By Mathias Risse, Harvard University
The views expressed below are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy or Harvard Kennedy School. These perspectives have been presented to encourage debate on important public policy challenges.
Reflections on the Occasion of Presidents' Day in the Year of America’s 250th Anniversary
On this Presidents' Day in 2026, George Washington's Farewell Address reads less like a relic from 1796 and more like a warning we failed to heed. With Donald Trump back in the White House after attempting to overturn his 2020 defeat, and the country still reeling from years of election denial, institutional sabotage, and political violence, Washington's principles offer both a diagnostic tool and an indictment.
This commentary takes Washington's stated principles seriously—not because Washington himself was morally pure (he was an enslaver who built his fortune on the labor of human beings he claimed as property, and on many occasions unleashed violence against Indigenous people who stood in the way of American expansion), but because the ideas he articulated about power, union, law, republican virtue and thereby about the presidency remain essential to self-government. Washington articulated principles about power that he himself violated in the most fundamental way—by holding human beings as property or seeing them merely as obstacles to expansion. But ideas, once released into the world, can be held to account even when their authors cannot be. The test is whether those principles, stripped of their author's authority, still describe the kind of republic we want to live in.
We should not put anyone on a pedestal anyway, but in this year of America’s 250th anniversary it makes sense to revisit Washington’s famous Address regardless of his personal flaws.
The question before us is stark: if we measure Trump’s presidency against those principles, what do we find? And if the answer is damning, as indeed it is, what do we do about it?
I am finishing up this commentary sitting on a bench in the Old Town of Albuquerque, New Mexico, facing the San Felipe de Neri church. Though not central for the projection of Spain’s military might in the Southwest, Albuquerque was part of a colonial system designed to extract wealth from Indigenous lands and labor, including from the Pueblo people whom I am here to visit. Thus this bench is not a bad place to think about legitimate exercise of power. Much harm has been done in North America driven by oppression and cruelty—reason enough to always be on high alert in this domain.
1. Power as a Temporary Trust
The Farewell Address opens with something simple but also quite revolutionary: Washington is leaving. He announces he will not stand for a third term. Holding the presidency, he writes, has been "a uniform sacrifice of inclination to the opinion of duty." Whatever value his service had was "temporary." Patriotism does not forbid his retirement—it requires it.
This is not modesty for its own sake. Washington is teaching the republic three things:
- Power is a trust, not a possession. One holds the presidency on behalf of the people; it is not an extension of one’s ego or identity.
- Retirement is a virtue. Stepping down is not defeat; it is an act of republican citizenship.
- Gratitude, not grievance, is the proper tone. Leaders owe the nation; the nation does not owe leaders.
Now consider Trump's departure from his first term. After losing the 2020 election by over seven million votes, Trump refused to concede and has since engulfed the nation in a high-stakes drama around this alleged election theft. He has promoted conspiracy theories of fraud that were rejected by court after court, including judges he himself appointed. He pressured state officials to "find" votes and urged the vice president to throw out certified electoral results.
When all of that failed, he summoned a mob to Washington on January 6, 2021, and directed them to the Capitol, where Congress was performing its constitutional duty. The result: a violent assault that delayed the transfer of power and left multiple people dead.
Where Washington said, "The people gave me this office; now I give it back," Trump said the opposite: leaving office is intolerable; defeat must be theft; the constitutional process is valid only if I win.
Trump has never stopped saying this. Even from the second-term presidency, he insists the 2020 election was "rigged" and that those who certified it should be prosecuted. He has helped install officials at DOJ and in election administration who were selected in part for their willingness to repeat this lie.
Washington's precedent—the peaceful transfer of power—was not just a "norm." It was the founding president's most important gift to the republic. Trump has spent a decade trying to take it back. His refusal to do those things—and his continuing claim, even from his second-term bully pulpit, that the 2020 election was “rigged” and that those who certified it should be punished—directly repudiates Washington’s model.
