Chapter 1
Don't Be the Frog
There is a well-known, if apocryphal, story about a frog being boiled alive. It goes like this: If you put a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will jump out to save its life because it feels the heat. But if you put that same frog into a pot of room-temperature water and slowly bring it to a boil, the frog won't notice what's happening until it's too late. By the time the danger is clear, the frog is immobilized and can be cooked until dead.
That metaphor of the frog comes in handy. It is frequently used to illustrate how businesses fail-the warning signs develop so gradually that leadership doesn't shift course until it's too late. It can also describe a troubled romantic relationship that incrementally shades toward abuse. Or societal inaction in the face of climate change. It's also a good, if oversimplified, explanation for how dictators come to power: a slow slide toward tyranny, easily dismissed for far too long by far too much of the populace.
Trump and the Frogs
We saw this in the United States during the first Trump administration and in the run-up to the 2024 election. It was much easier for some people to pretend we weren't in danger than it was to face the reality that our democracy could come apart. That prospect was far too frightening. They thought, and even today some of them continue to think, that if they don't look, if they unplug from the news or distract themselves with pretty things, it won't happen. The pot gets hotter, but they try to convince themselves that they're still okay.
You might think that having escaped the boiling pot in 2020, when voters put the country back on the path toward democracy, Americans would have been eager to stay out of it. But that wasn't the case. And the speed with which Trump came out of the chute following his 2024 electoral victory, signing more than 140 executive orders that radically altered American democracy during his first hundred days in office, was altogether different.
As they worked through the shock, some Americans finally realized that leaving the pot was their only course of action. They began to assemble and protest. As Trump tried to rewrite the Constitution (birthright citizenship), end legal challenges to his executive orders (attacking law firms), use DOGE to target federal agencies, disrupt and destroy foreign aid that helped maintain America's relationships and standing in the world, end efforts on climate change, gut universities and colleges, and put a stop to programs that ensured diversity, equity, and inclusion in the federal government, workplaces, and higher education, more people noticed the rising temperature. Bewildered government employees said in interviews that, yes, they had voted for Trump, but they never expected it would cost them their jobs.
Part of keeping the Republic is learning, and sometimes relearning, the lesson of the frog. Unfortunately, shock and even horror don't last forever. Some Americans left the pot and then voluntarily jumped back in. Surprise fades away and anger dims. Constant exposure to the heat creates a new normal. Sometimes the frogs fail to learn the lesson and are doomed to repeat their mistakes, until it finally sinks in.
Here is the reality: By the start of the 2024 campaign, the bipartisan outrage that moved some Republicans to criticize Trump after January 6 had dissipated in many parts of the country. Trump made his intention to deconstruct American democracy plain during the 2024 campaign. He continued to claim the 2020 election had been "stolen" from him even though that was a lie. It wasn't much of a stretch to understand he might try to exact revenge on those he believed were involved-he said as much. Despite the clear evidence, many people refused to believe the water would really come to a boil if he was reelected. They'd forgotten what they'd lived through during his first term in office.
In normal times, you would expect outrage from across the political spectrum over a candidate who repeatedly and mendaciously claimed American elections-but only the ones he lost-were fraudulent, a candidate who demanded officials "find" him enough votes to pull a win out of a loss. A candidate who wanted to overturn the will of American voters should have been untouchable and unelectable, a third-party pariah, even more fringe than a George Wallace or a Lyndon LaRouche. But that doesn't happen when voters act like frogs.
On November 5, 2023, The Washington Post ran an article about Trump's plans if he won a second term. It started like this: "Trump and his allies have begun mapping out specific plans for using the federal government to punish critics and opponents should he win a second term, with the former president naming individuals he wants to investigate or prosecute and his associates drafting plans to potentially invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office to allow him to deploy the military against civil demonstrations." The right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation spearheaded Project 2025, with contributions from multiple senior members of Trump's first administration, including cabinet secretaries and a White House chief of staff. It laid out explicit plans for his second administration. And yet, people were surprised when the revenge presidency went full bore. Project 2025 became so unpopular when it was aired in public that Trump took pains to distance himself from it. That maneuver largely succeeded. Then, upon his inauguration, Trump's administration started carrying it out-almost to the letter.
Despite the cautionary tale of Trump's first term in office, a lot of frogs managed to ignore the rising temperature. Trump floated the stuff of banana republics, but voters focused on the price of eggs. Once he was back in office, implementing a startling array of anti-democratic plans, the surprise was that living through a constitutional crisis had a patina of normalcy to it. It didn't necessarily feel like we were in trouble, especially for people who lacked the interest in or ability to pay close attention to what was transpiring. At dinner or over drinks when I'd raise the news, I experienced reactions like "Don't be a drama queen," or "You're overreacting, it's not as bad as you think it is." That's what was happening if you think back to late January or early February 2025. A lot of people still dismissed the concerns as "just talk." At first, nothing much changed in many people's lives. Maybe a friend or two lost a job. But there was no catastrophic events nothing like a January 6. No one was tearing up the Constitution in the streets. Nobody was hanged on the Capitol steps. There wasn't a dramatic moment to focus on when you could clearly say democracy was lost. It was easy, or at least easy enough, for the frogs to go on being frogs.
No Kings
Our nation's history cautions against dozing off in the face of the kind of danger we were seeing. The Federalist Papers, a series of eighty-five essays written between October 1787 and May 1788 by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison, were published anonymously, under the pen name "Publius." The essays were intended to convince New York delegates to ratify the new Constitution. Today, they offer unique insight into the framers' intent when writing the Constitution, and the sort of democracy they hoped to build. In 1788, James Madison titled Federalist 51 "The Structure of the Government Must Furnish the Proper Checks and Balances between the Different Departments." Reading Madison's words in 2025 only amplifies how committed Trump seems to be to running straight through the checks and balances and accumulating power in the hands of his own executive branch of government.
