Dear Arnold,

I’m enjoying your new Netflix action series, FUBAR. You’re funny and convincing as a retiring CIA agent who is pulled back into a very messed-up intelligence conflict because he didn’t realize his daughter is also a secret agent.

You also may not realize that, in real life, the door just opened for you to be pulled back into the FUBAR (“F’ed Up Beyond All Recognition”) of our national politics. I’m writing to ask you to walk through that door immediately, and run for president for the good of our country and our world.

You’ve long said that you would run for president, if it weren’t for two facts: that you were born an Austrian citizen, and that Article II, Sec. 1 of the U.S. Constitution states that “no Person except a natural born Citizen… shall be eligible to the Office of President.”

The article hasn’t changed, but American devotion to the Constitution and its provisions on presidential eligibility has.

For the destruction of this rule and so many other norms, Donald Trump is responsible. Incredibly, he has inspired leading Democrats and Republicans to take the position that being constitutionally ineligible to serve as president is no longer a barrier to running for president.

A new consensus has emerged: Voters have the right to choose whomever they want as president, no matter what the Constitution says.

This is the product of Trump’s own ineligibility for the presidency. The Constitution’s 14th Amendment bars any officer of the U.S. who took a constitutional oath and then “engaged in insurrection or rebellion”—as Trump did after losing the 2020 election—from holding any other government office. Leading constitutional scholars, from right and left, have delved into the law and history and affirmed that Trump isn’t eligible.

But being constitutionally ineligible hasn’t stopped Trump from running from office or taking the lead in the Republican polls. And it hasn’t stopped Trump from remaining on the ballot in every state, including the two states where he has been ruled ineligible (Colorado, by a court, and Maine, by the secretary of state). With the U.S. Supreme Court expected to decide the question of eligibility nationwide, and its conservative majority all but certain to keep Trump on the ballot, state actions have not taken effect.

Arnold, this makes it clear that you can run. Who could object without looking like a hypocrite?

The courts can’t, once they’ve blessed Trump’s unconstitutional run. And Trump certainly can’t, given both his own ineligibility and his repeated promises to “terminate” the U.S. Constitution itself, as he pursues dictatorial power in a new term.

You should be able to jump into the Republican primaries posthaste. If that doesn’t pan out, you’d be the perfect presidential candidate on the bipartisan No Labels ticket.

Why do you need to run? It’s simple. Because Trump must be stopped. And no one will stop him.

The media won’t stop him, because they need in the race to draw audiences to keep their desperate enterprises afloat. Democrats won’t stop him because they want to run against him—he’s the weakest and most beatable of the Republican presidential contenders in a general election. As California Gov. Gavin Newsom said, explaining why Trump remains on the state ballot, “In California, we defeat candidates at the polls. Everything else is a political distraction.”

The Republican Party would do better in the elections with a non-Trump candidate, but party leaders don’t want to risk losing Trump supporters. And Trump’s Republican challengers, fearful of his deranged base, are simply too scared to challenge him aggressively, even in debates when he’s not present.

You, on the other hand, have challenged him openly for years. And he hasn’t been able to lay a glove on you in response. That’s because you’re not a normal politician—you’re an entertainer both more popular than Trump (FUBAR is among the most watched shows on Netflix) and more skilled at parrying media attacks. (I know this firsthand, from covering you and writing two books about you.) You’re as famous as he is, but more respected. You’re that rare political figure who can make Trump look small.

In entering the race, you should emphasize that Republicans and Democrats, by allowing Trump to stay on the ballot, have all but rubber-stamped the notion that voters should get to choose whomever they want as president, Constitution be damned. You might also say that we should embrace this new American era of democratic openness. After all, the U.S. has long limited voter choice to just two parties, routinely striking smaller parties and their candidates from ballots.

And when your opponents refer to that Article II requirement that candidates be natural born, you should make two arguments. First: Despite the accident of your Austrian birth, you’ve always felt American in your heart and soul—a “natural born” American, in the vernacular of our times. Second: If the Biden vs. Trump matchup is the best that native-born citizens can do, then it’s high time to open the race to foreign-born contenders.

But you shouldn’t just run to stop Trump. You should run to win.

