McHugh retired in 2012 after 11 years as a justice of the Massachusetts Appeals Court. Marcuss is a retired partner at the law firm Bryan Cave and a former senior fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School. They are on the steering committee of Lawyers Defending American Democracy.
Mitch McConnell refuses to accept the verdict of the American people. The Senate majority leader is willing to indulge President Trump's attempt to destroy American democracy, by supporting his fight to stay in office despite his repudiation by nearly 78 million Americans and a margin of at least 5.3 million votes. Other Republicans give Trump and McConnell comfort by standing on the sidelines in silence.
This must end if American democracy is to survive. The norms of democratic behavior must be restored. The divisions that have poisoned this country must be bridged. This calls for enlightened behavior.
President-elect Joe Biden has started the healing process by assuring Americans that he will be the president of all the people once he takes office. His history of reaching across the aisle in search of compromise gives hope. He is in a better position than most to appeal to those who care for the future of the country, to persuade them of the importance of ensuring that the mechanisms of democratic government survive. If he is successful, we may see the beginning of the end of the nightmare to which we have been subjected by an incompetent and corrupt president.
It will be just a beginning, however, unless the abuses of power that have crept into our system of government are recognized and reversed.
One week before the election, a compendium of abuses of power and needed reforms was released by our organization. More than 2,000 attorneys — including former judges and prosecutors, law school deans and managing partners of large law firms — formed two years ago to enlist our colleagues in the legal community to speak out against the threats to our democracy and to demand that Trump and Congress honor the fundamental principles, norms and values of our democracy.
Among the reforms we proposed are:
- Compelling presidential compliance with congressional subpoenas and requests for government testimony.
- Punishing government officials who lie and deceive the American public.
- Prohibiting permanent "acting" government officials from exercising any power.
- Prohibiting the Justice Department from being the president's personal law firm
- Prohibiting use of the pardon power to protect presidential wrongdoing.
- Punishing civil servants who work on the president's political objectives.
- Outlawing nepotism, especially in the White House.
- Prohibiting use of the White House for self-enrichment.
- Requiring disclosure of the president's and vice president's business interests and tax returns.
- Prohibiting revenge against whistleblowers and others who tell the truth.
- Prohibiting voter suppression.
Many of these proposals will require legislation. For most of our history, legislation was not thought necessary. Most Americans understood implicitly that abuses of power would undermine the delicate checks and balances that make our Constitution work. The experience of the last four years has taught us otherwise.
Without legislation, the risk of repeated abuses is real. In an age increasingly vulnerable to autocracy and the preservation of power for its own sake, we cannot count on what was implicit in the past being what governs the future.
Legislation alone, however, is not enough. Compassion and empathy cannot be compelled. Respect for truth, diversity, political compromise, unbiased law enforcement and an independent judiciary comes from within. It requires a willingness to reach out to opponents in order to understand their concerns and grievances, and a desire to find common ground that satisfies competing interests. And it requires repudiation of the instinct for a "they did it, now it's our turn" approach to governance.
The winner-take-all approach to governance makes losers of us all.
Presidential elections are often bitter contests. Candidates frequently claim that an election is the most important in American history and that the future of our republic depends on the outcome. This time the future of the republic really is at stake.
Trump long ago refused to say he would leave office peacefully if the election went against him. He said that an election he did not win had to be fraudulent. He did what autocrats do: Participate in the election as a fig leaf and discredit it if they lose.
In Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar," Mark Antony observes: "The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones." The evil the defeated president has done will persist long after he is gone — unless it is eradicated.
We have the means to do it. If we fail, the good that is in America is destined for interment with her bones.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.