The Founders knew that Americans, for better or worse, had an insatiable desire for overseas trade. “They are as aquatic as the tortoises and sea-fowl,” observed John Adams, “and the love of commerce, with its conveniences and pleasures, is a habit in them as unalterable as their natures.” As early as 1785 he foresaw that Americans would be compelled to form “connections with Europe, Asia, and Africa,” and he advised that “the sooner we form those connections into a judicious system, the better it will be for us and our children.” Thomas Jefferson would have preferred to cease all commerce with the rest of the world and rely on the simple virtues of the “yeoman farmer,” but he knew this was impossible. “Our people have a decided taste for navigation and commerce … and their servants are in duty bound to calculate all their measures on this datum.” Even that much-caricatured “Jacksonian,” Andrew Jackson himself, as president never fired a shot in anger but negotiated more trade agreements with foreign powers than any of his predecessors.

The American love of trade made using the practice as a weapon against other nations difficult. When Jefferson forgot his own lesson and tried to embargo trade with Great Britain in 1807 in response to the British navy’s abuse of American merchants on the high seas, his efforts backfired, stirring talk of secession in the New England states that conducted most of that trade. It turned out to be easier to get Americans to support a shooting war with Great Britain than a trade war.

Donald Trump is now learning the hard way how vulnerable America is when it comes to trade wars. This is not because the United States doesn’t in theory hold the strongest hand. The American market is the most desired in the world, and any restriction on access to that market should hurt other countries more than it hurts the United States. The ratio of international trade to GDP for the U.S. is roughly 25 percent, compared with more than 60 percent on average for all other nations. In Germany, foreign trade tallies up to 90 percent of GDP. That ought to make the country vulnerable and give the United States leverage. In practice, however, Americans have proved time and again that they have a very low threshold of pain when it comes to trade wars. Jefferson was not wrong to believe that Britain depended heavily on American trade when he launched his embargo in 1807; what he did not anticipate was that his own citizens would cave before Britain did.

[Read: How Republicans learned to love high prices]

The problem is, or at least has been up until now, democracy, and, more specifically, electoral politics in a federal system where narrow, local interests can have broad national political impact. A trade dispute might harm only one sector of the economy, but if that sector happens to coincide with a crucial voting bloc, it can put the United States at a disadvantage in a contest with a nominally weaker power.

A good example of this came during World War I, before the United States had entered the war and Woodrow Wilson was trying to navigate his way through British blockades and German submarine attacks on transatlantic shipping while desperately trying to preserve American neutrality. The United States was far less reliant on international trade then; it was only 11 percent of GDP. But as Wilson learned, even damage to particular sectors of the economy could threaten political upheaval. Although his personal inclinations were pro-British, for instance, London’s threats to blockade cotton as contraband of war infuriated the Democrats’ key southern constituency. Wilson’s secretary of the Treasury, William Gibbs McAdoo, recalled spending “more sleepless nights thinking about cotton” than about anything else during his time in office. The rest of his sleepless nights were spent worrying about finding markets for midwestern grain, much of which had been purchased by Germany and other European nations prior to the war. These specific sectors, because they involved states and regions essential to national political coalitions, had influence on American decision making that exceeded their overall importance to the American economy.  

[Read: Trump’s most inexplicable decision yet]

Trump must believe, as Jefferson did, that the world needs America more than America needs the world, and he may be right—in theory. The problem is that individual voting blocs mean more to him than carrying out a consistent trade war, as he has repeatedly demonstrated during both terms in office. In his first term, the damage done to farmers by his tariffs on imports was sufficiently threatening politically that he had to spend much of the money gained by the tariffs to compensate the farmers for their losses. His vacillations and emendations in his latest rounds of tariffs this year have been similarly motivated by his desire not to alienate Republican voters in particular states—northern-tier states that rely heavily on trade with Canada and automaking states that stand to lose badly from tariffs on auto parts, steel, and aluminum crossing the Mexican and Canadian borders. It is no accident that among the Europeans’ first retaliatory tariffs have been those against Harley-Davidson and American whiskey. Other nations may know their history better than Trump does and have figured out that tariffing sectors of the economy that hit Trump voters can have an impact beyond their dollar value. The United States is a nation split down the middle politically, so marginal voting groups can have a huge effect. This significantly vitiates the American advantage.

It would be one thing if Trump’s supporters were willing to suffer economic hardship in order to show their support for the MAGA way. As Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama put it, “There’s going to be some pain with tariffs,” but “no pain, no gain.” The problem for Trump is that, so far, as in the past, even his own voters don’t have much tolerance for pain.

