Why does a man or woman run for Congress? And then — what happens to them?

If American voters bestow on you the great honor of being elected to the House of Representatives or the Senate of the United States, you step into history. Even as a visitor to our beautiful Capitol — as a tourist or reporter or lobbyist or anyone — you sense it. The air is thick with ghosts. They seem to whisper under the great dome, especially at night, when footfalls echo from one end of the building to the other. It feels almost as if the stones themselves are holding up the Republic with the ideals that have always been at the heart of the American experiment, even while they have so often been betrayed.

It must be that every man and woman who has served in our Congress has felt something like that. You can’t not.

They come to Congress, most of them, to serve. To represent the people who sent them, to vindicate their interests and hopes and needs.

It’s not corruption, in the classic sense of the term, though plenty of members shape their work to rake in campaign donations, and some vote in ways that make them richer. But there really aren’t very many members of Congress on the take.

What there are, increasingly, are members who are simply afraid. Afraid of a primary challenge. Afraid of the social media mob. Afraid of losing a life of prestige and purpose they have come to treasure above the duties that justify it. Afraid, above all, of Donald Trump.

“He has all these senators in the fetal position! They do whatever he wants,” is how Sam Nunberg, a former advisor to Trump in his first term, once put it.

It is a kind of careerism of the soul—protecting the office at the cost of what the office is for.

Consider what the Republican-controlled Congress has just done, or rather refused to do. The United States has been at war with Iran for nearly three weeks. Seven Americans are dead. Sixteen billion dollars has been spent. Hundreds of Iranian civilians have been killed. And Congress has held no public hearings, demanded no formal accounting, passed no authorization.

The House voted 219-212 to block a war powers resolution that would have required congressional approval for further military action. Speaker Johnson declared, while simultaneously requesting supplemental war funding: “We are not at war. We have no intention of being at war.”

James Madison was not available for comment.

Madison’s constitutional design assumed that members of Congress would jealously guard their branch’s war powers as a matter of institutional self-interest. He could not imagine surrender those powers—voluntarily, in wartime, without shame.

But here is the harder question, the one that reaches past Capitol Hill and into the country itself. Why are these members so afraid? Who made them this way?

You will find the answer in the polls. It’ll make you dizzy.

Not long ago, Donald Trump ran ads promising he would never take America to war. Polls taken as recently as February showed a majority of Republicans opposing U.S. military involvement in Iran. Then came February 28th. A tweet. Bombs falling on Tehran. Within hours, Republican support for the war was running at 77, 80, 84 percent, depending on the poll. No presidential address to the nation. No debate. No accounting of costs or goals. Just the Leader’s will—and the followers’ instant, near-total assent.

This is not party discipline. It is something closer to psychological surrender. The people who flipped weren’t persuaded by arguments—the administration’s justifications shifted almost daily, when they even bothered to offer justification. It didn’t matter.

Trump acted, therefore the action is just. Eric Hoffer, in his classic book on mass movements, called it the true believer’s deepest need—not a cause, but a leader, someone to whom the burden of individual judgment can be surrendered. The surrender is not experienced as loss. It is experienced as liberation.

Trump grasped this before anyone. “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody,” he said, “and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” It sounded like a typical, Trumpian boast—and it was. But it was also truly insightful; Trump saw what was happening in our country before anyone else. He was describing, with cold precision, what he had built. And now we are watching that claim tested in wartime, at civilizational scale. He was right. He’s opened fire on Fifth Avenue, and he has hardly lost a soul.

And so the members of Congress are afraid because the voters who sent them have, in significant numbers, given up the thing that makes democratic self-government possible: the capacity for independent judgment. A legislature cannot be braver than the citizenry that elects it. When the people abdicate, the institution follows.

A democracy requires both citizens capable of thinking for themselves, and representatives with the courage to act on their constitutional obligations. When a free people can be moved from “no more wars” to “our war” by a presidential tweet, and when their elected guardians choose to look the other way, something precious is being lost.

It should frighten us. It should frighten us even—especially—if the bombs are falling on people we consider our enemies.

—Terry