America's founders would be 'disgusted' by Republicans: Historian

President Donald Trump’s administration would disgust America’s founding fathers, explained a top historian and documentarian — and they'd be even more shocked at Republican lawmakers who fail to fight back.

“The founders would less be surprised by someone taking authoritarian power than they would be by [Congressional] abdication,” said historian Ken Burnshistorian Ken Burns, who has made more than 30 acclaimed documentaries on American history and other subjects. “Article One is the legislative and Article Two is the executive. That would be the manager carrying out what the executive — what the legislative — wanted. And that is not happening. And we're seeing even the courts go into that realm.”

Burns told MS NOW that America’s first president, George Washington, had three main warnings for America after leaving office: “avoid partisanship, no foreign entanglements, and leave office, please. That's his message. And those things are a good starting point.”

In his Farewell Address, which he submitted in writing in 1796 after Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton helped him draft it, Washington was particularly fretful over partisanship destroying American democracy.

“The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism,” Washington explained. “But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.”

Washington — who insisted on stepping down from power peacefully after the end of his second term and thereby began the tradition of peacefully giving up power that every president except Trump has followed — also warned against leaders who refused to accept that the law applies to them when they happen to dislike it.

“The basis of our political systems is the right of the people to make and to alter their constitutions of government,” Washington said. “But the Constitution which at any time exists, till changed by an explicit and authentic act of the whole people, is sacredly obligatory upon all. The very idea of the power and the right of the people to establish government presupposes the duty of every individual to obey the established government.”

Washington also urged Americans to vigilantly guard their First Amendment rights, even encouraging the affordable distribution of newspapers despite many of them criticizing his policies.

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