This is Why Dictatorships Fail

Anne Applebaum, for The Atlantic:

This is what arbitrary, absolute power looks like. And this is why the men who wrote the Constitution never wanted anyone to have it. In that famously hot, stuffy room in Philadelphia, windows closed for the sake of secrecy, they sweated and argued about how to limit the powers of the American executive. They arrived at the idea of dividing power between different branches of government. As James Madison wrote in “Federalist No. 47”: “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary in the same hands … may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

More than two centuries later, the system created by that first Constitutional Congress has comprehensively failed. The people and institutions that are supposed to check executive power are refusing to restrain this president. We now have a de facto tyrant who thinks he can bend reality to his will without taking any facts or any evidence into consideration, and without listening to any contrary views. And although the economic damage he has caused is easier to measure, he has inflicted the same level of harm to scientific research, to civil liberties, to health care, and to the civil service.

The representatives from those first Constitutional Congress sessions must be rolling in their graves right now.