americamagazine.org
The United States’ slow-motion constitutional crisis briefly sped up on April 7, though observers could be forgiven for missing it against the backdrop of the day’s chaos.
As President Donald Trump escalated from his threat against Iran’s civilian infrastructure to an apocalyptic warning that its “whole civilization will die tonight,” many Democratic lawmakers began calling for his impeachment or for the invocation of the 25th Amendment to temporarily suspend a president from office. (Though they did not call for actual consequences, a few Republican legislators did express their disapproval of Mr. Trump’s rhetoric.) The calls for accountability were largely dead on arrival, as impeachment would require a majority of the House and two-thirds of the Senate, and the 25th Amendment procedure begins with a majority of cabinet officials declaring the president “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”
**America** ’s editors have explained why, as a matter of just war teaching and international law, Mr. Trump’s threats against Iran’s civilian population cannot be countenanced. For the time being, the risk of the U.S. military being ordered to commit war crimes has receded, thanks to an 11th-hour cease-fire agreement. Many of Mr. Trump’s partisan enablers are celebrating this outcome as evidence of his brilliance as a strategist and negotiator—which means that any possibility of an official reckoning over his misuse of presidential authority in a war that Congress has still not even been asked to authorize has receded even further.
On social media, a number of commentators pointed out the dark irony of a president who has broken so many democratic and constitutional norms threatening the end of Iranian civilization, remembering the story of the Delphic oracle warning King Croesus that if he attacked Persia, “a great empire would fall,” as indeed Croesus’ did.
I doubt that specific ironic juxtaposition will be borne out, but it is worth thinking about what it means that American democracy has proven unable to restrain a president from waging a thoroughly unpopular and deeply dangerous war of exactly the type that he promised to avoid while campaigning. Further, what does it mean that our political system, given even the barest appearance of “success” in this military venture, will likely be unable to impose any significant constraints on the president until the next election at the earliest?
In early March, I attended a conference at Boston College, organized by Cathleen Kaveny and Gregory Kalscheur, S.J., on the rule of law and the common good. It brought together experts from the fields of both law and Catholic social teaching to consider how legal norms and institutions are related to human flourishing.
One of the themes that emerged from the conference was the need to articulate how we are committed to the rule of law in terms more substantial than mere proceduralism. In a democratic polity, we need to be able to explain, both to ourselves and to one another, how the rule of law and the common good support and require each other. We also need to enrich our imagination of how law functions, coming to see the law not only as restricting or punishing bad acts, but also helping to establish the conditions within which human beings cooperate as members of society in reciprocity and friendship, both within and across national borders.
Sadly, the patterns being established by the Trump administration are degrading rather than uplifting our imagination of how law and politics work. In early January, Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, said, “You can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world…that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.” During weeks in which Republicans in Congress refused to call Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to account under oath for the war in Iran, he repeatedly reveled in the superiority of American military force, while invoking God’s blessing for unrestrained aggression against “fanatics who seek a nuclear capability in order for some religious Armageddon.”
Rather than reminding Americans of the values that unite them and the inalienable rights that government is constituted to preserve, President Trump, in his conduct throughout the Iran war, has been demonstrating what it looks like to live in a world governed by power alone. We can pray, at least, that seeing that vision in action is terrifying enough to help us begin to reject it.
We can also be thankful for the strong witness being given across the Catholic Church by Pope Leo XIV, an increasing number of American bishops and many Catholic thinkers, leaders and laypeople to denounce such reliance on violence and desire for domination as profoundly un-Christian. The task that remains before us, however, is not only to repudiate what is evil but to build up what is good, in cooperation with all people of good will.
This article appears in May 2026.
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