A Moral Rupture

“We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Davos declaration will no doubt be quoted for years to come.

From time to time, a world leader captures the moment in a phrase. Consider Winston Churchill in Fulton, Missouri proclaiming, “An iron curtain has descended across the continent,” bookended by Ronald Reagan in Berlin demanding, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”

Carney’s “rupture, not a transition” sentence has already become the signature phrase of the end of the post-World War II order. It has launched countless debates over the next era of geopolitics and grand strategy, as it rightly should given the high stakes and uncertainties it implies.

The rupture Carney invokes is not only political—it is moral. It is not only international, but domestic. The structural breach in world order is so fundamental, we need to understand the collapse at the level of basic values to fully comprehend what is happening.

It is a dark and chaotic picture. The word “rupture” is apt, as it captures the energy and totality of the break. It also suggests the instability and uncertainty that follows.

There is no question that the animating figure in this story is President Donald Trump. Trump is the loudest voice and most powerful actor. His values provide both the catalyst and the accelerant for dramatic change.

In the lead up to Davos, Trump said about Greenland, “I would like to make a deal, you know, the easy way. But if we don’t do it the easy way, we’re going to do it the hard way.”

Deliberately provocative. Deliberately transgressive. The list of Trump’s incivilities is too long to summarize.

His norm-breaking regarding how U.S. presidents comport themselves on the international stage now also includes well-documented quid pro quo and financial corruption. Two stark examples, among many, include Qatar’s offer of a $400 million jet to replace Air Force One and the recent private investment for access to American AI chips.

It is objectively true and factually correct to point out that Trump is enriching himself and his family, using government power against his personal enemies (James Comey, Letitia James, Jerome Powell—just to name a few), and commanding the full force of the federal government to pressure law firms, media companies, universities, and civic organizations.

These past months, we have seen the deployment of U.S. military domestically and masked ICE agents on the streets of Minneapolis and other cities, accompanied by mentions of the Insurrection Act and calls to “nationalize the voting” ahead of the midterms.

“Nationalize the voting.” If this is not rupture, then what is it? Even the thought should be concerning.

Moral Relativists Are Sanitizing the Moment

Yet gauging how troubling these breaches are is a matter of opinion. And it is surprising to see the lengths to which some commentators have gone to normalize or “sane-wash” the current picture.

In a recent New York Times guest essay, “What a Comparison with Roosevelt Reveals About Trump,” Jack Goldsmith and Samuel Moyn compare Franklin Roosevelt and Donald Trump’s “unitary executive.” The implication of the comparison is that we have been here before, and perhaps, today’s version is not so concerning. Trump’s egregious overreach is unlikely to stick, and therefore, a new political order is unlikely to follow. Yet FDR’s “unitary executive” was of a different time, place, and quality than Trump’s. To compare the two is an exercise in moral relativism.

FDR was innovating, not destroying. He was reacting to serial crises, not precipitating them. FDR’s mission was to unify the country in response to the depression at home and the rise of authoritarianism abroad. Did the New Dealers overreach at times? Yes—there was court packing, abuses of the IRS, excesses of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, and the great sin of Japanese-American internment. But these episodes are remembered with shame. They are the exceptions that prove the worth of the rule.

FDR did not use the power of the presidency for personal gain. His reform was focused on social welfare. In fact, he was called “a traitor to his class” for his efforts.

Trump’s “unitary executive,” by contrast, wears self-dealing and the coercive use of presidential power with pride. Pardons for January 6th rioters, DOGE cuts to the civil service, tariffs, razing the East Wing of the White House, putting alliances in jeopardy with inflammatory proposals, prioritizing white South African refugees over others, militarizing public security through ICE, establishing a Board of Peace and making himself chairman for life, and so on.

Each of these actions alone represents not only a political rupture, but a moral one. Together, they are an attempt at the consolidation of personal and political power that is unprecedented.

Another attempt at smoothing over the rupture is Zachary Karabell’s Washington Post article “Shocked by Trump’s Profiteering, Here’s Some Perspective.” Karabell contextualizes government corruption at the federal level by recalling the “honest graft” years of Chester Arthur, George Washington Plunkitt, and Tammany Hall in the 19th century. He reminds us how the big machines of municipal government systematically and openly extracted wealth. The federal government did likewise through patronage appointments and the age-old practice of skimming customs fees.

Indeed, 19th century American history and literature is crowded with stories of how public office was used for private gain and how the spoils system defrauded the citizenry. But as we know, the story ends not with acceptance of this as a norm—but reform. The Civil Service is founded precisely for this reason—to ensure that office holders do not abuse their power for their own self-interests, and to serve the public good.

Historical context is helpful. But not as a tranquilizer. The reason to compare Trump to FDR or Chester Arthur should not be to draw the conclusion that today’s version of the unitary executive is not a unique threat, or that the current high-water mark of graft is not that unusual. Instead, history should render an unvarnished picture of the past to put into perspective how far we have come, and what is at risk in letting it go.

The moral rupture of today is the abandonment of the principles that guided leaders for the past 80 years. Power is effective only when it is kept within tolerable bounds, guided by principles—principles that prohibit certain practices and encourage others.

Power without restraint is a dark vision that ends badly. Prime Minister Carney surely sensed this when he stepped to the podium at Davos.