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From Hamilton to Trump: The 'Revolving Door' of American Power | First Draft with Susan Demas and Jeffrey Rosen
Is Trump a modern-day Julius Caesar or Andrew Jackson? Time will tell, says the head of the National Constitution Center.
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America’s fight over power has never been left or right — it’s a revolving door of conviction and convenience.
The founders’ fear of Caesar wasn’t metaphor; it was instruction.
Federalism protects liberty through friction, not control.
Civic understanding, not outrage, is what keeps the Republic alive.
National Constitution Center CEO Jeffrey Rosen sees America as a loop, not a line — the same argument replaying from Hamilton to Trump. Parties switch sides, Jeffersonian one decade, Hamiltonian the next, as if conviction itself were seasonal. “The point of the Constitution was not efficiency, but liberty,” Louis Brandeis warned, and liberty, as Rosen reminded, depends on disagreement. Susan Demas pushed that idea toward the present: If tension is the safeguard, what happens when polarization replaces principle? The answer, buried in history, is that efficiency always ends in empire.
Nowhere is that danger clearer than in the Insurrection Act. For more than two centuries, no president dared use it against a state’s will — until Donald Trump. The founders drew that line to make tyranny difficult, not impossible. Once that boundary moves, federalism stops being a guardrail and becomes a weapon. Rosen called it an irony bordering on tragedy: The party born of Jefferson’s suspicion of power now cheering its expansion; a collapse of memory disguised as strength.
Jefferson’s warning reads like a headline from January 2021: A leader who “loses an election by a few votes, cries foul, and refuses to leave office.” Hamilton feared Caesar rising from the mob; Jefferson feared one descending from the throne. Both were right. What they shared was an insistence that no republic survives on loyalty alone. The founders built friction into the system because they understood human weakness; we’ve traded it for obedience.
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Jeffrey painstakingly chronicles this history in new book coming out on Oct. 21, The Pursuit of Liberty: How Hamilton vs. Jefferson Ignited the Lasting Battle Over Power in America.
Susan closed by asking what could rebuild that civic muscle. Jeffrey’s answer wasn’t reform but education — the slow, necessary work of teaching citizens why limits matter. His faith is in classrooms, not courts, in people who can name their rights before they lose them. Learning itself is resistance, and knowledge the only check that cannot be vetoed.
Tune in to this powerful conversation with Susan Demas and Jeffrey Rosen.
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