Juan M. Blanco
In Europe, Trumpism is often assessed through a very simple moral lens —good or bad— with little sustained effort to analyse its meaning, causes and consequences. Donald Trump is frequently portrayed by his critics as the product of populism and democratic disaffection, and is seen as aimed at dismantling the political and constitutional architecture of the United States. Yet Trump did not arrive in a healthy system. Rather, he entered through the cracks of a moral and constitutional framework that had been eroding for decades and had gradually lost its historically distinctive capacity to integrate conflict. To understand this process, it is necessary to step outside familiar European categories and enter a logic that is deeply American in origin—one that is as political as it is biblical.
From its beginnings, the United States did not conceive of itself as merely another nation among many. It tended to understand itself as a singular political community, invested with a historical mission. This sense of exceptionalism did not arise solely from Enlightenment rationalism or classical republicanism, but from an older and deeper cultural matrix: Puritan theology and its distinctive interpretation of the Old Testament. The early Puritan settlers of New England did not see themselves simply as European colonists. They imagined themselves as a chosen people, a new Israel, bound by a covenant and entrusted with a moral purpose. John Winthrop’s famous image of a “city upon a hill” captured this idea precisely: a community exposed to the gaze of the world, held to a higher moral standard, whose success or failure would carry universal significance.
Yet this framework produced a particular tension. A society composed of ordinary, fallible human beings could not permanently sustain such an elevated moral demand. Under normal circumstances, this contradiction might have led to disillusionment or collapse. Instead, American political culture developed a distinctive mechanism to reconcile moral failure with national purpose: the jeremiad. In The American Jeremiad, Sacvan Bercovitch described this mechanism as a recurring cultural and rhetorical pattern. The American jeremiad draws directly from the prophetic tradition of the Old Testament: it denounces moral decline, accuses the community of betraying its founding ideals, and calls for collective repentance and renewal.
Crucially, the jeremiad does not portray moral failure as evidence that the project itself is flawed. On the contrary, it frames failure as a deviation from an otherwise valid promise. As a result, the founding myth is not challenged; it is reaffirmed. Moral crisis becomes the catalyst for regeneration. The biblical model is explicit. Israel betrays the covenant through idolatry; Moses responds with righteous anger; punishment follows—but the covenant itself remains intact. The period of wandering in the desert is not annihilation, but moral education. Transgression confirms the covenant rather than undermining it.
This logic had far-reaching consequences. Over time, American political culture learned to transform guilt into legitimacy. As Bercovitch argued, the jeremiad functioned as a powerful mechanism of symbolic reinforcement. If America acted justly, it demonstrated its virtue; if it acted unjustly, it revealed an even greater virtue by condemning itself. In this way, national greatness could be reaffirmed not only through achievement, but through self-criticism and lamentation. Unlike in many other political cultures, moral denunciation did not undermine legitimacy; it sustained it. Radical dissent was not excluded from the system but absorbed and Americanized.
Historically, this dynamic was often associated with moments of intense moral and spiritual mobilization. Guilt tended to activate rather than paralyze, frequently accompanying—or contributing to—periods of collective awakening, reform and renewal. For centuries, this mechanism allowed the United States to integrate deep internal conflicts without fracturing the national project.
Over time, this originally theological structure was secularized. Religious language receded, but the underlying grammar remained. Sin became injustice. The covenant shifted from God to the Constitution. Redemption became political and, increasingly, legal. During the twentieth century, American jeremiads increasingly sought closure not only through moral reform but through law and judicial rulings. This transformation reached a decisive moment in the 1960s, particularly with the Warren Court, when the Supreme Court began to function not merely as an arbiter of constitutional limits, but as a moral agent tasked with correcting historical injustice. Eventually, the Puritan preachers had gradually handed over the moral baton to the judges.
For several decades, this arrangement appeared to work. The injustices being addressed—especially racial discrimination—were real and morally urgent. Judicial intervention enjoyed wide legitimacy, and the prevailing narrative emphasized continuity: foundational principles were not being abandoned, but finally fulfilled. Yet this success carried an unintended structural cost: it generated, through a cumulative dynamic, a growing body of law that gradually moved away from the principles that inspired the original Constitution.
As Charles R. Kessler and others have argued, the United States gradually came to operate under two distinct constitutional logics. The first is the written Constitution of 1787, grounded in classical liberalism in the Madisonian tradition: limited government, separation of powers, and deep suspicion of concentrated authority. The second, unwritten constitution, emerged incrementally through decades of moralized jurisprudence and the growing role of executive agencies. Instead of limiting power, it is oriented toward deploying it in the service of substantive justice. This second constitution did not arise solely from the jeremiadic tradition; rather, that tradition provided moral legitimacy and cultural coherence to broader processes of judicialization and administrative expansion. For a long time, these two logics coexisted under the assumption that they were compatible. But each new moral resolution achieved through legal or administrative expansion pushed constitutional practice further away from its original framework. What had once been a tension gradually became a contradiction.
The most recent jeremiad—often labeled “wokeness”—arrived when this accumulated distance had become too great to absorb. In the American context, this movement is rooted above all in the moral legacy of race, particularly the history of slavery and segregation. Other identity-based claims largely extend a moral framework originally shaped by the Black experience. The jeremiadic structure remains unmistakably familiar: denunciation of sin, identification of guilt, and demands for repentance.
Yet what distinguishes this jeremiad is not its intensity, but its outcome: it ultimately becomes self-defeating. In its most radical forms, guilt is no longer framed as a deviation from the promise, but as evidence that the promise itself was fraudulent. By tearing down statues of figures such as Thomas Jefferson, the movement does not merely condemn historical injustice; it calls into question the legitimacy of the founding narrative itself. Moreover, when guilt is framed as an inherited condition—such as being white—or as a structural and identity-based trait, such as being male or heterosexual, redemption becomes elusive. There is no clear endpoint, no shared absolution: the loop cannot find any closure. As a result, the jeremiad loses its integrative function and becomes divisive, creating the cracks through which an unusual figure in American politics would eventually enter: Donald Trump. While his detractors believe he has come to break the rules, his supporters are convinced that those rules were already broken.
Trump does not emerge to bring the jeremiad to closure, but to negate it. He mocks guilt, rejects expiation, and offers no promise of moral renewal. He does not seek reconciliation, but confrontation. His politics is not corrective but combative, oriented toward victory rather than resolution. Although he openly rejects the moral logic of the second constitution and gestures vaguely toward a return to American greatness, he shows little commitment to restoring the first constitution either. Not only is his personal style ill-suited to constitutional restraints, but his populist worldview assumes that Madisonian constitutionalism has already been hollowed out by moralized institutions and politicized law. The crisis is so deep because neither side any longer believes in shared rules.
The final hypothesis is unsettling. The United States may be entering a post-jeremiadic phase—one in which guilt no longer integrates because there is no longer agreement on the ideal, the sin, or the possibility of redemption. Each side now possesses its own moral narrative, and neither appears willing to return to the principles of classical liberalism in the Madisonian tradition that shaped the written Constitution, nor to restore a shared moral consensus or the informal norms of fair play. Trump is not the cause of this crisis, nor is he its solution. He is one of its most visible manifestations, emerging when the cultural mechanism that for centuries sustained American national cohesion suddenly ceases to work.