The founding generation’s fear of demagogues is well known. Alexander Hamilton insisted on the problem in Federalist No. 1: “Of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.” The Founders’ concern was really two fears combined: fear of an unscrupulous leader and fear of an unreflective people. What is less well known is that they also feared a third source of power that could damage their grand experiment in popular government: extraordinarily rich Americans whose aims did not align with democracy. With America’s most prominent billionaires lining up to pay homage to Donald Trump at his inauguration, and in particular with the power granted to Elon Musk to make the government more “efficient,” the country is witnessing these three fears come together: a demagogue who unites the self-interested rich with the politically ignorant.

As a first step to protect against this sort of alliance, America’s republican political institutions rejected the built-in privileges of aristocracy. Thomas Jefferson, then a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, wrote legislation that abolished primogeniture and entail—property laws inherited from monarchical and aristocratic England that advantaged “an aristocracy founded on wealth and birth,” entrenching a sense of social and political privilege.

Similarly, Gouverneur Morris, the Founder who drafted the actual text of the Constitution, worried at the Constitutional Convention that “the schemes of the rich” would take advantage of the passions of the people, resulting in “a violent aristocracy, or a more violent despotism.” Morris insisted that the “rich will strive to establish their dominion,” and even considered designing a Senate populated by the established and propertied to balance the more democratic and popular House. The two classes, he reasoned, reflected in two different institutions, would contain each other. Although the Constitution did not embrace institutional class divisions, it did formally prohibit the granting of titles of nobility as a hedge against rule by the few. Yet even in a wholly republican and popular government, fears that concentrated wealth would enable the rich to have a predominant position in political life persisted.

[Read: The tech oligarchy arrives]

The remedy, many Founders believed, was a broad economic distribution among the middle class, avoiding established classes of both rich and poor and the conflict that inescapably came along with it. Defending the Constitution in “Federalist No. 10,” Madison acknowledged that “the various and unequal distribution of property” is the most durable source of political conflict, but argued that a large republic would inevitably include a great diversity of property and economic interests. Conflict within a dynamic political economy would be between different and diverse property interests, which would fluctuate and change based on different issues, making a permanent wealthy class less likely. Noah Webster echoed this thinking in a lesser-known defense of the Constitution and the logic it rested on. A political and educational thinker famous for his monumental American Dictionary of the English Language, Webster wrote forcefully on his belief that democracy depended on the middle class and could not survive highly concentrated wealth: “an equality of property … constantly operating to destroy combinations of powerful families, is the very soul of a republic.” Webster observed that, historically speaking, “the power of the people has increased in an exact proportion to their acquisitions of property,” but when wealthy people centralize power, “liberty expires” and republican government tends toward oligarchy.

If the problem of wealth in politics has been present from the beginning, it has been particularly acute since the Supreme Court’s opinion in Citizens United in 2010, which unleashed an unprecedented flood of money into our politics, to both parties. Yet the generic problem of money in elections doesn’t capture what is happening right now: The country faces an alliance of self-interested would-be oligarchs and a president who has little commitment to constitutional democracy. Their interests are not the public’s, and their power is immense.

Elon Musk is the most obvious instance of this. He has been appointed by Trump to head the Department of Government Efficiency, where he aims to cut $500 billion in government spending and reorganize the federal bureaucracy. DOGE’s remit is to dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies. Government can always be made more efficient. Yet Musk, whose companies have billions of dollars in government subsidies and contracts, seems to be engaged in “a bureaucratic coup.” He gained access to the Treasury’s payment system and halted operations at USAID; he is reportedly behind the attempted “buyout” of government employees, and his team has perhaps unlawfully accessed government employees’ private information. And despite the enormous conflicts of interest posed by his other businesses, he has not relinquished them even while wielding extraordinary governmental power (very much like Trump). The setup could allow Musk, again like Trump, to profit from his connections and potentially steer the government toward his financial interests and away from competitors’.

Beyond Musk, Trump has named a number of ultra-wealthy allies to his Cabinet, including the secretaries of the Treasury, commerce, and education. Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg have also signaled their support, with their respective companies donating to Trump’s inauguration and making business accommodations that seem aimed to please Trump. At the top of Trump’s agenda in the new Congress is extending his 2017 tax cuts, which will largely benefit the very well-off.