Madison understood the practical need for the three branches of government to work together but was wary of placing too much power into a single set of hands. That notion of a separation of powers dated back, to a French scholar, judge, and philosopher named Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu. We know him as Montesquieu. He developed a theory of government that heavily influenced Madison while he was at work on The Federalist Papers. There are echoes of Montesquieu's belief that "government be so constituted as one man need not be afraid of another" in Madison's famous line, "If men were angels, no government would be necessary."
Montesquieu's influential work The Spirit of the Laws advocated for what is known as a "trias politica," or separation of powers. Specifically, it proposed dividing government into legislative, executive, and judicial branches, with each branch acting independently, a now familiar structure for a government. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Madison was Montesquieu's greatest admirer. He wrote in Federalist 47, "The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."
Those words from history might have felt rote, even irrelevant, just a few years ago, too obvious to even a casual observer as to require any reflection. But of course, it is not a few years ago. We are watching what Madison would call "the very definition of tyranny," the effort to consolidate the power of the executive branch-while suppressing Congress, the courts, and the press-in one set of hands, those of an American president. The importance of separating power among three branches of government has never been more apparent. If there is a magic bullet for preserving democracy, it is this: prevent any one branch of government from holding too much power, especially power that the Constitution specifically gives to another branch of government.
Democratic state attorneys general understood this when they joined forces and began heading into court over some of the early executive orders in 2025. The lawsuits, which involved matters including birthright citizenship, federal funding freezes and grant cancellations, DOGE access to information in possession of the Treasury Department, firing federal workers, DOGE's constitutionality, and dramatic reductions of personnel and services at the Department of Education, asked the courts to prevent the president from seizing an outsize share of power for himself. Although the cases involved different substantive issues, their unifying goal was to restrict the president's power to what the Founding Fathers directed in the Constitution. Various plaintiffs, including state attorneys general, civil rights groups, pro-democracy organizations, federal employees, and other individuals harmed by the administration's actions filed more than one hundred lawsuits in just the first two months that the new administration was in operation. More were filed after that, particularly as Trump's deportation plans heated up. At the heart of these cases was an effort to protect the system envisioned by Montesquieu's trias politica.
The state attorneys general understood the stakes. They went for the source of the heat early, to try to get it under control. A functional judicial branch requires the work of both lawyers and judges. Judges can't just issue rulings on their own. They can't spontaneously hold people in contempt. They need lawyers to get the ball rolling by filing cases. Even then, judges can consider only the issues raised in the lawsuits before them, and only if they have jurisdiction. If a would-be authoritarian wants to put the courts out of business, the first thing you do is "kill all the lawyers," as the bard wrote.
Trump attempted his own version of Shakespeare's infamous line when he launched a series of attacks on prominent law firms, using executive orders and presidential memos, in what looked like little more than an attempt to settle old scores. The first one came in March 2025, targeting a Washington, DC, firm, Covington and Burling, and specifying its supposed wrongdoing-providing Special Counsel Jack Smith, who charged Donald Trump in two criminal cases, with free legal advice. Next he focused on Perkins Coie, where election lawyer Marc Elias worked before going out on his own. The firm's apparent sin was representing Democrats, including in connection with events surrounding the 2016 election. Then he came for more firms, including some of the oldest, most distinguished, and largest firms in the nation: Paul, Weiss; Jenner & Block; Susman Godfrey; and WilmerHale. The orders were separate but similar, with each firm singled out by name. The measures in them, intended to bring the firms to heel, were mob boss-level intimidation, including canceling lawyers' security clearances, denying firm employees access to federal property, terminating existing government contracts the firms had, and characterizing the firms' efforts to be more inclusive as potentially unlawful "racial discrimination."
The first order had come as something of a shock, and that shock was punctuated by each one that followed. These big law firms, perhaps not coincidentally, were well resourced and full of talented lawyers, and they were engaged in at least some work that was adverse to the new administration. Of course, there was the potential for them to bring many more cases as time went on. But the executive orders were harsh enough that some of the firms were concerned about going out of business. Then Paul, Weiss cut a deal with Trump to get out from under the restrictive provisions of his executive order. Others followed, including firms that agreed to Trump's terms before he issued an executive order, to prevent him from publicly naming them. For a moment, it looked like Trump might successfully coerce Big Law to stop bringing the lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the new administration's policies so that the courts could rule on them. But other firms chose to fight, and as of this writing, they have been universally successful in convincing the lower courts that Trump's actions were unconstitutional, although the cases are not yet over.
When a president speaks in an executive order, the figurative megaphone strapped to his mouth can inflict great damage. The order for WilmerHale started out with the accusation that "many firms take actions that threaten public safety and national security, limit constitutional freedoms, degrade the quality of American elections, or undermine bedrock American principles." Trump then pointed his finger directly at WilmerHale, calling it "yet another law firm that has abandoned the profession's highest ideals and abused its pro bono practice to engage in activities that undermine justice and the interests of the United States." Trump singled out Robert Mueller, the special counsel who investigated him during his first term in office and had once been a partner at WilmerHale. The order stated that "Mueller's 'investigation' upended the lives of public servants in my Administration who were summoned before 'prosecutors' with the effect of interfering in their ability to fulfill the mandates of my first term agenda. This weaponization of the justice system must not be rewarded, let alone condoned." It was clear that these orders weren't about "bedrock American principles." They were tools for revenge. Trump could not let old wounds close, even for the good of the country.
Copyright © 2025 by Joyce Vance. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