As I was reminded while interviewing you this summer, you have huge visions of the future—for massive improvements in education, for the restoration of health of a country whose people are dying younger, and for a complete revamping of American infrastructure to realize our greatest dreams in economy, technology, and environment. By contrast, the tired President Biden hasn’t offered a detailed second-term agenda, much less a vision. And Trump talks endlessly about the past, about history, about grievance, about the 2020 election.

By offering your ideas, you can show the poverty of Trump and Biden’s campaigns, and how America can escape its current malaise by dreaming big about the future. “When you don’t have a vision of the future, it’s easier to look back,” you wrote in 2023. “When you don’t have a vision, today doesn’t have much meaning because you don’t know why you’re here doing what you’re doing right now, and tomorrow is downright scary.”

Now, I know that running for president is hard, and let’s face it, you’re 76 years old. But you’re still younger than Trump and Biden.

I know that running for president when the Constitution still says you can’t might look crazy and illegitimate. But the recall that elected you in California was also called crazy and illegitimate.

I know that your friends, family, and co-stars won’t want you leaving them to jump into politics again.

But is anything more important than using your power to try to save our FUBAR country?

The post Run, Arnold, Run! appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I’ve spent nearly the past decade traveling the United States and talking with people about the Constitutional system, and I think the answer is yes.

My work on the question started in 2008, with an experiment called the Constitution Café. These were an evolution of the Socrates Café, public gatherings around the globe (from Tokyo to Sydney to Salt Lake City) that follow Socratic principles and served as spaces for friends and foes, intimates and strangers, to explore existential problems, an exploration that itself made people feel more bound to one another.

The Constitution Cafés are offbeat, miniature Constitutional Conventions that bring together people of many ages and experiences and perspectives to hold thoughtful yet impassioned exchanges about what we think the Constitution says on an array of matters. And about what we think, if we had our druthers, it should say.

The author, Christopher Phillips (left), with participants in a Constitution Café at a public library in Mt. Shasta, California. Photo courtesy of Christopher Phillips.

This is a radical idea. Most Americans venerate the Constitution, even if many of us don’t actually seem to know what’s in it. It’s considered untouchable, beyond reproach by us mere mortals, and this intimidating ideal only serves to make us feel like the system it begets can never be changed, no matter how much it contributes to record levels of political apathy and anger.

But the document’s Framers weren’t so reluctant. I studied Jefferson (as well as Socrates) in college, and learned that he derided those who looked at constitutions “like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched.” He believed that such people “ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human.” To him, “We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.”

Our Constitution Cafés have an “aspirational component,” as we put on our Framers’ hats and craft “new” Constitutional articles. They also have an “activist” component—we ask ourselves and one another what we’re willing to do to make the big Constitutional ideas we have in mind a reality. Far from a pretentious intellectual exercise, with the “experts” sitting on a stage pontificating to the masses, we all mix it up together.

When Constitution Café first got underway, we had a president who’d been a Constitutional law professor. Even so, events were already prompting Americans to fret about the state and straits of our constitutional republic, which is supposed to be of the democratic variety that respects fundamental individual rights. Under Barack Obama’s watch, Occupy protesters were rousted and ousted from one public space after another in public spaces in U.S. municipalities. The then-mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa, even chillingly declared after evicting Occupy activists, that he would create a sliver of a public “First Amendment zone.”

In our cafés, we saw a growing and pervasive preoccupation, in communities rural and urban, liberal and progressive, conservative and libertarian, with the philosophical basis of democracy, and whether that basis had been undermined in our country. Many participants were of the opinion that our republic would be unrecognizable to our Founding Fathers and Mothers.

In these conversations, there has been widespread interest in privacy rights, and dismay over their dissipation. This is due in large part to revelations about widespread government collection of phone call data—followed by broader claims about data collection involving the omnipresent internet and social media. This has prompted rich and anxious exchanges about the Fourth Amendment and how we should go about defining and delineating a constitutional right for privacy in the 21st century.