Trump openly rejected the basic rules of the constitutional order by refusing to acknowledge that he lost the 2020 presidential election, scheming to remain in office, pardoning those who aided him in his effort to overturn the Constitution, and promising political retribution on those who tried to hold him accountable. His wealthy backers are either indifferent to this threat or eager to indulge it, thinking they are beyond rules.

[Read: The unique danger of a Trumpist oligarchy]

This combination is the embodiment of Hamilton’s warning in “Federalist No. 71” that the people are continually beset by “the wiles of parasites and sycophants, by the snares of the ambitious, the avaricious, the desperate, by the artifices of men who possess their confidence more than they deserve it.” A demagogue with contempt for the Constitution, colluding with many of the wealthiest Americans on the promise that their wealth will be translated into political power and favors is just the sort of alliance that the Founders warned would corrupt popular government: that “the people,” in Madison’s phrase, “would be misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men.”

Writing to Jefferson, John Adams foresaw many of today’s problems: The people would inevitably confuse the rich and well-born for the wise and virtuous. If Jefferson contemplated the rise of a “natural aristocracy,” Adams reminded him that mankind had long admired the rich simply because they were rich, confusing their wealth for wisdom. Yet wealth is no guarantor of wisdom or virtue. A combination of the rich and the ignorant, Adams noted, could empower a demagogue at the expense of democracy.

Americans too often think they are exceptional, that history somehow does not apply to them. Adams disabused us of this notion from the beginning. There “is no special providence for Americans”; we are no different than other nations. We, too, might end our republican experiment by trusting in a demagogue urged on by our emerging oligarchs.

Sometimes a constitutional crisis sneaks up on you, shrouded in darkness, revealing itself gradually. Other times it announces itself dramatically. Elon Musk, to whom Donald Trump has delegated the task of neutering the congressional spending authority laid out in Article I of the Constitution, could hardly be more obvious about his intentions if he rode into Washington on a horse trailed by Roman legions.

“This is the one shot the American people have to defeat BUREAUcracy, rule of the bureaucrats, and restore DEMOcracy, rule of the people,” Musk wrote at 3:59 a.m. today on his social-media platform. “We’re never going to get another chance like this. It’s now or never. Your support is crucial to the success of the revolution of the people.” Here is Musk, as proxy for Trump, casting himself as a revolutionary force and embodiment of the popular will, demanding extraordinary powers to fight some unstated emergency.

Why, exactly, is eliminating these programs right this very instant so important? If, as Musk says, they are teeming with waste and fraud, presumably Congress could pass legislation to reduce or eliminate the problem, and if that were to fall short, it could try again later. Instead, Musk cites a vague crisis that requires suspending normal operations and concentrating power in his own hands. According to various reports, he is holed up in the Eisenhower Building with a small team of young engineers who possess neither government experience nor the authority to question his impulsive judgments, on the hunt for Marxist plots lurking within long-standing federal programs.

[Jonathan Lemire: Elon Musk is president]

The situation exposes a well-known flaw in the design of the Constitution. The Founders, famously, failed to anticipate the rise of political parties. They assumed that each branch of government would jealously guard its own powers, and thus check the others. But political parties created a different incentive system, in which members of the legislative branch can see their role as essentially employees of the president. Trump, who has convinced the Republican base that his interests are indistinguishable from the party’s and transposed his overbearing Apprentice boss persona onto his relations with co-partisans in Congress, is exploiting these incentives more than any other president in history.  

In theory, Congress ought to revolt against the prospect of Musk deciding which federal programs should live and which should die. In reality, its members largely share Trump’s goals—and to the extent that they don’t, they correctly fear that opposing him would invite a primary challenge. What’s more, this particular constitutional crisis has an inherent partisan asymmetry. If Trump and Musk succeed in taking the power of the purse from Congress, they will effectively reset the rules of the game in favor of the right. Congress’s spending powers would be redefined as setting a ceiling on spending, but not a floor. A world in which the president could cut spending without exposing Congress to accountability would hand small-government conservatives the opportunity to carry out policies they’ve long desired but been too afraid to vote for.

And so, although a handful of conservative intellectuals, including the budget wonk Brian Riedl of the Manhattan Institute and the law professor and former Bush-administration lawyer Jack Goldsmith, have described Musk’s ambitions as unconstitutional, most of the establishment right has cheered him on or stayed quiet. Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina conceded that Musk’s project might not be strictly constitutional, but nonetheless told the news site NOTUS that “nobody should bellyache about that.”