In previous commentary and other work I have tried to make sense of the trajectory this country has been on under Trump’s leadership developing notions of gaslighting, vindictive tolerance, and the intimidating state. Vice President JD Vance, a man not yet 41, has already positioned himself to be the standard bearer of this understanding of politics for decades to come.
We are learning how fragile Washington's gift really was.
2. "The Unity of Government Which Constitutes You One People"
Washington's most urgent theme is union. "The unity of government which constitutes you one people," he writes, "is…a main pillar in the edifice of your real independence, the support of your tranquility at home, your peace abroad, of your safety, of your prosperity, of that very liberty which you so highly prize."
He warns that "designing men" will try to convince Americans that their interests are irreconcilable, stoking division along regional, sectional, or factional lines. He frames such efforts as the work of "internal and external enemies" who seek to "enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together the various parts."
Washington was no naïve optimist. He knew interests differ. He knew factions would arise. But he insisted that Americans see their shared institutions as a common home, not a battlefield where one faction must achieve permanent dominance. And here once more, before progressing, we must recall the inconsistencies in Washington’s thinking. He did speak of unity, but it was a unity under which larger numbers of Black people were held in bondage. And it was a unity built on the aftermath of conquest of a continent occupied by Indigenous nations—which also threw the Pueblos around Albuquerque into a centuries-long struggle for sheer survival.
Trump's political strategy has been the opposite. From the birther conspiracy that launched his political career, to his relentless rhetoric dividing "real Americans" from coastal elites, to his suggestion that Democratic-led cities and states are inherently corrupt, Trump has thrived on fracture. His language routinely casts his supporters as the only legitimate Americans and his opponents as enemies of the nation—not people with different views within the system, but threats to the system.
Trump has explicitly used the machinery of the federal government to target jurisdictions and organizations associated with the opposing party, including for instance pushes to investigate the Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue and other liberal groups, described by observers as a break with basic post‑Watergate norms of Justice Department independence. Very recently the FBI was directed to raid a Georgia election hub in order to find “evidence” of Trump’s debunked claims. These moves are shattering the post-Watergate norm that prosecutorial power must be—and must appear to be—insulated from partisan retaliation.
Washington warned that "cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men" rise by exploiting grievance and turning citizens against one another. He wanted Americans to resist that, to "indignantly frown upon the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest."
We have failed to do that. Repeatedly. Across party lines, across media ecosystems, and most of all at the top.
3. The "Baneful Effects of the Spirit of Party"
No part of the Farewell Address feels more prophetic than Washington's warning about parties. The "spirit of party," he writes, is "truly their [popular governments'] worst enemy." It "kindles the animosity of one part against another" and "foments occasionally riot and insurrection."
And then comes the key passage:
"The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge…is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism…[when] the chief of some prevailing faction…turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation on the ruins of public liberty."
Washington feared a leader who rises by declaring that only his faction represents "the people," then uses that claim to justify breaking constitutional norms and persecuting opponents.
It is difficult to read that and not think of Trump. His political identity rests on the claim that he—and only he—represents a silenced, "real" America. His rhetoric about opponents is not simply critical; it is delegitimizing. They are "traitors," "enemies of the people," members of a "Deep State" conspiracy. The logic is clear: if these people and institutions were never legitimate, then neutralizing, prosecuting, or purging them is not an assault on democracy—it is its defense.
In Trump's second term, this has become concrete. He has pressured DOJ to create what critics call "weaponization" units targeting political adversaries. He has screened candidates for law enforcement roles with litmus-test questions about the 2020 election and January 6. And he has framed any resistance—from courts, from the press, from state officials—as evidence of the conspiracy he claims to be fighting.
This is exactly what Washington envisioned when he warned that party "engines," if controlled by ambitious men, would be used to "subvert the power of the people" and "usurp for themselves the reins of government."
Polarization long predates Trump. Both parties bear responsibility for the erosion of comity and trust. But Trump has not merely participated in the spirit of party. He has weaponized it. The party is no longer a vehicle for ideas within a constitutional system; it has become a tool for personal power above and against that system.
Washington warned us: this is how republics die.
4. Respect for Law and Constitutional Order
Washington insists that the Constitution is "sacredly obligatory upon all" until the people, "by an explicit and authentic act of the whole people," choose to change it. He warns against "all combinations and associations…with the real design to direct, control, counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities."
Such combinations, he argues, substitute faction for nation and lead to despotism.
The attempt to overturn the 2020 election—culminating in January 6—was exactly this. Trump and his allies pushed fake-elector schemes, pressured state officials to alter certified results, and urged Vice President Pence to throw out valid electoral votes. When that failed, Trump summoned supporters to Washington, told them their country was being stolen, and directed them to the Capitol.
The result was an attack that temporarily stopped Congress from carrying out its constitutional duty. Federal prosecutors documented Trump's repeated use of "knowingly false claims of election fraud" to pressure officials into subverting lawful processes.
This is a textbook case of Washington's warning: a combination aiming to "awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities," fueled by lies and mob pressure.
The damage did not end with January 6. In his second term, Trump has pursued executive orders designed to give the presidency leverage over future elections—tightened voter registration rules, interventions in vote-counting procedures, and threats against election officials. He has called for the nationalization of elections, abandoning the federalist principles his own party once held sacred.
The message is clear: elections that produce the "wrong" result are suspect; officials who certify them are criminals; federal power should be mobilized to punish them.
Washington also warned against "change by usurpation"—changes made outside the constitutional process. Trump has justified legally dubious maneuvers as necessary to fight a "Deep State." But Washington's point stands: once you normalize bypassing the Constitution in the name of some emergency, you create "customary weapons" for the destruction of free government.
One of Trump's gravest failures is not any single policy. It is the lesson he teaches daily: that law and constitutional structure are obstacles for the weak, not guardrails for everyone.
In that spirit, let me also mention here that the extent to which Trump has enlisted the presidency for personal enrichment has recently been estimated at 4 billion. It is happening right in front of everyone.
5. Foreign Influence and Passionate Attachments
Washington devotes significant space to foreign policy, warning that "permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations and passionate attachments for others" will make the United States a "slave" to emotion rather than interest. Such passions, he writes, open "avenues to foreign influence" and allow foreign powers to "tamper with domestic factions, to practice the arts of seduction, to mislead public opinion."
The details of Trump’s foreign policy—its mix of aggressive sanctions, tariff wars, abrupt withdrawals, and warm words for certain autocrats—go well beyond the scope of this essay. (But see some of my earlier commentaries, here and here and here.) What I would like to emphasize here is that Trump's approach to foreign policy has been defined not by consistent principle but by personal affinity and domestic grievance. He has repeatedly praised and defended strongman leaders abroad, while deriding traditional democratic allies and multilateral institutions.
Washington's fear was that a president might undermine confidence in American institutions—intelligence agencies, courts, the press—while elevating foreign narratives that flatter his political needs. That is precisely what Trump has done.
And his recent rhetoric around Greenland—publicly musing about acquiring it, implicitly threatening Danish sovereignty, and thus NATO itself—has done lasting damage to America's credibility as a reliable partner. Washington did not foresee social media or hybrid information warfare, but he understood the structural danger: when "real patriots" are cast as suspects and foreign "tools and dupes usurp the applause of the people," the republic is already compromised.
6. Religion, Morality, and the Corrosion of Truth
Washington writes that "religion and morality are indispensable supports" of political prosperity. In a pluralistic society, we read this as a call for public virtue: honesty, restraint, fidelity to truth, a sense of duty to the whole.
Washington worried about "pretended patriotism"—people who wrap themselves in the flag while undermining the republic's foundations.
