Daniel Lazare

02.03.25

The World Socialist Web Site has posted an article accusing Donald Trump of seeking to “overturn the Constitution and establish a dictatorship.”[1] The second part of the statement is correct. The first is not.

The reason is simple: you can’t overturn something that is already in a state of collapse. Rather than an enemy of the Constitution, Trump is the very constitutional product of an increasingly undemocratic structure rife with contradictions that are growing more explosive by the day.

Protest against Musk/DOGE

Not that the constitutional breakdown is the sole reason for Trump’s rise. After all, capitalism is a multi-dimensional system whose crisis is multi-dimensional as well. While the falling rate of profit is the ultimate driver, the global meltdown is taking on a multitude of forms involving imperialism, war, climate, disease, and so forth. But this doesn’t make the constitutional aspect any less critical. In fact, it makes it more so since the crisis is erupting in the heart of the global hegemon.

Behind the battle over the Constitution lurks a fundamental split over strategy within the American bourgeoisie. This is the background behind the contentious struggle over the Constitution.

It’s basically a faction fight within the American bourgeoisie over how best to insure the global dominance of American capitalism that takes on the appearance, in a highly distorted form, of a struggle over the Constitution.

We must analyze America’s ancient Constitution in order to understand why it is self-destructing so rapidly and what it means for international capitalism in general.

So how bad is it? Plenty. The US Constitution barely had a shred of democracy left before Trump entered the scene and now has even less. Well into its mid-third century, the document dates from the age of silk knee britches and slavery, yet has never been subject to a comprehensive democratic overhaul. Its most outstanding features include:

A senate based on equal state representation that allows the 54 percent of the country that lives in just 10 states to be outvoted four-to-one by the minority in the other 40;
An Electoral College that more than triples the clout of states like Wyoming and Vermont who have a tiny, mostly rural population, whose demographics in no way reflect that of the country as a whole.
A gerrymandered House;
And a rightwing Supreme Court that is wholly unaccountable to the general public.

What’s more, such features are growing worse. Not only is the Senate more unequal than at any point since the early 19^th century, it will grow even more so by the year 2050 according to population projections, when a majority of the population will be concentrated in just nine states instead of ten.[2] The Electoral College is also growing more unequal over the same period while the portion of the population capable of blocking a constitutional amendment under Article V will continue shrinking below even today’s minuscule levels.[3]

This is the system’s Catch-22. Something must be done to reform an aging political structure that is long past its sell-by date. Yet nothing can be done because a broken amending process blocks all efforts at constitutional reform before they can even get off the ground.

Thus the older and more undemocratic the structure grows, the more change-averse it becomes. Given such an immovable structure, is it any surprise that frustrated voters are turning to a strong man who promises to break the Washington logjam using force and intimidation?

Hardly. Yet the Socialist Equality Party, publisher of WSWS, consistently plays down the problem of constitutional decline. Instead of zeroing in on the document itself, it prefers to dwell on a Republican Party that has emerged as “the instrument of the most ruthless and anti-democratic sections of the ruling class,” as a recent article put it.[4] It disparages the struggle for a democratic constitution in Chile on the grounds that the capitalist state cannot “be reformed, refounded, or ‘democratized,’ but “must be overthrown by the working class in the fight to establish a new state based on workers’ control” – as if workers in either Latin America or the US must not fight for democratic reforms while at the same time fighting for power.[5]

In yet another article, it speaks glibly of “constitutional rule, legality and democratic rights” as if they were one and the same; attacks the Supreme Court for undermining “the democratic rule-of-law traditions of American constitutionalism” as if the court were not the product of those same traditions, and blames “four administrations since 2000 ... [for] the disassembling of the Constitutional framework of government” as if the framework was not crumbling under its own weight. It assails Democrats for “not fight[ing] to defend constitutional rule against fascist attacks” without asking how Dems can shore up constitutionalism at all when they are part and parcel of the same process of constitutional degeneration.[6]

For those who have eyes to see, the constitutional breakdown has been central to the growth of authoritarianism at least since the 1990s when infighting on Capitol Hill turned increasingly bitter. But 2016 marked a turning point. This is when the Constitution spat out a split decision, the second since 2000, with Trump winning the Electoral College and Hillary Clinton winning the popular vote. Since the EC was growing more and more dangerous, the logical solution would have been to fix the Constitution so as to remove an increasingly dangerous provision. But since America’s holy of holies is all but set in stone, Democrats didn’t bother. Instead, they opted for what they thought was next best, an anti-Trump destabilization campaign based on the theme of Russian interference. According to one campaign account:

“That strategy had been set within 24 hours of her [Hillary Clinton’s] concession speech. [Campaign manager Robby] Mook and [campaign chairman John] Podesta assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up. For a couple of hours, with Shake Shack containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.”[7]

Six months later, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe would secretly discuss wearing a wire when meeting with now-President Trump and using the 25^th Amendment to force him out of office.[8] For the next two years, Russia, Russia, Russia would be virtually all Americans would hear about as the as the campaign intensified.