Making things even more disturbing is the chaotic legal gray area in which Musk is operating. Musk and his team are working in secret, without hearings or public debate. According to Wired, they gained access to the Treasury Department’s federal payment system, shoving aside the long-time staffer overseeing it and ignoring its safety protocols. Democrats suspect that Musk is breaching numerous federal laws, but without any oversight, it is hard to tell precisely what he is doing. In any case, Musk might not have much reason to care about following the law. Trump has already made plain, by issuing mass pardons and commutations for the January 6 insurrectionists, that he will protect illegal conduct on his behalf.

Meanwhile, Musk has adopted Trump’s habit of deeming opposition to his actions inherently criminal. He has called the United States Agency for International Development, a decades-old program with support in both parties, a “criminal organization.” After an X user posted the names of the young engineers working with Musk, previously reported by Wired, he responded, “You have committed a crime.” The X user’s account has since been suspended.

Reporting on the identities of powerful public officials is, in fact, not a crime—even, or especially, if those officials have assumed public powers without going through formal channels. Musk has nonetheless gotten backup for his threats from Edward R. Martin Jr., a former “Stop the Steal” organizer whom Trump installed as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. In a vague but menacing message posted (naturally) on X, Martin warned that “certain individuals and/or groups have committed acts that appear to violate the law in targeting DOGE employees.” Martin declined to identify either the individuals or the laws they’d allegedly broken, nor did he acknowledge that reporting about or criticizing Musk’s work constitutes First Amendment–protected activity. Whether Martin acts upon these threats remains to be seen. In the meantime, however, he is contributing to the atmosphere of menace surrounding Trump and Musk by delivering their threats with a legal sheen, like some kind of MAGA Tom Hagen.

[Read: The ‘rapid unscheduled disassembly’ of the United States government]

The courts will have the final say over Trump’s audacious power grab. In all likelihood, they will affirm congressional authority to set spending levels authorized by the Constitution. But the Constitution ultimately means whatever five Supreme Court justices say it means. The Court’s more conservative justices often apply the most right-wing interpretation of the text they can plausibly defend, and occasionally one they can’t plausibly defend.

What’s more, Musk seems to have intuited that he can destroy programs and bureaucratic cultures faster than the system can restore them. Firing officials en masse, throwing the people and clients that rely on those programs into confusion and financial risk, and striking fear into the whole federal apparatus can break down the institutions and destroy their institutional knowledge. Rebuilding is painfully slow; destruction is rapid. This may be the dynamic Musk has in mind when he insists that his work must happen “now or never.”

Not even the most committed small-government-conservative lawmaker would design a process like the one now occurring: a handful of political novices, many of them drinking deep from the fetid waters of right-wing conspiracy theorizing, tearing through the federal budget, making haphazard decisions about what to scrap. And indeed, no elected body has designed this process. Trump and Musk have arrogated the power to themselves. The true urgent cause is to return that power to the legislature before the damage becomes irreversible.

A friend of mine, an old-fashioned and very capable scholar, views analogies as the first step on the road to perdition—and, even worse, to political science. These days, he is right to scowl more than ever, because on top of watching Donald Trump trash precedent and common decency, launch initiatives that are likely unconstitutional, and behave vindictively and erratically, we also have to deal with a wave of ill-conceived analogies.

Even sober writers who know that the argument ad Hitlerum is always problematic are now using it. Or they invoke Benito Mussolini, or Viktor Orbán, or Hugo Chavez, or any of a number of other thuggish saboteurs and wreckers of democracy to help explain the current American moment. The words fascism and fascistic appear regularly. It is all terribly misplaced.

Take the word fascism, properly applied to Franco’s Spain or Mussolini’s Italy, and to some extent beyond. The fasces were the bundles of rods carried by Roman lictors: symbols of punishment and magisterial authority, but in modern times also of a tightly unified society controlled from above, and organized in corporate form. The desire of totalitarians everywhere is to achieve harmonization, with all of society marching in military cadence under the guidance of an omnipresent government.

But the Trump administration is more interested in blowing up the state than in extending its power. Its ideologues, such as they are, are reacting to what they think of as government overreach. They will abuse executive power to do it, but they want to eliminate bureaucracy, not grow it.

Trump himself is not Mussolini, or Hitler, or Orbán—two of them soldiers with creditable war records, the third an activist against a dying Communist regime. Trump was a draft dodger by choice and a grifter by trade, and more important, he does not read. Unlike others in his orbit, he does not have ideas so much as impulses, whims, and resentments. He is, to be sure, cruel and malicious, but unlike the others, has no real governing vision.

