History will remember Trump as the most consequential Republican president since Lincoln.
Not the best. Not the worst. The most consequential.
If there’s one word that defines his presidency, it’s chaos.
After years of partisan divergence, this is exactly what the US needs.
Not because chaos is good. It’s not. The pain is real. The damage is measurable.
But because it’s forcing us to answer a question we’ve been avoiding for 250 years:
What does it actually mean to be American?
For two and a half centuries, American exceptionalism has been defined by agility.
We moved fast. We adapted. We didn’t need everything spelled out because we had something better: A shared understanding.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident…”
That phrase wasn’t just poetry. It was infrastructure.
At the bottom sits the Constitution. The bedrock. The framework for everything else.
Above that, our laws. The what and the how.
And at the top? Decorum. The unspoken rules. The norms. The “we’ve always done it this way” stuff that nobody wrote down because… well, it was self-evident.
At least for most of the time…
The spirit and the letter of the law lined up close enough.
When they didn’t (and there have been some pretty huge differences to be sure).
The Supreme Court would step in and add a definition here, a clarification there.
It worked. Mostly.
We could focus on action instead of drowning in legalese. We didn’t need to define every edge case because everyone more or less agreed on what things meant.
Until we didn’t.
March 3, 2024.
Trump v. Anderson.
The Supreme Court unanimously restores Trump to the Colorado ballot.
Section 3 of the 14th Amendment is clear: anyone who took an oath to support the Constitution and then engaged in insurrection is barred from office.
Colorado said Trump’s actions around January 6, 2021 met that definition. They removed him from the ballot.
The Supreme Court said sure, the Constitution is clear… but there’s no federal law to enforce it. And without enforcement, it can’t be applied.
That’s the moment everything changed.
Suddenly, anything not nailed down is getting ransacked.
Like Collis Huntington reborn, exploiting every gap in the system.
Take the federal agencies getting gutted.
Article 1 says Congress makes the laws and funds them.
Article 2 says the president executes the laws.
Simple, right?
People: We want kids to get an education.
Congress: Great. Here’s a Department of Education. Here’s what it does. Here’s funding.
President: Cool. Department’s up. One person running it.
Congress: Wait, you’re not spending the money. Nothing’s getting done.
President: Sure I am. Is the department there? Yes. Is it doing the work? Yes. Slowly, but yes. Am I spending the money? Yes. A dollar at a time.
Congress: But that’s not what we intended—
President: So sue me. There’s nothing in the law that compels me to do it your way. No penalties. No consequences. What are you gonna do, impeach me?
Or the emoluments clause. The president shouldn’t profit from office.
But there’s no penalty. No enforcement mechanism.
(And even if they was Trump VS US {2024} means the only real enforcement now is impeachment).
For 250 years, we just… didn’t. Because it was understood.
Now? That understanding is gone.
And honestly? That’s a good thing.
Not the chaos. Not the exploitation.
But the reckoning.
We’re being forced to codify all the stuff we assumed was part of “the art of the deal.”
All those unspoken rules. All those “of course we wouldn’t do that” norms.
We have to write it down now.
Sure, we’ll lose agility. Laws will balloon into thousands of additional pages of definitions, enforcement clauses, exception handling. The machine will get slower, heavier.
(Conservative Translation: A larger federal government)
There will be years of chaos while we work through it.
But on the other side? We’ll be stronger.
Because after 250 years, that “shared understanding” loophole will finally be closed.
And that’s what makes Trump so consequential.
Not what he built.
But how he broke everything…
Does God Exist? 