America's founders feared a president like Donald Trump. Through the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, they erected a fortified but constrained government to secure the benchmarks of our democracy and established the guardrails designed to protect it. But Trump pushed almost every one of the Framers' safeguards to its limit-most held, but some broke under the weight of presidential abuses even the Framers did not foresee. Thirteen Cracks will be the first book to expose the most vulnerable areas in our democracy, explain in historical context how President Trump uniquely and outrageously exploited these weak spots, and propose a fix for each challenge. Historian Allen J. Lichtman argues that Trump has put us at a pivot point in our history, where the survival of American democracy is at stake. But this is also an historic opportunity to shore up the vulnerabilities and to strengthen our democracy.
Allan J. Lichtman is Distinguished Professor of History at American University and the author of many acclaimed books on U.S. political history, including White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, FDR and the Jews (with Richard Breitman), and The Case for Impeachment. He is regularly sought out by the media for his authoritative views on voting and elections. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland.
The question of whether our constitutional democracy will survive the next decade has become the most urgent problem of American politics. In his newest book, Allan Lichtman offers an acute diagnosis of thirteen of the most troubling ailments vexing our political system and prescribes an ingenious remedy for each. Writing with an almost Madisonian concision, Lichtman makes an essential contribution to the growing literature on the danger of democratic decline.--Jack Rakove, Pulitzer Prize-winning Author of Original Meanings; William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies, Emeritus, Stanford University With fresh, inventive, and sound ideas--what he calls a "blueprint" for reform in the early post-Trump months--Allan Lichtman, one of the most widely knowledgeable historians of the American past, provides a set of robust proposals for essential changes in American government to prevent the further erosion of federal institutions, practices, and norms. It should be read widely in Congress and by everyone concerned with the perilous state of American government and politics.--James M. Banner, Jr., editor of Presidential Misconduct: From George Washington to Today