[Christopher R. Browning: A new kind of fascism]

Nor is the United States like other countries in which democracy has perished. America has nearly a quarter millennium of legitimate self-government under its belt, unlike, say, Weimar Germany, which never had a majority coalition of parties that favored democracy. The U.S. has not experienced in recent years anything like the slaughter of World War I, the murderous chaos of post–World War I Europe, or half a century under the Soviet boot. It is a continental empire, as the Founders called it, and they argued—correctly—that its physical vastness, the diversity of its population, and the multilayered nature of its government would form unequaled (if never impregnable) obstacles to the mob rule or the despotisms experienced by city-states. It is not only much older than the democracies that failed or faltered in Germany, Italy, and Hungary, but nearly an order of magnitude larger in physical extent.

MAGA ideology is itself difficult to define—it lacks a poet like Gabriele d’Annunzio or a propagandist like Alfred Rosenberg to explain it to the masses. In fact, it reflects disparate and divergent tendencies, including the divisions between Silicon Valley techno-futurists and old-fashioned nativists, libertarians and pro-lifers, isolationists and those who look to confront China. In some respects it is ugly indeed, but unlike the ethno-nationalist movements of the right, the MAGA movement has grown more racially diverse over time (although there are racists in it and Trump is perfectly willing to exploit racist tropes), and it is more hostile toward government than eager to expand it.

Nor is it anti-Semitic—just the reverse, in fact. The Jews are the proverbial canaries in the coal mine of Western civilization, and the undeniable truth is that MAGA is not only pro-Israel but anti-anti-Semitic, and sometimes fervently so. For Jews (like myself) and philo-Semites who despise Trump and Trumpism, that is a jarring thing to admit. But if you cannot handle cognitive dissonance, you cannot think clearly about politics.

Analogies have their place, although they are most useful as a means of sharpening our understanding of what is different about the past (and the past is always different) rather than purporting to explain the present or predict the future. Sometimes, analogies help us ask the right questions as well.

But for the most part, they are a distraction. Trump and Trumpism, the servility of the Republican Party, and the flight from a values-informed foreign policy are all thoroughly American phenomena, and need to be understood in that way. History can help us see not so much where we are going as how we got here, and the nature and magnitude of the political challenges we face.

Some Democratic politicians, such as Representative Richie Torres of New York, understand this, which is why they are using the moment to reflect on how their party lost the working class rather than to bleat in unremitting outrage. But there is much more to be done. How did the presidency end up with such excessive powers vis-à-vis Congress and the judiciary? Why have so many Americans come to mistrust the government’s expertise and its ability to serve them well? What led them to put in office for a second time an odious and erratic felon? The answers will not be found merely in excoriating one administration or two. These problems have been long in gestation, and only by acknowledging that can we reckon with them.

The despicable parts of the Trump enterprise are best understood in an American context, too—not through the framework of Mussolini’s goons administering castor oil to intellectuals, but rather through the cruelties of Andrew Jackson, America’s ur-populist, who presided over the Trail of Tears. Or think of the Palmer raids in 1919 and 1920, the FBI snooping on Martin Luther King Jr. (among others, to the fascination of the Kennedy administration), loyalty oaths, Ku Klux Klan marches, the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II—all of these help illustrate how America has gone astray in the past.

The personalities that so many find alarming in the Trump administration are best understood not as native variants of Martin Bormann and Nicolás Maduro, but as authentically American demagogues in the mold of Huey Long and Father Coughlin, not to mention business geniuses with wild and reprehensible ideas, such as Robert McCormick and Henry Ford. Indeed, it is only by seeing Trump’s subordinates and henchmen in their American context—in a land that has produced its share of racketeers, bullies, and thugs—that one can understand them at all.

For thoughtful patriots, the Trump moment needs also to be a reckoning with American history. We must come to accept that we are the country that was born with, and in some cases even embraced, the curse of slavery, but also with the principles that ultimately undermined it and which inspired the self-sacrifice of heroes who destroyed it. We despoiled much of our fabulous birthright of natural resources and beauty but also preserved huge swaths of it by creating the greatest national-park system in the world. We have supported dictators, and we have liberated nations. We produced Aaron Burr and George Washington, Preston Brooks and Abraham Lincoln, Donald Trump and John McCain. Historical analogies cause us to stare out the window, when what we really need to do is look in the mirror.