I think often these days about how past American leaders thought the Civil War was divine punishment for the nation’s sins. In his second inaugural address in 1864, Abraham Lincoln framed the struggle against slavery in biblical terms—not to suggest that he was on a holy mission to abolish it, but that the war itself was the result of providence. “Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away,” he told the assembled crowd.
“Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk,” Lincoln continued, “and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said 3,000 years ago, so still it must be said: ‘The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”
Ulysses S. Grant, the leading Union general and eventual president, saw the tremendous bloodshed as a balancing of accounts for the Mexican-American War, which helped fuel the westward expansion of slavery. “The Southern rebellion was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican war,” he recounted in his memoirs. “Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions. We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and expensive war of modern times.”
Lincoln had also opposed President James Polk’s contrived effort to annex Texas and conquer roughly half of Mexico in the 1840s. In a private letter to a friend in 1848, he criticized Polk for provoking a war with the Mexican government over Texas and then demanding that Congress support it. Lincoln’s friend had suggested that Polk’s actions were valid because the Constitution allows the president to repel foreign invasions.
That did not apply in this case, Lincoln countered, because Texas was not part of the United States when the fighting began. “Allow the president to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so, whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose—and you allow him to make war at pleasure,” the future president warned.
“Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after you have given him so much as you propose,” Lincoln continued. “If, today, he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada, to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, ‘I see no probability of the British invading us,’ but he will say to you, ‘Be silent; I see it, if you don’t.’”
Those words proved to be prophetic. Last week, President Donald Trump sent troops into Venezuela to capture Nicolás Maduro, the president of Venezuela, and bring him to the U.S. to stand trial on various charges. Much of the situation is unclear: Trump initially claimed that the U.S., in some unspecified way, would “take control” of Venezuela. Days later, there are no U.S. troops on the ground, and the Chavismo faction that had been ruling Venezuela, with the exception of Maduro, appears to be intact.
In the immediate aftermath of the raid, Trump showed little interest in the legal or constitutional implications of his actions. “They should say ‘great job,’” he told reporters after one mentioned criticism from congressional Democrats. “They shouldn’t say, ‘Oh gee, maybe it’s not constitutional.’ You know, the same old stuff that we’ve been hearing for years and years and years.”
Nor have he and his subordinates offered much clarity on the situation. Some officials described it as a “law enforcement operation,” citing a 2020 federal grand jury indictment against Maduro. Others suggested that the Trump administration would now try to now control the rest of the New World more aggressively. Trump and his top officials have threatened additional military action in Colombia, Cuba, and Mexico. They have also renewed their demands and threats to acquire Greenland from Denmark, a NATO ally.
Some top GOP officials have taken to sounding like German officials from the late 1930s. “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” Stephen Miller, Trump’s top domestic policy aide, told CNN’s Jake Tapper earlier this week. “These are the iron laws of the world.” Miller also suggested that the U.S. acquisition of Greenland was a foregone conclusion because “nobody is going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland.” Representative Andy Ogles, speaking on the Trump administration’s apparent imperial desires, described the U.S. as the “dominant predator force in the Western Hemisphere.” He appeared to mean that as a compliment.
The American people have signaled no interest in any of these proposed military misadventures. As many as 73 percent of voters oppose the use of military force to seize Greenland, according to one post-Maduro poll. But the views of American voters may not matter, at least in the near term. The U.S. only really has two branches of government right now. Trump sits atop the executive branch, which is little more than a vehicle for his personal whims and desires. Officials like Russ Vought have sabotaged many agencies’ workings to benefit their corporate allies. Other powers and responsibilities have been turned toward darker ends.
The judicial branch also retains much of its vitality despite the Supreme Court’s best efforts to sabotage it. Lower court judges have consistently pushed back against the Trump administration’s lawlessness on immigration enforcement, on federal spending power, and on basic civil rights. Occasionally a majority of the nine justices does something other than undermine their fellow judges, but those days are few and far between.
Congress, on the other hand, functionally no longer exists. It has not been abolished in some dictatorial show of force or authoritarian crackdown. That would be unnecessary. There are still senators and representatives. They occasionally hold votes and hearings on Capitol Hill. They still run for reelection. But they don’t really do much of anything. Oversight is minimal and toothless; lawmaking is centralized, preordained, and infrequent.
Much of the blame for this sorry state lies with the Republican Party and its leaders. The Constitution’s structure anticipates that members of each branch will guard their own powers and prerogatives jealously. It also assumed that lawmakers would be more loyal to their constituents and to the republic than to some passing demagogue. Top GOP lawmakers have gone out of their way to prove these assumptions wrong.
Mike Johnson, the eminently forgettable speaker of the House, insisted in a CNN interview that the Venezuela raid wasn’t a big deal. “This is not a regime change,” he claimed. “This is a demand for change of behavior by a regime.” He and John Thune, the Senate majority leader, insisted that Trump was not obligated to inform Congress under the War Powers Act before launching a military operation to arrest a foreign head of state.
Democrats, too, have struggled to use their platform and (albeit limited) power effectively. “I asked for assurances that they were not planning operations in other countries ... including Colombia and Cuba,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told reporters on Tuesday, “and I was very, very disappointed in their answer.” Nor have they been able to articulate a compelling argument against Trump’s imperialism. “The White House is laser focused on threatening a military takeover of Greenland,” Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar offered on social media on Wednesday. “Where’s the same focus on lowering costs?”
Congress’s power is immense—if it chooses to wield it. No better evidence could be offered than Trump’s warnings that he will be impeached if Democrats retake at least the House in this year’s midterm elections. “You got to win the midterms, because if we don’t win the midterms, it’s just going to be—I mean, they’ll find a reason to impeach me,” Trump told GOP lawmakers earlier this week at a policy retreat. “I’ll get impeached.”
There is no shortage of reasons to impeach and remove him, but Trump’s military adventurism would be a good place to start. Why does Congress have the power to declare war? Because that power must reside somewhere. It could not reside in the Supreme Court, obviously. Nor could it be entrusted to the president—not even to George Washington, whom the Framers had in mind when they sketched out the office’s powers. Instead it fell to the most representative branch, along with the power of the purse and the approval of military commissions and regulations.
“The provision of the Constitution giving the war-making power to Congress, was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons,” Lincoln explained in the 1848 letter. “Kings had always been involved and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object.”
English history is filled with examples that prove his point. The history of Parliament is, at least in part, a history of medieval kings asking for more money to wage expensive wars and surrendering more power in exchange for it. “This our [Constitutional] Convention understood to be the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions,” Lincoln continued, “and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us.”
Trumpworld apparently thinks it can solve this ancient dilemma by plundering Venezuela’s oil and transferring it to offshore slush funds, circumventing both the Treasury and the Constitution. Past administrations had the bare decency to pretend they were appealing to a higher interest, like liberty or democracy or human rights. The Trump Doctrine, such as it is, is pure gangsterism, shorn of any moral pretext other than “because I want to and because I can.” It is the domestic abuser’s mentality translated into foreign policy.
The U.S. is powerful enough to get away with this for a little while. But this country is not omnipotent. Much of our strength as a superpower comes from the goodwill of our allies and our neighbors—from our alliances and trade relationships and shared institutions—all of which is now being destroyed or dismantled. Whether by divine reckoning or abstract karma or sheer Newtonian physics, there will one day be an equal and opposite reaction to Trump’s foreign policy adventurism. Only by restoring constitutional government can we hope to limit whatever damage will come.
