feared was the demagogue, whose inflammatory rhetoric stirred the very passions that the Founders hoped to control — a fairly apt description of Trump’s campaign to date. That is one of the main reasons the Constitution contains so many roadblocks to the direct expression of the people’s will. Much of Madison’s Federalist No. 10 is an outline for how the new republic would control demagogues. Enlarging the size of the nation would help “to refine and enlarge the public views” and make it more difficult for “men of factious tempers, of local prejudices, or of sinister designs” to use “intrigue (to) betray the interests of the people,” he wrote.

In other words, many of the checks and balances built into the Constitution were put there precisely so that people such as Trump would not be able to win an election.

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