POWER rarely announces its excesses with fanfare. More often, it advances by inches, testing how much strain institutions can bear before they bend or break. It is in these incremental advances, rather than in spectacular ruptures, that democracies are most at risk. Today, as a new global order struggles to take shape, the rise of one superpower coincides with the visible fatigue of another. At the center of this disruption stands a familiar and polarizing figure: Donald Trump.
Unintended or not, Trump’s second act in American politics has pushed the United States into a moment of institutional reckoning. Longstanding assumptions forged after World War II about alliances, restraint and the self-discipline of democratic power are no longer merely debated. They are being stress-tested in real time.
What unfolds in Washington today is therefore not simply a partisan drama. It is a trial of institutions, one whose outcome will shape not only America’s future, but the credibility of a global order that long depended on its steadiness.
History is rarely kind to moments when power outruns restraint. It is even less forgiving when institutions hesitate, unsure whether what confronts them is a passing disruption or a fundamental rupture. The Trump phenomenon, viewed historically, revives questions many assumed were settled decades ago: Are alliances transactional or enduring? Are norms binding or optional? Are institutions stronger than personalities?
I was a young legislator when I first learned that institutions are tested not only by their enemies, but by their friends. In the Batasang Pambansa of the mid-1980s, and later in the Senate after the restoration of democracy, I saw how rules could be bent in the name of expediency, and how silence could become complicity. The erosion was rarely sudden. It was incremental, rationalized and often applauded. The lesson stayed with me in later years in government: Institutions survive not because they are perfect, but because enough people choose to defend them when doing so is inconvenient.
Calls for impeachment often surge alongside collapsing approval ratings. Yet impeachment, in the American constitutional design, is not a plebiscite on popularity. It is a political remedy for abuse of power, not a moral verdict on leadership style.
History offers a sobering guide. Richard Nixon did not fall because of a botched burglary. He fell because of a sustained effort to weaponize presidential authority against the very institutions meant to restrain it. Crucially, impeachment became inevitable only when members of Nixon’s own party concluded that preserving the presidency mattered more than preserving the president.
The lesson is unmistakable. Impeachment becomes viable only when institutional self-preservation outweighs partisan loyalty. Without that shift, impeachment remains symbolic: loud, cathartic and ultimately inconclusive.
Much misunderstood is the 25th Amendment to the US Constitution, often invoked in moments of political anxiety. Ratified in 1967 after the trauma of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, it was designed to address presidential incapacity, not misconduct. It provides a mechanism for continuity of governance, not a shortcut around political accountability.
To stretch the amendment into a tool for resolving political disagreement would be to invite a constitutional crisis deeper than the one it seeks to solve. In such moments, impatience can become as dangerous as abuse.
In times of turmoil, faith is often placed in the judiciary as final arbiter. Yet courts are deliberately limited actors. The US Supreme Court may interpret laws, restrain executive overreach, and defend constitutional boundaries but it cannot remove a president, initiate impeachment, or repair political paralysis. Courts can slow institutional erosion; they cannot reverse it alone.
Those of us who have lived through democratic transitions recognize this pattern. Institutions weaken not because constitutions are defective, but because norms are treated as expendable. In many post-authoritarian societies, crises were resolved not merely by legal instruments, but by moments when elites and citizens alike agreed that rules mattered more than rulers.
EDSA was not simply a change of leadership. It was a collective insistence that legitimacy has limits. Power, once stripped of moral authority, could no longer command obedience.
The American system now faces a similar reckoning. Democracies rarely collapse in a single dramatic moment. They erode through repeated exceptions, each justified as temporary or necessary. By the time the danger is undeniable, the guardrails have already been removed.
The real test before the United States is therefore not whether one president survives impeachment or censure. It is whether institutions still command loyalty when they inconvenience power. History reminds us that such loyalty is never automatic. It must be chosen, again and again, by those entrusted to govern.
“For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same,” said American historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt.