Bright Now Media

09/21/2026

‘Thousands of people gathered outside the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Friday evening to protest Trump’s takeover of the building and his threat to shut it down or even demolish it unless his name goes onto the facade. U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper of the District of Columbia has ordered the board of the center to give 30 days’ notice before making any major physical changes to the building.

Recognizing the leeway the courts have given him over anything that falls under “national security,” Trump this morning decided to take a proactive approach to making sure the courts don’t stop his triumphal arch. He announced on social media:

“At the strong request of the United States Military, and for National Security purposes, I have agreed to convert the magnificent Triumphal Arch, planned since the Civil War Era many years ago, at the Receptive Circle adjoining the Arlington Memorial Bridge, into a top grade Military Complex/Triumphal Arch, to house, store, and have the rapid ability to use large numbers of drones, plus Snipers, on both the roof and plaza areas, and additionally have and hold large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage. There will be no facility like this anywhere in the World. Out of the 59 top cities and Capitals, Washington, D.C., IS THE ONLY ONE IN THE WORLD THAT DOES NOT HAVE A TRIUMPHAL ARCH, but it will now and, by far, the greatest of them all!”

This is the same justification he made for his ballroom where the East Wing used to be. When it became clear that his claim to need an entertainment space up to his aesthetic standards would not fly, he began to claim that the ballroom is imperative for national security. We have since learned that there already is a secure space under the White House, built in secret during President Barack Obama’s administration.

Dan Diamond reported in the Washington Post last Wednesday, September 16, that officials from the National Park Service have agreed that the construction will adversely affect Arlington National Cemetery, the Lincoln Memorial, and several dozen other historical sites, but urged those concerned about historic preservation to sign on to the project through a memorandum of agreement that will stand as approval by noon tomorrow anyway.

The document asserts that the arch is supposed “to celebrate 250 years of American independence by honoring America’s founding principles.” Now Trump says the arch is imperative for “National Security purposes” and will have drones and snipers.

Rebecca Miller, executive director of the DC Preservation League, responded to the request to sign the document: “This is not consistent with NPS practice, NPS regulations, or the intent of the National Historic Preservation Act.”

While Trump suggests he will defend the United States from atop his triumphal arch, our European allies are much more concerned with Russia’s drone strike last Sunday on a passenger train traveling from Kyiv, Ukraine, to Warsaw, Poland. The train was just over a mile—two kilometers—from the Polish border when the drone hit at a border crossing. The drone hit just after a convoy carrying former leaders and high-level diplomats, including former U.K. prime minister Boris Johnson, had passed through.

The train operators were warned of the coming drone and no one was hurt, but European leaders widely interpreted the strike so close to Poland as, in the words of Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s high representative for foreign and security policy, “clearly a message to the western world.”

Poland is a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Twelve nations founded NATO in 1949 to resist Soviet aggression. After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, NATO’s mission shifted toward crisis management, and then to resisting the aggression of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin.

Over the years, NATO has grown to include 32 countries, 30 of which are in Europe (the U.S. and Canada are the two NATO countries in North America). The success of their collective defense system rests on Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which states that an attack against any one member of NATO will be treated as an attack against all of them. So a threat to Poland threatens all the NATO countries.

Russia has been pushing NATO countries with what European leaders call “hybrid attacks.” Rather than launching classic military attacks, Putin has been allowing drones to go into NATO airspace, cutting undersea telecommunications networks on which European countries depend, and possibly placing bombs on a train in France.

Russia has been a bad actor for years, destabilizing NATO countries by flooding them with disinformation that affects elections, paying for political parties, bribing politicians, and so on. But the increase in Russian provocations now seems to be related to Putin’s attempt to undercut European support for Ukraine as Ukraine’s drones have brought the war home to Russia’s oil industry and to the Russian people.

In a speech on Wednesday, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, former prime minister of the Netherlands, noted that “Russia wants to stop us helping Ukraine—but their actions will only lead us to do more for Ukraine.”

Kurt Volker, who served as U.S. ambassador to NATO under President George W. Bush, told NPR’s Elissa Nadworny that President Trump “has largely looked at all of this and said, that’s a European problem. He doesn’t feel a threat to the United States from Russia, and he doesn’t see a need for the U.S. to increase its pushback on Russia at all.” “I disagree with this,” Volker said. “I think that we have a vested interest in freedom and free people everywhere being safe and prosperous. It creates a better world for us.”

Trump’s stand is interesting in light of news that Russia has been helping Iran in its fight against the United States, sending upgraded munitions as well as satellite imagery and targeting data to hit U.S. forces in the Middle East.

