The best thing about America is that anyone can become president; it is also the worst thing.
This paradox sits at the heart of American democracy, razor-sharp and irreducible. To understand it requires holding two truths simultaneously: that our system’s greatest strength and its most perilous weakness spring from the same source.
Consider what that first part—anyone can become president—means.
It means a person born into poverty can ascend to the highest office. It means a person need not inherit her station. It means talent, determination, and vision can overcome the accident of birth. This is the American covenant, the one that draws people to our shores and holds them through hardship. When we say a child born in a modest neighborhood can reach for the presidency, we affirm something profound: that merit matters more than dynasty, that opportunity trumps origin.
The history of the presidency itself testifies to this. From Lincoln splitting rails to Eisenhower commanding armies, from Reagan working as an actor to Truman running a haberdashery—men of genuinely varied backgrounds have occupied the office.
This accessibility creates a deep legitimacy. It tells citizens that the system is not rigged for an inherited elite, that the top office is not sealed off by blood or privilege. That matters immensely for social cohesion and for belief in the democratic process itself.
But examine the same principle through a different lens, and the danger becomes equally clear.
If anyone can become President, then anyone can become President. That includes the demagogue and the charlatan, the ideologue with a thin grasp of constitutional governance, the narcissist drawn to power as a drug. It includes those with authoritarian instincts, those willing to exploit divisions for personal gain, and those indifferent to the damage they inflict on institutions in pursuit of victory.
On whether this is completely true or not, I think the defense rests.
The barrier to entry is precisely what makes this possible. America maintains few formal gates. We require age, citizenship, and natural birth—crucial safeguards, yes, but not especially restrictive ones. We do not require military service, public administration experience, legislative accomplishment, or executive competence. We do not require a minimum standard of character to be measured through institutional vetting. We trust the voters to be the filter.
That trust has sometimes proven naive.
The Founders understood this risk. They created the Electoral College not to democratize but to constrain—to place a layer of educated judgment between the popular appetite and the actual selection of a president. They worried about demagogues. They worried about men of insufficient character. But the very mechanism they built to filter aspiration has itself been undermined, first by the rise of the two-party system they did not anticipate, then by the democratization of the primary process, and finally by the dissolution of shared consensus about truth and basic norms.
The system’s openness has become its vulnerability.
In an era of mass communication, in a culture where entertainment and politics have bled into each other, the skills that once would have disqualified a candidate, the ability to command attention, to project simplicity, to appeal to grievance—have become assets. A man can reach the presidency without ever having built anything, managed anything, served in war or peace, or demonstrated the patience that the office demands.
This is not an argument for aristocracy or expertise unmoored from accountability. History shows us that privilege often produces mediocre leadership, that inherited position is no guarantee of virtue. The solution is not to seal the office against ordinary Americans. Rather, it is to understand the cost of complete openness and to grapple with how we can preserve the aspiration while raising the baseline of accountability.
We might begin by demanding more of ourselves as voters. Accessibility to office should not mean abdication of our responsibility to evaluate fitness. We might insist on transparency about character, record, and intention in ways we currently do not. We might strengthen the institutions—the free press, the academic community, the civil service—that once provided context and judgment to political decisions. We might take seriously the question of whether our current primary system truly identifies our most capable citizens or merely our most relentless and media-savvy ones.
The paradox admits no perfect resolution. To make the presidency more restrictive is to risk creating a system that serves established interests rather than the public good. To leave it entirely open is to invite repeated crises of legitimacy and competence.
The true key to proper vetting of a candidate is to vote. When almost 25% of eligible voters choose not to participate, it widens the opportunity for an unqualified candidate to succeed. With that level of indifference, a candidate can attain the office with less the 40% of American voters’ approval.
In 2024, Mr. Trump received 77,303,568 popular votes. As a percentage of total eligible voters (175,000,000) it works out to 44%. Do we want a government determined essentially by people unwilling to perform a primary civic duty?
But this much is clear: the foundation of American democracy rests on the belief that talent and character can rise. We do not serve that belief by closing doors. We serve it by being rigorous about what we require of those who enter them.
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