Federalist 68, by Alexander Hamilton, is not much read today. It consists of a defense of the original Electoral College in which the electors, chosen by the people, would assemble in each state and deliberate on their choice for president. This version of the Electoral College never really took hold and has faded into the mists of history. So this essay might seem irrelevant.
But in the current moment, Federalist 68 is if anything more relevant than ever. That’s because it makes an argument about the importance of the character of the person who will be president.
Here’s Hamilton:
We were reminded again and again in the first year of the presidency of Donald Trump, of “the share which the executive in every government must necessarily have in its good or ill administration.” We will be reminded again and again of this in 2018.
This past week, the Trump administration, guided by its senior national security officials and consistent with the judgment of virtually every senior official in the Bush and Obama administrations, strongly supported the reauthorization of section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The surveillance authority in question, though crucial to our national security and safeguarded from abuse, has been under attack from demagogues on the left and right. The administration reiterated its support for reauthorization Wednesday night as the House of Representatives readied for a vote on Thursday.
Then the president unleashed a tweet Thursday morning that endangered the very legislation his own administration had endorsed:
“House votes on controversial FISA ACT today.” This is the act that may have been used, with the help of the discredited and phony Dossier, to so badly surveil and abuse the Trump Campaign by the previous administration and others?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 11, 2018
He later tweeted: With that being said, I have personally directed the fix to the unmasking process since taking office and today’s vote is about foreign surveillance of foreign bad guys on foreign land. We need it! Get smart!
And the House, to its credit, shrugged off the president’s ill-timed mixed messages and approved the surveillance program.
But the dueling tweets were a reminder of the risk of having a president who “is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.” Even if the ship of state maneuvered past presidential irresponsibility in this case, can it do so successfully time and again?
Meanwhile, one of today’s leaders of the decayed husk of the religious right, Jerry Falwell Jr., has tweeted:
Complaining about the temperament of the @POTUS or saying his behavior is not presidential is no longer relevant. @realDonaldTrump has single-handedly changed the definition of what behavior is “presidential” from phony, failed & rehearsed to authentic, successful & down to earth
— Jerry Falwell (@JerryFalwellJr) January 10, 2018
Falwell is wrong. No one can change the definition of what behavior is presidential because that definition fundamentally depends on what our form of government requires, not on what one individual prefers.
As Hamilton put it a few years after Federalist 68, when serving in the Washington administration:
Trump lacks “the advantage of military habits.” He lacks the discipline to truly “ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.” But he does seem more than able to create a storm and incite a whirlwind that can do considerable damage. Disorder is its own threat, even if it is not in this case laying the precondition for despotism. Enough civil commotion, as Hamilton foresaw, can threaten our form of government—the great achievement for which the Founders labored, which subsequent generations fought to defend and improve, and of which citizens of the United States have always been proud.
Self-government is an experiment. It could still fail.
