On July 4th, we can say one thing for sure about the Founding Fathers: they would have fucking hated Donald Trump. Trump may have revived the 18th century practice of capitalizing letters seemingly at random (the Declaration of Independence says “He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country,” while Trump posts things like “Iowa voted for me THREE TIMES, because they love my Policies for our Wonderful Farmers and Small Businesses”). But the founders were thoughtful about executive power. They detested monarchy. They had long philosophical debates over exactly how the government should keep from turning into a tyranny. Trump, meanwhile, flagrantly violates the Constitution in both domestic and foreign affairs. 

Of course, we should approach the founding generation with deep skepticism. For one thing, we know that most of them were morally blind on the most important issue of their day, slavery. Thomas Jefferson kept people enslaved while knowing full well that it was wrong, and ignored the pleas of ex-slave Benjamin Banneker, who wrote to him personally to beg him to live up to the principles of the Declaration of Independence. The majority of Americans (women, Black people, Native Americans) were excluded from participating in democracy at the founding of the country, which undermines the legitimacy of the entire Constitution.

Nevertheless, it’s striking just how far the current president’s view of executive power departs from the original vision of the framers, the men that the American right ostensibly worships and whose “original” vision they say they want to emulate. Take borders, for instance. Trump recently proudly presided over the opening of a brutal new swamp prison for immigrants. Trump was amused at the prospect that if they tried to escape, the immigrants would be attacked and possibly eaten by alligators. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt boasted that “Alligator Alcatraz” was “isolated and surrounded by dangerous wildlife and unforgiving terrain.” Thousands of people will be housed in tents there even in the punishing Florida heat, part of Trump’s effort to fulfill his plan to kick millions of people out of the country who have done nothing except work difficult jobs in construction and agriculture.

It is worth remembering how alien this kind of rigid, violent state regulation of the country’s population would have been to its founders. Until the 20th century, this country had no immigration enforcement. The U.S. Border Patrol wasn’t introduced until 1924. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) dates from 2003, and was part of George W. Bush’s paranoid security crackdown after 9/11. It’s a popular talking point on the right that “unless you have border enforcement, you don’t have a country.” Well, it would have been news to the Founding Fathers that they did not, in fact, have a country.

Back then, you could just wander in. Under the Naturalization Act of 1790, which defined the procedures for becoming naturalized, you could become a citizen of the United States just by showing up and living here for two years (assuming you were also “free,” “white,” and “of good character”). The residency requirement was increased a few years later to five years. Then, in 1798, it was increased to 14 years, before being reduced back to five a few years later. In the early 1800s, when you arrived in the country, a clerk of court simply collected information including your “name, birthplace, age, nation of allegiance, country of emigration, and place of intended settlement, and granted each applicant a certificate that could be exhibited to the court as evidence of time of arrival in the United States.” Then once you had been here long enough, you could become a citizen. 

The racist exclusions were repugnant, of course, but this was essentially a system of open borders. Citizenship was granted on the basis of whether you had been here for long enough. It did not occur to the Founding Fathers to demand people’s removal if they hadn’t entered via some particular procedure. If you didn’t have your entrance recorded, you wouldn’t be able to prove residency for the purpose of becoming a citizen, and if you didn’t have “good character,” you wouldn’t be allowed to vote. But the idea that a huge group of people would be “illegal” simply didn’t occur to them.

Another of the ways in which the modern right-wing movement most sharply diverges from the Founders’ original principles is its expansive use of state police and military power. The founding generation was not just skeptical of kings, but of armies. (There were no modern police departments, so they could not have had opinions on police.) James Madison famously said during Virginia’s Ratification Convention that “a standing army is one of the greatest mischiefs that can possibly happen” and promised that the U.S. Constitution “provides against this evil more than any other system known to us.” Responding to George Mason’s worry that “once a standing army is established in any country, the people lose their liberty,” Madison (rather naively, in retrospect) promised that the new Constitution would ensure that standing armies were unnecessary: 

The most effectual way to render it unnecessary, is to give the general government full power to call forth the militia, and exert the whole natural strength of the Union, when necessary. Thus you will furnish the people with sure and certain protection, without recurring to this evil… Can we believe that a government of a federal nature, consisting of many coëqual sovereignties, and particularly having one branch chosen from the people, would drag the militia unnecessarily to an immense distance? This, sir, would be unworthy the most arbitrary despot. They have no temptation whatever to abuse this power; such abuse could only answer the purpose of exciting the universal indignation of the people, and drawing on themselves the general hatred and detestation of their country.

As we know, he was right: no U.S. president ever dragged the armed forces “an immense distance,” because this would have “excited the universal indignation” of the people! Smart guys, those Founding Fathers. 