Last week, CNN reported that fourteen Russian spy satellites moved over the Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, used by the U.S., two days before a devastating March 27 attack by Iran. A CNN investigation showed that the spacecraft had access to a large spectrum of data. U.S. officials and international intelligence sources told CNN that the information the satellites gathered helped Iranian forces conduct some of its most precise attacks against American forces and assets.

Two months later, a Russian close to Putin footed the bill for a three-day celebration for Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding to Bettina Anderson. According to Justin Elliott, Brett Murphy, Joshua Kaplan, and Alex Mierjeski of ProPublica, Umar Kremlev spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on the event, held on private islands in the Bahamas.

On Tuesday, September 15, the Department of Justice announced charges against five people working for Russian intelligence “to conduct attacks and murders around the world, including in the United States.” The indictment alleges that a network of Russian hit men has operated since at least 2024 and has recruited U.S. citizens to surveil and murder people, intending to target “all the countries that are helping Ukraine.” As Daniel Boffey and Andrew Roth of the Guardian note, it was an unwritten rule of the Cold War that Russia would not attack people in the U.S. (although Russian agents are widely believed to be behind the murder of U.S. journalist Paul Klebnikov in Moscow in 2004).

On September 16, Congress passed a major sanctions package targeting Russian officials, the energy sector, financial institutions, and the “shadow fleet” of tankers that get around sanctions by using shell corporations and flying under the flags of countries with a loose regulatory system. The measure is named the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026, in honor of the late South Carolina senator.

But on Thursday, September 17, Anton Troianovski of the New York Times reported that Trump is suggesting Putin will be more willing to end his war if the U.S. makes business deals with Russia regardless of whether it stops its assault on Ukraine. In February, Troianovski reported that Gentry Beach, a Texas investor with ties to the Trumps, signed an agreement last fall with one of the biggest energy companies in Russia to develop Alaska’s natural gas resources.

According to a September 14 piece by Dexter Filkins in the New Yorker, the Trump administration has essentially privatized U.S. foreign policy for their own interests. The “generally held view,” a former U.S. official told Filkins, is that Russia has offered administration officials and their allies business deals in exchange for their supporting Russian demands against Ukraine. A classified report a European intelligence agency provided to Filkins lists Trump, his son-in-law Jared Kushner, special envoy Steve Witkoff, former envoy Richard Grenell, and Gentry Beach as people who might participate in any of ten money-making ventures on the table.

The world, and the place of the United States in it, is changing fast. In June, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called it “shameful” that European allies did not help the U.S. attack on Iran and said the U.S. would review its military commitments to Europe. On September 17, Dan De Luce, Gordon Lubold, Courtney Kube, and Abigail Williams of NBC News reported that the Pentagon is weighing a plan to pull tens of thousands of troops and weapons, ships, and planes out of Europe despite the warnings of NATO allies about Russia’s increasingly aggressive moves.

In Wednesday’s speech, Rutte outlined what he called NATO 3.0. If NATO 1.0 was the phase of the organization that pushed back against the Soviet Union and NATO 2.0 was the period from then until now, he said, NATO 3.0 is one in which the weight of NATO shifts away from the United States and toward the United Kingdom, Europe, and Canada.’

-Heather Cox Richardson, September 20, 2026 (Sunday)

09/20/2026

‘On September 19, 1676, three hundred and fifty years ago today, Nathaniel Bacon and his followers burned Jamestown, the capital of the Virginia Colony. The destruction of the seat of government was the culmination of a year of conflict between Governor Sir William Berkeley and poor settlers in the colony. Fears of another such uprising in the future led Virginia lawmakers to make sure poor men would not make common cause, passing laws to divide them along racial lines.

The crisis had begun a year before, in the fall of 1675, when Thomas Mathew refused to pay members of the Doeg tribe what they believed they were owed for goods they had sold him. They raided his farm on the northern neck of Virginia, taking some of his pigs. A number of Doegs were killed in the skirmish.

The Virginia militia retaliated for the raid but mistakenly fell on a village of Susquehannocks, who were actually allied with the Virginia government. Blindsided and furious, the Susquehannocks began to raid local farms.

The raids set a smoldering power struggle within the colony ablaze.

Since the colony’s beginning in 1607, both English custom and the drive to produce cash crops had created a clear line between men who had land and power and those who worked for them. Horrific death rates made those men who had paid for the passage of workers from England to North America drive them hard to get as much labor out of them as possible before they died.