I have also been in the midst of explorations throughout the country about whether corporations should enjoy the same First Amendment rights to free speech as individuals, spurred in considerable measure by the Supreme Court decision on Citizens United v. FEC. In a similar vein, the Supreme Court’s 2014 “Hobby Lobby” decision that expanded religious rights at the expense of constraining Obamacare strictures has been a platform for deep probing of whether we’ve lost our way when it comes to our Founders’ original intent of keeping corporations at arm’s length in influencing the interlocking concepts of citizenship and personhood.

Lately, debates on subjects like immigration and the constitutionality of sanctuary cities, on whether the Electoral College should be done away with, and on how the Constitution can drive (or serve as an obstacle to) campaign finance reform have been hot Constitution Café topics. And one issue that has been of perennial interest—namely, our Second Amendment rights (or lack thereof) for citizens not serving in militias to bear arms—has become even more divisive.

Over the last six months, I’ve met Americans of quite varied political stripes who declaim that our system has become “rigged.” This is not in the puny, self-aggrandizing way that Donald Trump uses it. For many Americans, “rigged” expresses the pervasive fear that Trump and his ilk will do away with all remaining vestiges of our system of checks and balances.

Students and community members discussing the Constitution at East Central High School in San Antonio, Texas. Photo courtesy of Christopher Phillips.

Of late, I’ve been making these inquiries broader, as part of an initiative I call Democracy Café (also the name of our nonprofit, which can be accessed either via DemocracyCafe.org or SocratesCafe.com). We’re now asking ourselves what we can do to reverse anti-democratic trends and to “unrig” our system, so that the promise of our civic and political sphere becomes more aligned with actual practice and can once again serve as a space dedicated to the Jeffersonian idea of freedom.

While the Constitution remains our frame for discourse, we inquire into specific pressing matters. These include the continuing lack of adequate funding for a world-class education for our youngest citizens, the dearth of affordable and high-quality health care for one and all, the ever more forceful attempts to round up and deport even undocumented immigrants who make clear-cut contributions to our nation and economy, and orchestrated efforts by elected officials to spread misinformation and disinformation in order to demonize, polarize, intimidate, and malign efforts to hold them accountable.

We’ve become more proactive, not just discussing what our society has become, but designing ways to get us out of this morass. And it has led to a complementary initiative, the Declaration Project, that seeks to resurrect our rabble-rousing Spirit of ’76 by issuing mini-Declarations inspired by our original July 4, 1776 document.

One ongoing group within the project is composed of junior high students from a public charter school in downtown Philadelphia with ethnically diverse students. One, Jazmarie Vega, penned a “Declaration of Independence from Silence.” It goes:

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for a community of people to speak out against the crimes and injustices that have been done to them by other people, and to demand mutual respect and equality, it is their duty to do so. Some hold these truths to be self-evident, that we are and ought to be equal, no matter gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnic background, etc., and that this is one of our many unalienable rights. And to secure such rights, we, as a people, must use the power in our freedom of speech to uplift ourselves from the wrongdoings of society based upon their biased actions and words. Too many lives are lost and spirits broken by the harsh actions and ways of people with certain prejudices. We as a people are stuck in this cycle of an ancient battle for the upper hand, for privilege, and upliftment of our own community even if it means the pitfall of another. While victims, we are still very much so to blame for this ongoing fight for power and glory. We, unknowingly, contribute to the fueling of this hate fire in our admittance to silence. And, so, I declare my independence from this silence. The silence that has kept too many in oppression. The silence that is heard in classrooms and business places when others are harassed. I, as an individual, dissolve the bonds and ties that I have to this perpetual ignorance and vow to use my newly declared independence to encourage others to do so as well.

As I carry on with the cafés, the questions recur. Has our Constitution—as Barack Obama, former professor of constitutional law, maintains—“proved a sufficient defense against tyranny? Do we need to use our Declaration as a touchstone and to heed Jefferson’s advice to engage in a revolution every two or three generations?”

All of us need to take a hard look in the mirror. We need to ask ourselves whether we are doing all we can, and must, to wrest our republic from those who aim to make a mockery of the sublime sacrifices of our Founding Fathers and Mothers, for the most self-serving and democracy-busting ends.

It’s time to quit asking ourselves what our country can do for us—the stock-in-trade of our President and his family and closest associates—and ask ourselves instead, more than ever, what we can do for our country. Before it’s too late.

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