After The Collapse

What broken institutions, trafficked workers, and a dying planet reveal about the Constitution we actually need

There’s a particular kind of illusion that many Americans have clung to, the belief that our democratic institutions, imperfect though they may be, were fundamentally stable. That they could bend under pressure but never truly break. That the courts, the agencies, the laws, and the “norms” were made of something sturdier than ambition and paper.

And yet here we are, watching as entire systems buckle under the weight of a single man’s will, not because he’s especially clever, but because the institutions were already hollow. Trump didn’t shatter a robust architecture. He exposed a rotten framework, knocked on the walls, and watched them crumble like termite-ridden plaster.