After the arrival of Africans to the colony in 1619, those enslaved people joined indentured white workers to make common cause against their “masters.” They worked and socialized together and, according to advertisements and court cases, ran away, committed crimes, and had children together.

They also suffered similar punishments when they ran afoul of the law. And those few who lived past the deadly early years of their servitude shared similar access to the benefits of freedom, although slaves could not simply outlive their contracts but had to buy their way out of bo***ge with money they earned in their spare time.

At first, so many poor Virginians died in the colony that the few who survived posed little threat to their former masters. But by the 1660s, the survivors had grown into a large population of poor men, white and Black both, who were free but could not afford prime land in the eastern part of the colony, so they migrated to the western frontier hoping to become farmers.

There, these settlers thoroughly resented the eastern government that seemed to ignore their interests. In 1675 they saw the increased fighting with the local tribes as an opportunity to weaken those tribes and take their lands.

But Governor Berkeley disagreed. He wanted to avoid an expensive war and he wanted to honor a 1646 treaty under which allied tribes paid an annual tribute to the colonial government and fought alongside the English against tribes that didn’t have such an agreement.

Nathaniel Bacon had arrived in the colony in 1674. He was well connected and wealthy—he was actually related to Berkeley by marriage—but was frustrated that Berkeley wasn’t following his advice. Bacon began to speak for the angry westerners and by spring 1676 had welded them into a powerful coalition that by spring was attacking local Indigenous tribes without the government’s blessing. Finally, Berkeley declared Bacon a rebel.

Under Bacon, vagrants and poor farmers, including former slaves and servants, went to war against the Pamunkey tribe and the Indigenous tribes who lived around them. And then they marched on Jamestown. On July 30, 1676, Bacon issued the Declaration of the People of Virginia, complaining that the governor had raised taxes too high, was corrupt, had put his own “ignorant” judges in place, and had failed to protect settlers against Indigenous Americans. He included a list of Berkeley supporters he called “Confederates, aiders, and assisters” of Berkeley’s perfidy. Bacon ordered them all to surrender to him within four days and declared that he and his men intended to confiscate their estates.

In a dramatic affront to the colonial system in which leaders held their positions by virtue of the Crown, Bacon signed his name “Nathaniel Bacon, Generall by Consent of the people.”

Bacon’s men held control of Jamestown from July through September before Berkeley’s forces forced them to retreat. Berkeley’s men abandoned the town when Bacon’s men tried to recapture it. Aware that more of the governor’s men were on their way, Bacon’s forces burned the town down on September 19.

On October 26, Bacon died from dysentery, the “Bloodie Flux,” and the rebellion fell apart. But the crisis had left the colony in ruin with its people dead or wounded, farms plundered or burned, crops ruined from lack of care.

In the wake of Bacon’s Rebellion, Virginia’s wealthy elite set out to preserve their control over the colony. They pushed Indigenous Americans off their land and enslaved those who fought back. From 1670 to 1715, colonists enslaved between 30,000 and 50,000 Indians. Entire tribes disappeared, and white farmers moved onto their lands.

And the elites set out to drive wedges between Black slaves and white servants, establishing greater punishments for Black Virginians. In 1705 the Virginia Slave Codes pulled all those regulations together and went further. They prohibited Black Americans from owning cattle, hogs, or horses. They made it legal to kill an enslaved Virginian in the process of “correcting” them. And they made enslavement hereditary.

At the same time, they gave white servants new legal rights and limited the length of white indentures. The assembly passed laws requiring masters to provide white servants with food and clothing, as well as money to set themselves up after they earned their freedom. This, combined with a booming to***co market, enabled more white men to buy land. The assembly also reduced the poll taxes for voting, making it easier for poor white men to vote.

And they made it costly for white and Black Virginians to socialize. Any white person attempting to marry across race lines would be fined and sent to jail, and the minister performing such a marriage would be fined the astonishing price of ten thousand pounds of to***co. White servant women who had mixed-race children had to either pay a whopping fine or have their term of service extended for five years. And the child would be a slave until they turned thirty-one.

As leaders bound Black Americans more tightly into slavery, they courted white Virginians into joining the cultural and social world from which they had previously been excluded. Wealthier Virginians reached out to their less-prosperous neighbors, rubbing elbows with poorer white men in taverns and welcoming them into their imposing homes to emphasize that they were all friends.

