The following brief essay has already in its short life had a checkered career. It has been sequentially sent to, and rejected by, The New York Times, USA Today, The Washington Post, and The Clarion-Ledger as a guest editorial. Given its unfortunate, shady, and even leprous career, read at your own risk. On the other hand, if so inclined, feel free to share.
OUR THIRD AMERICAN CRISIS
The dangers of an ambitious demagogue coming to power were not lost on Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, or Thomas Paine. Hamilton noted in The Federalist, Number 1 that “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.” Jefferson warned of a presidential incumbent like the current president, who, being defeated in a close election, would “pretend false votes, foul play, hold possession of the reins of government.” In the pamphlet Common Sense Paine saw how “men who look upon themselves born to reign, and others to obey, soon grow insolent,” and in his wartime “The American Crisis” he dismissed pretenders to democracy, who today are the president’s weak-kneed supporters in congress, as the incarnation of “the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot.”
The current president is the fulfillment—in truth, an ominous excess—of these prescient forewarnings. He has made lies, mob-like shakedowns, corruption, rapacious greed, self-idolatry, racism, vindictiveness, moral degradation, election rigging, war mongering, economy wrecking, and even murder our new and shameful presidential reality, all while weakening our national security, birthing despotism, rending our shared bonds, coarsening our culture, finding common ground with dictators, insulting and even threatening our friends, usurping congressional power, and accelerating threats to the earth itself. He wishes to make us his subjects, as we were under George III, but we are not. We are citizens, we have been since 1776, and two and a half centuries later those citizens who cherish democracy will be heard—and will prevail.
Aside from Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, Paine’s “The American Crisis,” of “These are the times that try men’s souls” fame, is the fiercest document urging separation from Great Britain. George Washington led us through that first American crisis. Mr. Lincoln, by whose high measure of presidential greatness we have fallen so far, from our best to our worst, steered us through our second American crisis.
Now we are in our third, where our own democracy and our political and moral leadership in the democratic world hang in the balance. The shot heard round the world in the first crisis was at Concord, the shot in the second crisis at Fort Sumter. The shot heard round the world in our time was at our national Capitol, a day of treasonous infamy, a day whose seeds have borne a poisonous fruit now sowing its own seeds in sometimes fertile soil. Yet all those traitors have been proclaimed by the current president as patriots and pardoned.
Other times have tried our souls: the Second World War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam. Yes. Yet in none of those did we face all three of the threats we face now, a fearsome triumvirate: profound internal division among our people and our politicians, a morally bankrupt president untroubled by character or conscience, and the foundational question as to whether or not our grand, two-and-a-half-century experiment in democracy can, in Lincoln’s words, “long endure” and not “perish from the earth.”
Surely we have suffered long enough the rot and disease and shame which have so afflicted us. Our national fever must break. Let us prove ourselves worthy of the best in our founders and honorable to our children and grandchildren, and let the future say of us that we did so. With our collective voice and vote this November, and despite the intimidation of the president’s masked military-style enforcers in blue cities, we must cleanse the Congress of those who hold loyalty to a would-be dictator and their trembling fear of his wrath above our Constitution, our democracy, and our humanity. We must end our descent into cold and darkness. We must find a more righteous path. Let us now, this day, start to climb back into the light, back into the warmth of a shining sun.
(I am indebted to Kevin McCauley of The Atlantic for Jefferson’s quote in a 1787 letter to Madison and to Jake Lundberg of The Atlantic for Paine’s first quote in Common Sense. The Hamilton quote, the second Paine quote from The American Crisis, and Lincoln’s quote from The Gettysburg Address were known to me and are thus not cited as secondary citations.)
John Rachal's Blog
Our Third American Crisis
March 30, 2026 at 4:08 pm (Political Commentary)
Tags: politics, donald-trump, news, history, democracy
The following brief essay has already in its short life had a checkered career. It has been sequentially sent to, and rejected by, The New York Times, USA Today, The Washington Post, and The Clarion-Ledger as a guest editorial. Given its unfortunate, shady, and even leprous career, read at your own risk. On the other hand, if so inclined, feel free to share.
OUR THIRD AMERICAN CRISIS
The dangers of an ambitious demagogue coming to power were not lost on Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, or Thomas Paine. Hamilton noted in The Federalist, Number 1 that “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.” Jefferson warned of a presidential incumbent like the current president, who, being defeated in a close election, would “pretend false votes, foul play, hold possession of the reins of government.” In the pamphlet Common Sense Paine saw how “men who look upon themselves born to reign, and others to obey, soon grow insolent,” and in his wartime “The American Crisis” he dismissed pretenders to democracy, who today are the president’s weak-kneed supporters in congress, as the incarnation of “the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot.”
The current president is the fulfillment—in truth, an ominous excess—of these prescient forewarnings. He has made lies, mob-like shakedowns, corruption, rapacious greed, self-idolatry, racism, vindictiveness, moral degradation, election rigging, war mongering, economy wrecking, and even murder our new and shameful presidential reality, all while weakening our national security, birthing despotism, rending our shared bonds, coarsening our culture, finding common ground with dictators, insulting and even threatening our friends, usurping congressional power, and accelerating threats to the earth itself. He wishes to make us his subjects, as we were under George III, but we are not. We are citizens, we have been since 1776, and two and a half centuries later those citizens who cherish democracy will be heard—and will prevail.
Aside from Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, Paine’s “The American Crisis,” of “These are the times that try men’s souls” fame, is the fiercest document urging separation from Great Britain. George Washington led us through that first American crisis. Mr. Lincoln, by whose high measure of presidential greatness we have fallen so far, from our best to our worst, steered us through our second American crisis.
Now we are in our third, where our own democracy and our political and moral leadership in the democratic world hang in the balance. The shot heard round the world in the first crisis was at Concord, the shot in the second crisis at Fort Sumter. The shot heard round the world in our time was at our national Capitol, a day of treasonous infamy, a day whose seeds have borne a poisonous fruit now sowing its own seeds in sometimes fertile soil. Yet all those traitors have been proclaimed by the current president as patriots and pardoned.
Other times have tried our souls: the Second World War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam. Yes. Yet in none of those did we face all three of the threats we face now, a fearsome triumvirate: profound internal division among our people and our politicians, a morally bankrupt president untroubled by character or conscience, and the foundational question as to whether or not our grand, two-and-a-half-century experiment in democracy can, in Lincoln’s words, “long endure” and not “perish from the earth.”
Surely we have suffered long enough the rot and disease and shame which have so afflicted us. Our national fever must break. Let us prove ourselves worthy of the best in our founders and honorable to our children and grandchildren, and let the future say of us that we did so. With our collective voice and vote this November, and despite the intimidation of the president’s masked military-style enforcers in blue cities, we must cleanse the Congress of those who hold loyalty to a would-be dictator and their trembling fear of his wrath above our Constitution, our democracy, and our humanity. We must end our descent into cold and darkness. We must find a more righteous path. Let us now, this day, start to climb back into the light, back into the warmth of a shining sun.
(I am indebted to Kevin McCauley of The Atlantic for Jefferson’s quote in a 1787 letter to Madison and to Jake Lundberg of The Atlantic for Paine’s first quote in Common Sense. The Hamilton quote, the second Paine quote from The American Crisis, and Lincoln’s quote from The Gettysburg Address were known to me and are thus not cited as secondary citations.)
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