Kevin Frazier will join the Crump College of Law at St. Thomas University as an Assistant Professor starting this Fall. H e recently concluded a clerkship with the Montana Supreme Court.
A friend invites you to play a game of Jenga at a party. This isn’t any friend and it’s not any party. Your friend is the creator of Jenga. Impressed, you agree to play. Before the game gets underway, she discusses strategy– be deliberate, patient, and plan for the future. She also explains the rules…but with a twist: first, anyone that shows up to the party is going to join the game; and secondly, you’ll be building the tower rather than removing pieces.
You quickly realize that to build the tallest tower possible, you’ll have to coordinate with each and every current and future attendee--they’ll need to know the rules, find a piece to add to the tower, and do so using the proper technique. Suddenly, guests start arriving out of nowhere. Some miss your explanation, others try to add several pieces at once, and a few think it would be fun to knock the tower over rather than help the cause.
A few hours pass and you see that the tower is standing but leaning like a palm tree and swaying from side to side. Your friend, the founder, told you that something like this might happen but warned that restarting wasn’t an option. Thankfully, though, she also said that you could use your imagination to come up with other ways to lay the pieces to keep the tower in place and growing.
What do you do?
This modified version of Jenga might as well be titled, “Intergenerational Democracy.” Since 1776, it has been passed generation to generation with varying levels of success. Each generation has more or less adhered to the recommended strategy--you’ve done your best to translate the founders’ rules and strategy but some things have been lost in translation. Now, those slight and short-term differences in technique have reduced the stability of the overall structure. To make matters worse, those slight structural imperfections have been placed under greater and greater stress as more people come to the party. The troubles don’t stop there. Turns out some recent players don’t want to play by the rules at all. A handful are even plotting to bring the tower down.
What do we, the American people, do?
First, we need to reintroduce the rules of our democracy, review recommended strategies, and make sure that every player has a piece to contribute. In short, we need to revive civics education. With our 250th birthday coming up, there’s no time like the present to remind Americans of our shared aims and agreed upon tactics. This work has already started but needs to gain momentum and fast. One place to start is with the celebration of Civic Season -- an effort to create a new civic tradition. The goal is to use the time between Juneteenth and July 4th each year to educate Americans about our past and inspire them to shape our collective future. This sort of work will make sure every player understands they have the right to join our democratic experiment and, importantly, the obligation to contribute their piece toward shared goals.
Second, we ought to realize that our democracy needs a new support system.. We inherited a structure that wasn’t built for a modern, multicultural democracy grappling with challenges such as geopolitical turmoil and existential risks posed by AI and other emerging technologies. If we follow the same strategies, our tower is bound to topple. If we coordinate to create new institutions, then this endeavor can persist and become far more stable. One place to start is with the development of public-private institutions that allow for information sharing and joint policy creation between innovators and regulators. Gone are the days when the government led in R&D. If we’re going to deal with the threats posed by AI and make the most of its benefits, then collaborative institutions must become a core part of our democracy.
Third, we must stop players from trying to bring down all of our hard work. Our democracy has only lasted this long because of a shared understanding of the rules and, for the most part, enforcement of those rules. So long as certain people--especially those in positions of power--think they are above the law we will teeter on the edge of collapse. One way to bring these players into alignment is to shore up our judiciary, which has struggled to remain neutral in an increasingly partisan environment. The good news is that we’re well aware of ways to reduce such partisanship - we can start by ending the practice of electing judges to state courts.
Our founders are gone. Our political experiment is careening. And, some would like to see us fail. But, we can’t tear our democracy down. We can make sure that everyone has a role in protecting it, restoring it, and advancing it.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.