Indeed, the needs of poor white landowners were not all that different from those of wealthier planters, and it was easy to believe that all Virginia voters had the same interests. They understood what it meant to be under the thumb of a tyrant, for they saw enslaved people and their enslavers all around them. They believed that owning land made a man independent, for that was their experience. And, unlike the royal officials who used their offices to enrich their friends, Virginia voters could argue that they had the best interests of the country at heart. They were free and independent.

They were, one might say, created equal.’

-Heather Cox Richardson, September 19, 2026 (Saturday)

09/19/2026

‘According to the American Automobile Association, diesel hit its highest recorded average price today at just above $6.44 per gallon. Diesel moves most of the consumer goods in the United States. Iran’s news agency reported today that a political advisor to Iran’s Supreme Leader said Iran would not reopen the Strait of Hormuz until President Donald Trump and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu are removed from power.

As the conflict drags on with no coherent U.S. strategy, J.P. Morgan wrote yesterday, “We simply don’t know how to model the endgame.” Today Bloomberg reported that Saudi Arabia has told European refiners that they will not be receiving crude oil next month because of the shutdown of the East-West pipeline.

John Stoehr of The Editorial Board noted that the economic pain of this moment appears to be turning the media against Trump. He called attention to a hard-hitting piece in the Washington Post yesterday by Evan Halper, Rachel Chason, and Joyce Sohyun Lee warning of “huge jumps in the prices of gasoline and diesel…despite the Trump administration’s assurances.”

Trump responded to this shift in coverage this afternoon by announcing he is banning CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House. “Media Outlets shouldn’t be able to constantly write or report FICTION and LIES when they’re covering the President of the United States, the Trump Administration, or the United States of America,” Trump wrote. “Other Fake News Media Outlets to follow.”

Trump’s anger at the press was probably fed today by three scoops.

Katie Bo Lillis and Zachary Cohen of CNN reported that this spring, the U.S. military set out to intercept a Chinese ship in the Middle East after an intelligence report said it was carrying components for a nuclear weapons program. After preparing to board the ship and sending up planes, officials realized that the report had been generated by AI. It was, a source told the reporters, “entirely false.” But it almost “started a war.”

Audrey Decker and Mark Satter of Politico reported that a shipment of F-35 fighter jet parts headed from Australia to the U.S. for repairs this summer was diverted to Hong Kong and disappeared, raising the possibility that China could have accessed key components of a highly classified U.S. weapons system.

Noah Robertson, Tara Copp, Warren P. Strobel, and Alex Horton of the Washington Post reported today that at least four more U.S. service members have died in the Middle East during the Iran war than the Department of Defense has announced. Three military contractors have also died since the combat began.

Trump’s fury at MS NOW might have come from Joe Scarborough, who noted on Morning Joe this morning that the latest Fox News poll showed that people trust Democrats more than Republicans to handle inflation and prices, by 15 points: 55% to 40%. In 2022, the advantage went to Republicans by 49% to 40%. Scarborough noted that Republicans are beginning to break from Trump.

All of these crises—the price crisis, caused by the oil crisis, caused by the Iran crisis, which has created a military crisis while the country is staggering under a deportation crisis—appear finally to be making some Republicans rethink their support for Trump and his policies.

On Monday, the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal reported that although Republican lawmakers are celebrating Trump’s tariffs in public, they are privately seeking exemptions from tariffs for manufacturers in their own state. “Tariffs for thee, exemptions for me,” the board wrote in a piece detailing the efforts of Senator Katie Britt of Alabama to stop tariffs in private while praising them in public.

The board explained that this lie shows “why blunderbuss trade wars are an economic mistake, along with how tariffs deepen the D.C. swamp.” Big companies can push their interests through a senator, it noted, but “who speaks for the little guy being walloped?”

In The New Republic, Greg Sargent reported that Trump’s super PAC, called MAGA Inc., has just begun to pour $100 million into the midterms. Sargent notes that they are spending that money in at least 17 districts that Trump won in 2024 by more than five points, including six districts he won by ten points or more. “If those are in danger, then a lot of other seats that are considered similarly safe for Republicans must be on the chopping block,” Larry Sabato, the founder of the nonpartisan political analysis and handicapping newsletter Sabato’s Crystal Ball, told Sargent.

Social media user Thomas Long suggested that their investments showed that Republicans had written off districts they had won in 2024 by five points or less and are trying to protect those in the 5- to 15-point range. Sargent agreed, posting: “Very possible that what I'm reporting here is the beginning of Rs starting to write off the Trump +3, +4, +5 districts and now starting to put money into the Trump +8, +9, +10, +12 districts to save those.”

