Abraham Lincoln wrote this short reply in 1864: Broken eggs cannot be mended.
He was responding to a Louisiana slaveholder who wanted the Union restored exactly as it had been before the war.
He meant it literally. Fort Sumter had broken something. Whatever the United States would be after the war, it would not be what it was before. The wish for restoration was not just impractical. It was a refusal to understand what had happened.
I’ve been thinking about that line for a few months, because the dominant response to Trump and his destructive administration is still, at its core, a restoration project. Get back to normal. Rebuild the institutions. The problem is that normal is what produced this moment. You cannot return to the conditions that made something possible and be surprised when it happens again.
The past several years have not been an aberration. Before any of it began, the architects of Project 2025 — the Heritage Foundation and its allies — said so themselves, loudly and in writing. They wanted to dismantle the regulatory state, concentrate authority in the executive, and pull the republic back toward a 19th-century model: narrow federal reach, wide presidential discretion, and a much smaller group of people actually protected by the Constitution’s promises. They have made substantial progress.
This is the first of a six-part series I will be publishing over the next six weeks. It is a response to what Project 2025 has done to the United States, and to the inadequacy of simply wanting it undone. The argument running through all six pieces is that reconstruction requires a holistic vision, not just a policy list: a theory of what the republic is, who holds power within it, and what it would take to rebuild democratic governance on a foundation that can hold.
The damage Trump has done and will continue to do is real and it is extensive. Walk through a federal agency that processed food safety standards or environmental permits before 2025 and after: the institutional knowledge is hollowed out, replaced with loyalists who understand that their job is to impede rather than implement. The courts reshaped for a generation. Alliances built over decades treated as liabilities to be renegotiated in exchange for personal loyalty. Families separated. People removed from the country they lived in. None of this is normal, and none of it is fixed by returning to the arrangements that made it possible.
I am writing this for readers inside the United States and outside it, because what happens in the United States does not stay there. The people I have spent my career writing about (migrants, indigenous communities, families working through the aftermath of armed conflict), all live downstream of American political decisions. My friends and family in Canada or Colombia suffer the consequences of Trump’s actions as well. The view from downstream sometimes clarifies things that the view from the center tends to obscure.
This is not a list of Democratic Party policy preferences. It is closer to a constitutional argument: sovereignty flows from the people through Congress, not through a president who claims to embody the national will. That is the Madisonian design, and it has been systematically inverted under Trump. Reversing it requires more than winning elections. It requires rebuilding the architecture.
It also requires a critical understanding of what was there before. The filibuster gave minority coalitions veto power over majority governance. The Electoral College produced presidents who lost the popular vote but held the office anyway. Partisan gerrymandering meant legislative maps bore little relationship to where voters actually lived. The Supreme Court has been transformed, through decades of strategic appointments, into a political institution wearing the authority of a legal one. These were not problems created by the current moment. They preceded it by years or decades. Returning to that arrangement is not a viable solution.
And then there are the people the system was never designed to protect in the first place. The undocumented worker whose labor is essential and whose existence is criminalized. The asylum seeker processed through a system built to exclude rather than adjudicate. The community whose water has been treated as collateral damage for someone else’s profit. Any reconstruction agenda that does not address these failures is just the renewal of a compromised, flawed foundation.
In The Tides of Freedom, I wrote about a fictional Caribbean island nation where a constitutional scholar named Sofía Domínguez watches democracy come apart not through a coup but through a sequence of administrative decisions. Mass deportations. Detention centers. Journalists losing credentials. Universities losing funding. Citizens reclassified, paperwork by paperwork, into something less than citizens. The machinery is not spectacular. It is procedural. It moves through regulatory changes and executive orders and the patient replacement of career officials with loyalists. By the time it becomes undeniable, it has been operating for years.
The Comandante’s Shadow traces Daniel Ortega’s arc from Sandinista guerrilla to authoritarian ruler across four decades. The novel does not treat this as a fall from grace. It treats it as a logic. Ortega did not become something different. The revolutionary machinery he built — the loyalty networks, the personalist control, the equation of himself with the cause — simply found a new use when there was no Somoza left to fight. The people who still believed in the revolution’s founding purpose were the first ones eliminated, because memory is the thing authoritarian governance cannot tolerate.
Neither transformation was sudden. Both were gradual until they were total. The hardest moment to resist is not the end, when everything is visible, but the middle, when it is still possible to argue that things are not as bad as they look.
Lincoln returned to the broken egg image a few months later and added a few words. Broken eggs can never be mended, and the longer the breaking proceeds the more will be broken.
The question is not whether to restore what was. The question is what to build instead.
The remaining five essays, published weekly through July, work through the domains where I suggest reconstruction is necessary:
Part 2 — The Architecture of Democracy (June 22) The filibuster, the courts, the Electoral College, redistricting, AI personhood, and civil service protections. Nothing else on this agenda holds without fixing the machinery first.
Part 3 — The Economy Belongs to Everyone (June 29) Antitrust as governing philosophy, worker power, public options, wealth taxation, and why economic concentration and political authoritarianism are the same threat.
Part 4 — Rights That Cannot Be Erased (July 4, U.S. independence and my wedding anniversary) Birthright citizenship, asylum, the prohibition on family detention, immigration reform, racial and gender equality, and the reparations question. The Independence Day essay is not a celebration. It is a reckoning.
Part 5 — America in the World (July 13) A foreign policy doctrine built on democratic values rather than transactional loyalty. Written as much for readers outside the United States as for those inside it.
Part 6 — What We Are Building (July 20) Health care, education, climate, accountability, and the synthesis. What this agenda assumes, what it requires, and what it will cost.
We are not restoring what was. We are building what was promised.
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Listen and watch: the AI companions to this series
I ran the Project 2029 essays through Google NotebookLM, a tool that turns written work into a conversation between two AI hosts. The results were interesting enough that I want to share them alongside the series.
Before you go further, here is a short explainer video that maps the whole six-part argument:
▶ Watch the series explainer:
And the AI discussion of this first essay, “Broken Eggs,” is in the audio player below.
Think of these as supplementary listening that sits beside the essays rather than standing in for them. The hosts are AI-generated synthetic voices, and the analysis is drawn from the text of the series. I review each one before posting.
Explore the full Project 2029 workspace in NotebookLM: the source essays, a mind map, the explainer video, and the part-by-part podcasts, where you can also ask your own questions of the material.
Ricardo Gómez is the author of The Tides of Freedom (mybook.to/TidesOfFreedom), Those Who Stayed (mybook.to/ThoseWhoStayed), The Comandante’s Shadow (mybook.to/ComandanteShadow), and other novels.
Stories Across Borders publishes weekly at storiesacrossborders100.substack.com.