Two contemporaries born in the 18th century provide reasons for guarded optimism about 21st-century U.S. politics. Democrats are suddenly, if only situationally, admiring James Madison (1751-1836). And Republicans will soon be sadder but wiser for having ignored British economist David Ricardo (1772-1823).

Democrats since Woodrow Wilson have been impatient with the federal government’s Madisonian architecture: the separation of powers that enables Congress to constrain presidents. Now, however, Democrats indignantly oppose Donald Trump’s aspiration to refuse to spend appropriated funds, thereby vitiating Congress’s core power: control of the purse.

Democrats have the strange strength that comes from being incapable of embarrassment. They applauded Joe Biden’s attempt to make — unilaterally, without Congress — perhaps the largest single expenditure in U.S. history: $400 billion on student loan forgiveness. The Supreme Court disapproved; Biden shrugged and pursued his unconstitutional objective piecemeal.

Democrats are so enamored of presidential power that they are intellectually disarmed when the 47th president advances his agenda via executive orders — such as Trump’s order moving the U.S. Agency for International Development into the State Department. Only Congress can eliminate USAID, which it established as an independent agency in 1998, but the president can exercise discretion about its administration unless and until Congress speaks in legislation.

Some of Trump’s executive orders violate pertinent laws. He dismissed about 17 inspectors general of various agencies without the required 30-day notice to Congress or the required written statement of reasons. But in 2021, Biden fired 18 people Trump had appointed to the military service academies’ advisory boards. This violated not just long-standing norms but also the law, which specifies three-year terms for these appointees and contains no provision for removal by the president.

With a pettiness, fervor and thoroughness akin to Trump’s in 2025, Biden in February 2021 purged four Trump appointees to the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, including the chairman, who said that “in the Commission’s 110-year history, no commissioner has ever been removed by a President.” Legal scholar Richard Epstein warned that the next Republican president would reciprocate Biden’s vindictiveness, further politicizing historically nonpartisan committees. If Trump does this, silence from Democrats will be seemly.

When asked to name a social science proposition that is important and true but not obvious, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Samuelson cited Ricardo’s doctrine of comparative advantage, which is the division of labor applied to nations: If Nation A is better than Nation B at making both cloth and wine, but relatively better at making cloth than wine, then it should concentrate on cloth.

Promises made, promises kept: Trump promised to raise taxes — by promising tariffs, which are paid by U.S. consumers. If prolonged, they are going to make Americans (a) less affluent than they should be and (b) disciples of Ricardo. For a taste of the coming madness, read the Cato Institute’s Jan. 29 report by Scott Lincicome and Alfredo Carrillo Obregon on how tariffs on Canada and Mexico will harm the U.S. auto industry and car buyers:

Many vehicles sold here are assembled in Mexico with U.S. and Canadian parts, so much, sometimes most, “of the vehicles’ value comes from work performed by American workers and companies during production.” And: “About half of automobiles and light trucks exported by Mexico to the United States in 2024 were made by Detroit automakers.” And: “An engine, transmission, or other automotive component might cross the U.S.-Canada and U.S.-Mexico borders as much as seven or eight times before it ends up in a finished vehicle.” Why? Comparative advantages.

The Trump administration’s frenetic frivolity has infected its foreign policy. Greenland? Buy it. The Panama Canal? “Take it back.” Gaza? “Own it” — and empty it by resettling the Gazans.

Trump, perhaps bored with banging his spoon on his highchair tray for attention, soon had second, or more likely first, thoughts about making Gaza a “Riviera of the Middle East.” Theodore Roosevelt, another rambunctious president who was impatient with inhibiting institutions and norms, had a close friend who, whenever he was asked to explain TR, said: “You must always remember that the president is about 6.”

Fumbling with this nation’s separation of powers, and with the interlocking, overlapping complexities of global commerce, Trump resembles a 6-year-old treating Limoges porcelain plates like Frisbees. But presidential high-handedness is a bipartisan affliction that predates George W. Bush’s presidential “signing statements” announcing portions of 171 laws that he would not take care to faithfully execute. More presidential aggrandizement has now been encouraged by Senate confirmations of Cabinet nominations that surely were partly, and successfully, calculated to humiliate senators.

George Will’s email address is georgewill@washpost.com.