The result was akin to a constitutional cage fight in which the two sides wailed away at one another amid deteriorating conditions overall. When Russiagate didn’t work – the conspiracy theory was as flimsy as any other – Democrats tried impeachment. When that didn’t work, Trump struck back with a coup attempt on January 6, 2021. Democrats countered with a second impeachment trial and then a “lawfare” campaign aimed at putting him behind bars. One Democratic prosecutor charged him with fraud because he had hyped the dimensions of an apartment he was selling, while another charged him with federal election-law violations because he had paid hush money to a porn star. But they backfired by making Trump seem like the victim of a weaponized criminal-justice system. After a plurality voted him in, he paid Democrats back by pardoning some 1,500 “J6” defendants – thereby legalizing the original coup – and issuing a blitzkrieg of executive orders aimed at eliminating immigrant rights, abolishing birthright citizenship, pulling the plug on climate measures, withdrawing from the World Health Organization and wiping out DEI.

Trump was less a winning political candidate than a military leader bent on revenge. His strategy was to “flood the zone,” as ultra-rightist Steve Bannon put it in 2018, by firing officials, dismantling entire offices, freezing trillions in federal grants and loans, starting trade wars, and sending in Elon Musk to virtually take over the government.

He embarked on such a strategy because he thought he could get away with it – and so far he’s been right. As far as congressional Republicans are concerned, the man can walk on water since, with the exception of Bush II in 2004, he is the first GOP presidential candidate to win the popular vote in more than 30 years. The courts lean in his favor thanks to the 234 federal judges he appointed during his first four years in office, twice as many as Barack Obama appointed in eight. With its unbreakable 6-3 conservative majority, the Supreme Court leans in his favor as well. As a New York Times piece notes, the Trump administration is counting on “the Supremes” to back his drive for a “unitary executive” in which all congressional restraints are removed.[9] If they do, it will be a giant step toward rule by fiat.

But is all this unconstitutional as the SEP maintains? Only if you believe in liberal fairy tales about a constitutionally-enforced “delicate balance” that keeps the three branches in perfect equipoise. In reality, Congress is exhausted after three decades of gridlock and public opinion polls showing a disapproval rating of better than 2.5 to one.[10] The legislative branch is filled with empty-headed show-offs preening for the TV cameras as the recent Tulsi Gabbard or Robert F. Kennedy Jr. confirmation hearings make clear. The upshot is a power vacuum that Trump can’t help but fill.

Besides, if the Supreme Court backs Trump’s power grab, it means it’s constitutional after all. This is the standard law-school view, so Congress will likely go along with it, as will the bourgeois press. If so, Trump will have the field to himself. By filling the federal bureaucracy with militant conservatives and placing rightwing loyalists like Pam Bondi, Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, and John Ratcliffe in key positions as heads of the Justice Department, Pentagon, FBI, and CIA respectively, he’ll be able to turn the entire executive into an ultra-right steamroller.

The system is hurtling toward dictatorship as a consequence. But it will not be despite the Constitution. The sclerotic Constitution provides no brakes to the drives towards dictatorship which is being pushed by the realignment of class forces. In fact the Constitution encourages it as it is itself a fundamentally anti-democratic document. The only way to defend freedom is by overthrowing an 18^th-century government that is degenerating into one of the most obscene oligarchies in modern history and replacing it with a workers’ democracy. But democracy is not something workers can put off until after the revolution, but something they must struggle for in the here-and-now in the process of seizing power.

[1] “Trump’s first 7 days: The framework for presidential dictatorship,” Jan. 27, 2025, https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/01/28/rlxj-j28.html.

[2] Frances E. Lee and Bruce I. Oppenheimer, Sizing Up the Senate: The Unequal Consequences of Equal Representation (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999), 11; Demographics Research Group, Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, University of Virginia, https://www.coopercenter.org/national-population-projections.

[3] Demographics Research Group, Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, University of Virginia, https://www.coopercenter.org/national-population-projections.

[4] Patrick Martin, “As Trump assembles dictatorial regime, Biden offers ‘smoothest’ transition,” Nov. 14, 2024, https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/11/14/hciq-n14.html.

[5] Mauricio Saavedra, Chile’s ruling right wing suffers crushing defeat in election of Constitutional Convention,” May 21, 2021, https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/05/22/chil-m22.html.

[6] Richard Hoffman, “Trump putsch was the outcome of a two-decade attack on constitutional rule and legality,” Oct. 14, 2021, https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/10/15/2fea-o15.html.

[7] Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign (New York: Crown, 2017), 395.

[8] Pamela Brown and Jeremy Herb, “The frantic scramble before Mueller got the job,” CNN, Dec. 7, 2017, https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/06/politics/rosenstein-comey-firing-obstruction-probe/index.html.

[9] Charlie Savage, “Defying Legal Limits, trump Firings Set Up Tests That Could Expand His Power,” New York Times, Jan. 29, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/29/us/politics/trump-firings-officials-legal-test.html?searchResultPosition=1.

[10] “Latest Polls,” Jan. 31, 2025, https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/approval/congress/.