In the quiet halls of American history, where the marble statues of our forebears stand as silent sentinels over the nation they forged, one can almost hear a collective shudder. It is not the wind rattling the panes of the National Archives, nor is it the settling of the foundation of the Lincoln Memorial. It is, perhaps, the metaphysical recoil of the Founding Fathers. If the dead could weep, George Washington would be in tears; if they could rage, Thomas Jefferson would be storming the heavens. And Abraham Lincoln, the man who gave his life to bind a broken union, would likely look upon the current state of the republic with a profound, crushing shame.
We are living through a moment that historians may one day mark as the definitive end of the “American Experiment.” This was not a sudden death, but a slow, agonizing unraveling, culminating in the return and reign of Donald Trump. The experiment—the radical idea that a people could govern themselves through reason, law, and shared virtue—has faced threats before. It survived a civil war; it survived depressions and global conflicts. But it is now succumbing to a threat the Founders feared most: the willful abandonment of democratic values by the people themselves, led by a figure who has turned his back on the very essence of America.
I. The Founders’ Nightmare: Faction and the Demagogue
To understand why the Founders are “spinning in their graves,” one must revisit what they actually feared. They did not fear a king from across the ocean so much as they feared the rot from within. In his Farewell Address, George Washington warned explicitly against the “baneful effects of the spirit of party.” He foresaw a time when “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men” would subvert the power of the people to usurp the reins of government.
Alexander Hamilton and James Madison wrote extensively in The Federalist Papers about the dangers of the demagogue—a leader who rides to power on the back of populist passions, flattering the prejudices of the people to secure absolute authority. They designed a system of checks and balances specifically to cage such a beast. They assumed, however, a baseline of civic virtue. They assumed that the people would fundamentally desire a republic, not a ruler.
Donald Trump represents the total realization of the Founders’ nightmare. He is the demagogue unbound. By prioritizing personal loyalty over the Constitution, and by weaponizing the “spirit of party” to a degree that has paralyzed the legislative branch, he has dismantled the guardrails Madison erected. The Founders envisioned a system where ambition would counteract ambition; they did not foresee a system where one party would voluntarily surrender its ambition to the will of a single man. When the mechanism of checks and balances fails because the check-writers are complicit, the machine breaks. The Founders turn in their graves not because the system failed, but because we chose to break it.
II. Abraham Lincoln and the Loss of “Charity for All”
If the Founders provided the brain of the republic, Abraham Lincoln provided its soul. His Second Inaugural Address is perhaps the greatest secular sermon in American history. “With malice toward none with charity for all,” he implored a bleeding nation to heal. Lincoln understood that for a democracy to survive, the political opponent cannot be the enemy; they must remain a neighbor.
Donald Trump has inverted the Lincolnian ideal. His governing philosophy is “malice for all who oppose me, and charity only for those who bend the knee.” The rhetoric of the modern presidency has shifted from calling upon the “better angels of our nature” to summoning the darkest demons of our tribalism. By referring to political opponents as “vermin” and “the enemy within,” Trump has done something Lincoln refused to do even in the midst of a war that killed 600,000 Americans: he has dehumanized fellow citizens.
Lincoln’s shame would stem from the realization that the Union he saved is being voluntarily fractured. The Civil War was fought to preserve a political map; the current war is being fought to destroy a political culture. Trump’s rejection of the peaceful transfer of power in the past and his promise of retribution in the present stand in direct opposition to everything Lincoln died for. Lincoln believed that the ballot box was the “rightful and peaceful successor of bullets.” Trump has blurred that line, suggesting that if the ballot box does not yield the desired result, the system is rigged and extra-legal measures are justified. In doing so, he has turned his back on the central tenet of the American faith: that we accept defeat to preserve the system.
III. The Erosion of Truth and the Epistemological Crisis
A republic relies on a shared reality. We may disagree on how to solve problems, but we must agree that the problems exist and that facts are verifiable. The American Experiment was born of the Enlightenment—a belief in reason, science, and objective truth. Thomas Jefferson famously stated that “where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.”
Donald Trump has presided over the destruction of this shared reality. By labeling any unfavorable news as “fake,” by challenging the validity of objective metrics (from crowd sizes to election results), and by flooding the zone with so much noise that truth becomes indistinguishable from fiction, he has severed the country’s anchor to the Enlightenment.
This is not merely “lying” in the conventional political sense. All politicians spin; Trump annihilates the very concept of objective verification. When a leader successfully convinces half the country that the institutions of truth—courts, intelligence agencies, scientific bodies, the free press—are all part of a “deep state” conspiracy against them, the experiment is effectively over. You cannot have a government by the people if the people are operating in two distinct, incompatible realities. The Founders believed that “facts are stubborn things.” Trump has proven that facts are malleable, provided you have a loud enough microphone and a willing audience. This betrayal of truth is a betrayal of the very premise of self-governance.