The Trump era has been a sustained assault on truth. Fact-checkers documented thousands of false or misleading claims during his first term. His 2024 campaign and second-term governance rest on the foundational lie that the 2020 election was stolen. Election denial is now a loyalty test within his party. Officials are selected based on their willingness to repeat it.
Washington hoped for a republic where "institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge" would enlighten public opinion. Trump has made expertise, scholarship, journalism, and even basic election administration into targets, routinely framed as partisan conspiracies.
When everything becomes tribal belief and the president casts any constraint on his power as corrupt, morality is no longer a foundation of government. It is a casualty.
7. The Burdens We Lay on the Future
Washington urges Americans to pay down debts and avoid "ungenerously throwing upon posterity the burthen which we ourselves ought to bear."
Trump's first-term tax cuts exploded deficits with no plan to address long-term obligations. In his second term the focus of concern has shifted toward fiscal and regulatory power being weaponized to reward allies and punish enemies—federal contracts steered, investigations launched for political ends, trust systematically eroded.
And just this week, the Trump administration has removed the government’s power to fight climate change—ensuring that future generations, here and worldwide, will bear environmental burdens we refused to address. As of 2026, the United States is no longer guided by the scientific result that carbon emissions and associated greenhouse gases significantly harm human health.
Washington's point was ethical, not merely fiscal: what feels painless now will be paid for later, in money and in trust. Trump's presidency has been a decade-long act of spending down both. The U.S. under Trump is basically waging a war against the future.
8. What Washington’s Ideas Demand of Us Now
Washington closes his Address with humility. He admits mistakes, asks for indulgence, and expresses hope that his warnings might "now and then recur to moderate the fury of party spirit, to warn against the mischiefs of foreign intrigue, to guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism."
On Presidents' Day 2026, after watching a president incite an attack on Congress, return to power, and use that power to tilt future elections and punish critics, Washington's words are not ceremonial. They are an indictment—of Trump, of the institutions that enabled him, and of citizens like us who allowed it.
The indictment includes:
- Refusal to accept electoral defeat and attempts to subvert lawful succession.
- Deliberate intensification of factional hatred into permanent emergency.
- Weaponization of federal power against political opponents.
- Systematic erosion of truth as a public standard.
- Undermining of U.S. credibility abroad in service of short-term gain.
- Treatment of future generations' inheritance—financial, institutional, environmental—as expendable.
The question is not 'Was Washington perfect?' He was not. We have long known that. The question is: Do we still believe in the kind of republic Washington articulated?
A republic where power is a trust, not a possession. Where opponents are adversaries within the system, not enemies to be destroyed. Where laws bind everyone, including presidents. Where truth and morality are foundations, not obstacles. Where we owe something to those who come after us.
If the answer is yes, then Washington's Farewell Address obliges us to say plainly: by these standards, the Trump presidency has failed. And this is a painful statement to make in the year of America's 250th anniversary.
These failures do not belong to Trump alone. They implicate parties, media, and all of us who enabled or tolerated them. But Trump has accelerated and personalized them in ways that make his presidency a stress test of Washington's entire vision. His second term has sparked a mass resistance movement calling itself No Kings—a name that speaks for itself.
Presidents' Day often is sentimental—portraits, sales, platitudes. This year, let it be something harder: a day to read Washington's Farewell Address not as nostalgia, but as a summons. To name what has been broken. To defend what remains. To insist that no president, however popular with a faction, is above the laws and above the norms that keep a free people free.
Again, I am completing this commentary in Old Town Albuquerque, on land taken from the Pueblo people and held by force. The Pueblos did not remain free; they suffered from oppressive and cruel exercises of power. That history is a reminder of what happens when power is treated as possession rather than trust, when might makes right, and when legal and moral limits are discarded. Washington warned that republics face the same danger—not from external conquest, but from leaders who place themselves above law and accountability. His principles, flawed as their author was, remain our best defense. But only if we defend them.
OpenAI-generated image.
