Happy 250th Birthday, America.
How is your president, the living symbol of our democracy, our nation’s leader and face unto the world marking the holiday? Well, one of the things he is doing is touring the country in a flying bribe, an airborne emolument’s clause violation. At the same time, his family is celebrating a corruption bonanza that brought Trump $2.2 billion in cash and prizes last year, more than four times what he made the prior year as a private citizen.
How did he make the money? Well, a lot of it came from crypto deals that did better and better as he gave more and more breaks to the crypto industry. $80 million of it came from “settlements” (translation: pay-offs) from corporations that wanted preferential treatment from Trump on deals they were doing. And that doesn’t count the “donations” that happened to coincide with pardons or merger approvals or other twists of good fortune the donors received with respect to their relations with the U.S. government.
Who needs fireworks when you have a big noisy game of Grand Theft White House going on all the time?
Face it, as the United States celebrates a historical milestone, somehow we have managed to empower the absolute worst person possible to lead America as we commemorate its founding. He is not just a bad, incompetent man whose own hand-picked Supreme Court majority let stand a ruling that he was guilty of sex abuse and defamation earlier this week. He is actually the antithesis of our founders.
He’s the un-Washington, the anti-George.
Recent polls of historians have shown again that our first president was rated as one of our very best. Trump, meanwhile, was rated as the bottom of the barrel, one of the worst among many folks of whom we really ought to be ashamed had achieved our highest office.
Compare Trump to Washington—which Trump has done from time to time—and the reasons why our current chief executive fairs so poorly in objective comparisons with the Father of Our Country are crystal clear.
One of Washington’s greatest acts was his decision not to accept the title of king. He said he viewed the idea “with abhorrence.” Indeed, he said no event in the entire battle for U.S. independence had given “more painful sensations” than the prospect of becoming just another monarch. Trump, of course, and his White House, have both sought the powers of kingship and offered images of the president wearing a crown. (See Truth Social on February 19, 2025, for one example.)
Washington rejected grand titles and dressed plainly while Trump has sought to be treated like a potentate and has tarted up the White House with gilding and expensive foofaraws that have turned the executive mansion into a Temu Versailles.
Another of Washington’s great acts was leaving office voluntarily after two terms. When told of Washington’s decision to do so, even King George III of England said that if he followed through, Washington would be “the greatest man in the world.” Trump, on the other hand, has repeatedly suggested that he would, despite Constitutional prohibitions, seek a third term in office. He told an NBC journalist, Kristen Welker, that he was not joking when he brought up the possibility. And of course, he actually incited a mob to attack the Capitol in an effort to illegally maintain his hold on power after his defeat in the 2020 elections. (In yet another direct contrast, Washington defused a potential coup of former Continental Army officers while Trump has defended, pardoned, celebrated, and rewarded those who answered his call to seize power from the Congress and the people of the United States.)
Whereas Trump has said that Article II of the Constitution gave him “the right to do whatever I want as president,” Washington’s view was the polar opposite. He created precedents for many of the limits on the presidency that became the operating standard—prior to Trump.
Washington valued integrity above all things. He asserted “the character of an honest man” was “the most enviable of all titles.” Trump is a pathological liar who was clocked at over 30,000 lies by the Washington Post during his first term in office.
Washington warned against factionalism in his Farewell Address. Trump has made dividing the public and heightened factionalism the centerpiece of his political “movement.”
As Trump flies around in a gift from a foreign government while his family seeks to cash in on foreign deals worth billions from those who seek Trump’s favor, Washington, in that same address, called foreign influence, “one of the most baleful foes of republican government.”
There is no question that Washington—the flawed, slave-owner that he was—would have despised Trump. Indeed, he surely would have fought to stop him just as he battled the excesses of England’s Mad King George. But he would not have been alone. Trump turns out to have been precisely the kind of leader that America’s founders feared the most.
Alexander Hamilton argued that no one should be president who was not to “an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications” (Trump was the only president with zero prior public service experience to ever hold the office) and that America should avoid candidates with “talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity.” He warned that those who undo republics are most often those who pay “obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues and ending tyrants.”
Benjamin Franklin warned that the government could “only end in despotism…when the people shall become so corrupted as to need to despotic government, being incapable of any other.”
Paradoxically, Trump, despite his manifold, grotesque, and dangerous defects, has been made, as a consequence of a corrupted Supreme Court and a supine Congress, into the most powerful president in our history. From the impunity granted him in the Trump vs. US case in 2024 to this week’s delivery by the court to the presidency new power to fire the heads of independent agencies, the worst man for the office is also becoming the least constrained by checks.
Washington would have condemned that. He also said during his Farewell Address that, without checks, “cunning, ambitious and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government.” He saw the impulse as a strong one to create the kind of situation Franklin warned about, and that we are now seeing unfold before us. “The spirit of encroachment,” he said, “tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create, whatever the form of government, a real despotism.”
Back then, in the early days of the country, Washington and the other founders were personally so familiar with despotism and tyranny that taking every precaution to combat them—from carefully choosing our leaders to securely constraining their power—were top priorities. 250 years later, Americans have grown too distant to such ideas to recognize what our first president would have seen, acknowledged and sought to combat instantly: That his warnings and the lessons of history had not been heeded, and that 250 years after the country’s founding, we are at the risk of losing all they fought for and sought to create because we have elevated the worst among us, the president and the architects, enablers and beneficiaries of his corruption.
To see how grave the situation has become, we need only contrast our first president with our current chief executive. But that alone is not enough. We must also act to undo the damage Trump and the court and the Congress and the constellation of oligarchs they serve have done, or the contrast will grow only starker, as it will be between our first democratically elected president and our last.
