I wanted to take a moment to set out some thoughts about the outer bounds of constitutional government in the United States, just where and at what point the American Republic might come apart or temporarily unhinged and how, potentially, to navigate such a situation.

For starters, where does the break point come? It seems clear to me that Trump plans to coerce the states into operating under his direct control by cutting off their flows of federal money from the federal government. We have already seen this with private institutions like Columbia University and other institutions in the form of NIH and other grants. Maine is already a focus because of the verbal confrontation between the state’s Gov. Janet Mills (D) and Trump back in late February.

One of Democrats’ pet peeves is that President Biden has not only overseen a robust economy with almost unprecedentedly low levels of unemployment, his policies actually have some decent claim to responsibility for that record. And yet he gets no credit for it. Not only has Biden been mired in low-40s approval for the last two years, his ratings on the economy are some of his weakest.

This is definitely annoying and certainly unfair (what isn’t?). But it shouldn’t seem new or unexpected. If you’ve been following politics closely for a few decades you’ll remember that Presidents Reagan, Clinton and Obama faced a very similar issue. All three presidents had a significant interval when the economy was demonstrably doing well and yet got zero credit for it or even any clear public recognition that the economy was in good shape.