IV. The Abandonment of the “City on a Hill”
For centuries, America has viewed itself as the “City on a Hill”—a beacon of democracy for the world. While we have often failed to live up to that ideal, the aspiration mattered. It guided our foreign policy, inspired dissidents in authoritarian regimes, and gave Americans a sense of higher purpose.
Trump has explicitly turned his back on this role. His “America First” doctrine is not a return to traditional isolationism; it is a transactional amorality. By cozying up to dictators and disparaging democratic allies, he has signaled that the United States no longer cares about human rights, the rule of law, or the spread of liberty. We are no longer a beacon; we are just another great power looking out for its own interests, willing to trade values for favorable trade deals or personal flattery.
This is a tragedy for the world, but a catastrophe for the American soul. The “American Experiment” was never just about us; it was about proving to humanity that freedom was possible. By abandoning that mission, Trump has stripped the nation of its moral exceptionalism. We are now just another country, indistinguishable from the empires of old that the Founders sought to escape.
V. Why the Experiment is “Over”
Critics might argue that this is alarmist. They might say that America has survived worse, that the pendulum will swing back. But this view ignores the fundamental shift that has occurred. The American Experiment was a test: Can a diverse people sustain a democracy over centuries?
A test has a conclusion. You can pass, or you can fail.
The experiment is arguably over because the electorate, fully aware of who Donald Trump is—aware of his rhetoric, his legal challenges, his disdain for norms, and his rejection of the 2020 results—chose to return him to power. In 2016, one could argue the country took a gamble on an outsider. In 2024, the country affirmed that it no longer values the democratic norms that constrained it.
When a populace knowingly votes to erode its own checks and balances, the experiment in liberal democracy has ended, and something else has begun. We have transitioned into an era of “illiberal democracy,” similar to Hungary or Turkey, where elections happen, but the machinery of the state is captured to ensure a permanent advantage for the ruling faction.
The Founders designed a system for a virtuous people. Lincoln preserved a system for a united people. We have become neither. The spinning in the graves is the sound of their realization that the safety mechanisms they built were designed to stop a tyrant from seizing power, but they were not designed to stop a people from handing it to him.
VI. The Path Forward in the Ruins
If the experiment is over, what comes next? We are entering a period of “post-American” history within America itself. The structures may remain—Congress will meet, the Supreme Court will issue rulings—but the spirit that animated them is gone. The spirit of compromise, of shared destiny, of reverence for the rule of law above the rule of men, has evaporated.
We are left with a hollowed-out republic, a shell of the vision of 1776. The task now for those who still believe in the ideals of Washington and Lincoln is not to pretend the experiment is still running, but to figure out how to survive the wreckage. We must become the keepers of the flame in a dark age, preserving the memory of what America was meant to be, so that perhaps, generations from now, a new experiment can begin.
Donald Trump has turned his back on America, not by conquering it, but by seducing it into abandoning itself. The tragedy is not that he succeeded, but that we let him. And somewhere, in the great beyond, Abraham Lincoln buries his face in his hands, weeping for the government of the people, by the people, and for the people, which has, at long last, perished from the earth.
Analysis: The Three Pillars of the Collapse
To further understand this transition, we can categorize the collapse of the experiment into three distinct failures of the American body politic:
| Pillar of Democracy | The Founder’s Vision | The Trumpian Reality |
| Civic Virtue | Citizens must prioritize the public good over private interests and factional loyalty. | Tribal loyalty is paramount; the “other side” is an existential threat that must be destroyed, not debated. |
| Institutional Trust | Courts, press, and agencies serve as neutral arbiters of truth and justice. | Institutions are viewed as weaponized tools of the “Deep State”; truth is subjective and defined by leadership. |
| Transfer of Power | The sacred ritual that legitimizes the consent of the governed. | Power is a possession to be seized and held; electoral defeat is treated as illegitimate theft. |
The Final Word
The “Merged Insight” here is uncomfortable but necessary: Nostalgia is not a strategy. We cannot simply wish for a return to the norms of the 20th century. That world is gone. The American Experiment required a consensus on reality and a baseline of civility that no longer exists.
Donald Trump is not the cause of this death, but the symptom of a terminal condition that the Founders feared would eventually develop. He is the mirror in which America finally saw its own reflection—angry, divided, and willing to trade liberty for the illusion of strength. The experiment is over because we have stopped testing whether we can live together and started testing how we can rule over one another.
Abraham Lincoln would indeed be ashamed. Not just of the man in the White House, but of us.