In Kansas, prominent Trump ally Kris Kobach, who is running for reelection as the state’s attorney general, said he has no plans to ask Trump for an endorsement before the midterm elections. “I don’t think it’s necessary,” he said. Tim Carpenter of News From the States reports that while Trump carried Kansas by 57.1% of the vote in 2024, an August YouGov/Economist poll showed his job performance rating at –17 in the state.

In Florida, Republican Representative Maria Elvira Salazar, a former broadcast journalist and Trump supporter, spoke to the camera in an ad designed to look like she was challenging Trump directly. “Mr. President,” she said, “some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far. In July, fifty percent of the 50,000 people that were detained had no criminal record.” Blaming his advisors rather than Trump, she warned: “Be careful what your advisors are telling you about immigration policy. The same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today…. I’m not talking about giving them amnesty,” she said. “I’m talking about giving them a dignified life in this promised land."

Like Salazar, other Republicans are advancing the idea that the problem with the Republican Party these days is a poisonous MAGA element from which they are trying to distance themselves. In Texas the need to create that distance became imperative when Bo French, the Republican candidate to head the Texas Railroad Commission that oversees the oil and gas industry, posted a racist attack on University of Texas football fans. His comments threaten to sour Hispanic voters even further on Republican candidates.

On Wednesday, Senator John Cornyn (R-TX), who was primaried out of his seat by Trump-backed challenger Ken Paxton, posted a Wall Street Journal article titled: “Why I’m Voting for a Texas Democrat.” The op-ed was written by Karl Rove, Republican strategist and senior advisor to President George W. Bush. Rove wrote that the raw racism, religious bigotry, and sexism coming from French has driven him to support French’s Democratic opponent, Jon Rosenthal, for railroad commissioner.

Rove warned that the racists, "misogynists who worship hypermasculinity, conspiracy nuts seeking clicks for profit, and religious bigots who won’t differentiate between Muslim terrorists and Muslim American patriots…are diminishing the Republican Party.” “I’ll have no part of it,” he wrote. The Republican Party’s “stables need a cleaning,” he wrote. “This is a good place to start.”

In a second repost of the op-ed, Cornyn quoted: “The GOP’s stables need a cleaning. This is a good place to start.”

On Wednesday, right-wing political blogger Erick Erickson warned of a “group of white guys” who have “subtly inserted themselves into conservative institutions and church organizations,” and “even surround the Vice President of the United States.” “To varying degrees, they embrace white nationalism, antisemitism, and even N**i sympathies,” he wrote. “Some of them believe the United States is at a tipping point, and they want to push it over the edge and rebuild it in their image.”

Erickson, too, called out Bo French. He also called out Charles Haywood, whose fortune has enabled him to shape boards and institutions, and right-wing broadcaster Nick Fuentes, who is radicalizing young men and urging them to infiltrate the Republican Party. Erickson warned that they are moving into extremism from different directions and that “the institutions of the right are absorbing both without resistance.”

Notably, though, neither Rove, nor Cornyn, nor Erickson called for French to drop out of the race.

In a marked change from usual political divisions, in contests across the country Republican leaders have endorsed Democrats. Megan Cartwright of Newsweek reported that in Texas, more than twenty current and former Republican officials, as well as other party leaders, have endorsed Democrat James Talarico for the U.S. Senate over Republican state attorney general Ken Paxton. One of those endorsing Talarico is Lionel Sosa, who advised President George W. Bush’s campaign.

Republican former senator Jeff Flake of Arizona had endorsed Georgia Democratic senator Jon Ossoff for reelection.

In Kansas, former two-time Republican governor Bill Graves has endorsed Democrat Adam Hamilton for U.S. Senate over sitting Republican senator Roger Marshall.

In Montana, a former chair of the Republican National Committee, Marc Racicot, has endorsed Democratic U.S. House of Representatives candidate Sam Forstag.

In Florida, Democratic candidate for governor David Jolly, who was once a Republican member of Congress, has picked up support from a group called “Republicans for Jolly.” The group includes a man who ran for the Republican nomination to run against Jolly.

In the All-In Podcast this week, Vice President J.D. Vance asked voters to “Give us another chance.” Perhaps recognizing that his framing was not one that would inspire confidence, he corrected himself: “Or give us another couple of years to continue to work on the amazing things that we've been doing for the past two years.”

The clip of him asking voters for another chance made the rounds in the media. When MS NOW’s Morning Joe showed it, the producers continued the clip to include his second point. He said: “And the second argument I'd make is, even if you don't agree with us on every issue, the other party is consumed by craziness.” At that point, the panel burst out laughing.