The debate over the Constitution was not a debate over whether the federal government should have strong coercive powers over the people. Both Federalists and anti-Federalists agreed that it shouldn’t. The debate was over whether the Constitution, as written, sufficiently guaranteed that that state power wouldn’t get out of hand. The Americans had just waged a successful revolution against an abusive king, and they didn’t want another one. Founding Father Patrick Henry, explaining why he opposed the Constitution, warned that it didn’t sufficiently constrain presidential powers. 

This Constitution is said to have beautiful features; but when I come to examine these features, sir, they appear to me horribly frightful… Your president may easily become king… If your American chief be a man of ambition and abilities, how easy is it for him to render himself absolute!... Where is the existing force to punish [the President]? Can he not at the head of his army beat down every opposition? Away with your President, we shall have a King: The army will salute him Monarch; your militia will leave you and assist in making him King, and fight against you: And what have you to oppose this force? What will then become of you and your rights? Will not absolute despotism ensue?

This was not an unreasonable worry. Ten years later, President John Adams would assume, through the Alien and Sedition Acts, an extraordinary amount of power to personally decide which foreigners he wanted to deport for national security reasons, and which speech was a threat punishable by prison. The “open borders” rule remained in place, but with a new prerogative for the president to hand-select the foreigners and citizens he personally disliked, then punish them. Dozens of Adams’ political opponents were soon prosecuted under the Sedition Act. 

Thomas Jefferson was so horrified by the Sedition Act that he secretly authored a Kentucky state legislative resolution declaring the law unconstitutional and therefore invalid. (His authorship was secret because he was vice president himself at the time, and could have been charged with sedition.) Jefferson lamented that the Constitution had been “so interpreted and administered, as to be truly what the French have called a monarchie masquée” (masked monarchy).

James Madison was equally horrified by the abuse of power, and authored a similar resolution for Virginia. Madison warned that “the unconstitutional power exercised over the press by the ‘sedition act,’ ought ‘more than any other, to produce universal alarm” because it threatened Americans’ right to criticize their government—which he deemed “the only effectual guardian of every other right.” Madison was also deeply skeptical of the president’s power to punish alien residents or abrogate their rights, reminding us that “If aliens had no rights under the constitution, they might not only be banished, but even capitally punished, without a jury or the other incidents to a fair trial.” Madison, who had cautioned in the Federalist papers that “the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands… may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny,” responded to the law’s provision “that it shall be lawful for the president to order all such aliens as he shall judge dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States.” Madison wrote: 

Could a power be well given in terms less definite, less particular, and less precise? To be dangerous to the public safety; to be suspected of secret machinations against the government: these can never be mistaken for legal rules or certain definitions. They leave every thing to the President. His will is the law… it is not a legislative power only that is given to the President. He is to stand in the place of the judiciary also. His suspicion is the only evidence which is to convict: his order the only judgment which is to be executed… this union of powers subverts the general principles of free government.

Trump, of course, loves the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 and the provision of extraordinary executive power that Madison said threatened the basic principle of a free government. Lately he has been threatening to strip the citizenship of his political enemies. 

Here we can see that it’s impossible to really say what “the Founding Fathers” thought of anything, because they were in major disagreement on some of the most important questions. John Adams believed in the Alien and Sedition Acts, while Jefferson and Madison loathed them. That’s all the more reason why we should avoid engaging in “founder worship.” American political discourse often ends up affording the same status to the founders that Christianity gives to the words of Jesus or Marxism to the words of Karl Marx, the idea being that if you can find a quote from one of the holy figures supporting some position, that position is thereby correct. 

July 4 is a good day to remember that, despite the existence of Mount Rushmore (to which Trump himself would love to be added), the Founding Fathers were flawed and contradictory men, and that we should take what wisdom we can from them and leave their failings behind. They had sensible warnings about executive power, and I think it’s safe to say that as Enlightenment thinkers concerned about tyranny and in favor of roughly open borders, Donald Trump would have been horrifying to them. Some are more admirable than others. Jefferson was a world-class hypocrite who disgraced himself by sexually abusing an enslaved woman while writing paeans to liberty. Thomas Paine, on the other hand, was not only a principled opponent of monarchy but a champion of reason, human rights, and even a rudimentary form of the social democratic welfare state. (Paine’s radicalism contributed to him dying impoverished and alone.) We have to make our own judgments, based on an evolving understanding of morality and justice, rather than assuming that because the great dead white men believed something, it necessarily made any sense. Sometimes it did, and sometimes it didn’t, but whether something is true, it is true irrespective of what Madison, Adams, Jefferson, Paine, Washington, Franklin, Henry, and the others happened to think.