Frazier is an assistant professor at the Crump College of Law at St. Thomas University. Starting this summer, he will serve as a Tarbell fellow.
When the Framers sat down to think about the best form of government for America, they had few good reasons to think a republic would succeed. Looking back at historical examples of failed democracies and oppressive autocracies, James Madison and the other members of the Constitutional Convention quickly saw that building a durable government is easier said than done.
Though republics, too, had their faults, the Framers believed that they had taken sufficient precautions to reduce the odds of worst-case outcomes. They gave us a Goldilocks Constitution. Not too hot — meaning the nation would not be governed by the whims of temporary political winds. Not too cold — able to respond to crises and controversies. Just right — insisting upon deliberate and deliberative processes to lead to effective and legitimate governance.
In short, they didn’t think the Constitution was perfect but they were convinced it would be resilient. Our Goldilocks document, however, has shown signs of no longer being able to moderate extremism. We’re running too hot — short-term political thinking often determines our governing agenda and too cold — problems that require sustained and substantial political attention have been ignored or, worse, deemed too hard to solve.
Getting back to the Goldilocks Zone means restoring our faith in and demand for democratic processes. Our shared priority should be holding each branch of government accountable for adhering to their respective roles: an executive branch that governs less by executive order and more by effective administration; a judicial branch that adjudicates as impartially as possible and leaves policy decisions to the political branches; and a legislative branch that timely passes the laws required for the nation to keep moving forward. Of course, this requires holding ourselves and our fellow Americans accountable for accepting the results of this process even when they may not precisely align with our own ideological preferences.
Scholars often think the Framers had an end destination in mind when they wrote the Constitution — they scour diaries, journals and other scraps of history like Nicholas Cage in the “National Treasure” movies to find some hidden message in between the document’s relatively few lines. Unsurprisingly, no one has discovered the one North Star that neatly resolves all the ambiguity and uncertainty within the Constitution. My own two cents is that they should stop looking — the Framers weren’t trying to point us in a specific direction so much as they were trying to make sure we didn’t drive off a cliff.
Thinking of the Constitution as a set of guardrails rather than a compass should free us to focus less on litigating the past and more on following the processes they set forth to ensure a resilient, workable government. This constitutional framework should also nudge us to more vigorously defend those processes against political forces that think their policy goals are more important than our democratic longevity.
The Framers intentionally developed a system that sniffs out shortcuts and decreases the need for detours — the best way forward is through. Let’s make sure each branch does its job; let’s show up at the polls; let’s monitor whether politicians, agencies and judges play by the rules of the game. The sooner we all collectively embrace a Goldilocks Constitution as a good thing, the sooner we can fulfill our respective roles as citizens: protecting our Constitution, our elections and our laws against all threats.
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.