The clip continued: “They're consumed by people who want to steal everything, who want to give the country over to illegal aliens and criminals.”

Host Joe Scarborough, who was once a Republican member of Congress himself, apparently couldn’t stand it. “Who want to steal everything?” he echoed. “You work for a guy who has made more trades in the stock market than every member of the House and Senate combined. You work for a guy whose family has made billions and billions of dollars off of so-called public service. We could go down the list, but we don't have over three hours. It’s such a disingenuous thing for you to say.

“And make things better? JD,...you know, I know I wake up early, and sometimes I forget things, but I think it was you in ’24, promising us: ‘Oh, if you’ll only vote for Donald Trump, we'll end those forever wars. He won't take us to war with Iran, but Kamala will.’ Right? Promised that. No more wars, no more stupidity, no more inflation. The Ukraine war would end on the first day.”’

-Heather Cox Richardson, September 18, 2026 (Friday)

09/19/2026

09/18/2026

‘In 1761, 55-year-old Benjamin Franklin attended the coronation of King George III and later wrote that he expected the young monarch’s reign would “be happy and truly glorious.” Fifteen years later, in 1776, he helped to draft and then signed the Declaration of Independence. An 81-year-old man in 1787, he urged his colleagues at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia to rally behind the new plan of government they had written.

“I confess that there are several parts of this constitution which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure I shall never approve them,” he said, “For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise.”

The framers of the new constitution hoped it would fix the problems of the first attempt to create a new nation. During the Revolutionary War, the Second Continental Congress had hammered out a plan for a confederation of states, but with fears of government tyranny still uppermost in lawmakers’ minds, they centered power in the states rather than in a national government.

The result—the Articles of Confederation—was a “firm league of friendship” among the 13 new states, overseen by a congress of men chosen by the state legislatures and in which each state had one vote. The new pact gave the federal government few duties and even fewer ways to meet them. Indicating their inclinations, in the first substantive paragraph the authors of the agreement said: “Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom and independence, and every Power, Jurisdiction and right, which is not by this confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled.”

Within a decade, the states were refusing to contribute money to the new government and were starting to contemplate their own trade agreements with other countries. An economic recession in 1786 threatened farmers in western Massachusetts with the loss of their farms when the state government in the eastern part of the state refused relief; in turn, when farmers led by Revolutionary War captain Daniel Shays marched on Boston, propertied men were so terrified their own property would be seized that they raised their own army for protection.

The new system clearly could not protect property of either the poor or the rich and thus faced the threat of landless mobs. The nation seemed on the verge of tearing itself apart, and the new Americans were all too aware that both England and Spain were standing by, waiting to make the most of the opportunities such chaos would create.

And so, in 1786, leaders called for a reworking of the new government centered not on the states, but on the people of the nation represented by a national government. The document began, “We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union….”

The Constitution established a representative democracy, a republic, in which three branches of government would balance each other to prevent the rise of a tyrant. Congress would write all “necessary and proper” laws, levy taxes, borrow money, pay the nation’s debts, establish a postal service, establish courts, declare war, support an army and navy, organize and call forth “the militia to execute the Laws of the Union” and “provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States.”

The president would execute the laws, but if Congress overstepped, the president could veto proposed legislation. In turn, Congress could override a presidential veto. Congress could declare war, but the president was the commander in chief of the army and had the power to make treaties with foreign powers. It was all quite an elegant system of paths and tripwires, really.

A judicial branch would settle disputes between inhabitants of the different states and guarantee every defendant a right to a jury trial.

In this system, the new national government was uppermost. The Constitution provided that “[t]he Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States,” and promised that “the United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion….”

Finally, it declared: “This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.”

“I agree to this Constitution with all its faults, if they are such,” Franklin said after a weary four months spent hashing it out, “because I think a general Government necessary for us,” and, he said, it “astonishes me…to find this system approaching so near to perfection as it does; and I think it will astonish our enemies, who are waiting with confidence to hear that our…States are on the point of separation, only to meet hereafter for the purpose of cutting one another’s throats.”

“On the whole,” he said to his colleagues, “I can not help expressing a wish that every member of the Convention who may still have objections to it, would with me, on this occasion doubt a little of his own infallibility—and to make manifest our unanimity, put his name to this instrument.”

On September 17, 1787, they did.’

-Heather Cox Richardson, September 17, 2026 (Thursday)