“You want to defend the United States of America, then defend it with the tools it supplies you with—its Constitution. You ask for a mandate, General, from a ballot box. You don’t steal it after midnight, when the country has its back turned.”—Seven Days in May (1964)

Who is actually running the government?

That is no longer a rhetorical question.

As America’s war with Iran lurches from escalation to ceasefire to renewed threats of military force, Americans are being asked to trust that someone, somewhere, knows what they are doing.

But who?

The president who boasts one moment of imminent peace and threatens the next to “finish the job”? The Pentagon officials who insist the war is going according to plan? The vice president who has reportedly questioned whether the Defense Department is giving the president the full picture? The intelligence agencies, defense contractors, war planners, foreign allies, billionaire donors, political handlers and unelected power brokers who operate behind the curtain?

This is the constitutional crisis hiding in plain sight.

The question is not merely whether Donald Trump is fit to lead. The question is whether any president still leads in any meaningful constitutional sense once the permanent war government gets moving.

That war government—the military industrial complex, the intelligence apparatus, the surveillance state, the federal police bureaucracy, the defense contractors, the private-sector profiteers and the unelected functionaries who keep the machinery running—does not need tanks in the streets to take over.

It already has the budgets, the weapons, the secrecy, the technology, the classified briefings, the emergency powers, the corporate partners and the political class in its pocket.

All it needs is for the American people to keep believing the fiction that elections alone are enough to keep tyranny in check.

They are not.

The Constitution was supposed to keep power on a short leash. Congress was supposed to declare war, control the purse strings, restrain the executive and answer to the people. The president was supposed to execute the laws, not rule by decree, wage undeclared wars, or serve as front man for an empire. The courts were supposed to serve as a check against government abuse, not rubber-stamp the national security state’s worst excesses.

Instead, we have inherited a government of permanent war, permanent surveillance, permanent emergency, permanent secrecy and permanent power.

Call it the Deep State.

Call it the Police State.

Call it the Military Industrial Complex.

Call it the Techno-Corporate State.

Call it the Surveillance State.

Whatever name you give it, the result is the same: a government that keeps expanding no matter who occupies the White House, no matter which party controls Congress, and no matter what the people actually want.

This is bigger than Trump.

Trump may be reckless, transactional, vindictive, distracted, authoritarian in impulse and dangerously unfit for the powers he wields. But the machinery now surrounding him did not begin with him and will not end with him.

Every modern president has inherited the same war powers, the same secret agencies, the same emergency apparatus, the same surveillance systems, the same defense contractors, the same militarized police forces, and the same bipartisan addiction to power without accountability.

Trump didn’t create the permanent war government.

He inherited it, fed it, enlarged it, weaponized it and, like every president before him, became its salesman.

The Iran war is merely the latest test case.

We are told the president is in command. We are told the Pentagon has the situation under control. We are told American weapons stockpiles are strong, the strategy is working, victory is near, diplomacy is proceeding, and the next escalation—if it comes—will be necessary.

Yet the reporting suggests something far more troubling: confusion, competing narratives, disputed assessments, growing concerns about depleted missile stockpiles, and possible gaps between what military officials are saying publicly and what political leaders privately fear.

According to Reuters, Trump insists that the U.S. is still not satisfied with the terms of a possible Iran deal and is not considering easing sanctions. He also reportedly threatened to blow up Oman if they did not cooperate over the Strait of Hormuz.

The Associated Press reports that a new analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies warns the U.S. could need years to replenish key advanced weapons stockpiles depleted by the Iran war, including Tomahawk cruise missiles and Patriot and THAAD interceptors.

And The Atlantic reported that Vice President J.D. Vance has repeatedly questioned the Defense Department’s depiction of the Iran war and whether the Pentagon has understated the depletion of U.S. missile stockpiles.

Read between the lines.

If the president is not getting the full picture from his own Pentagon, then who is really making the decisions?

If the Pentagon is shaping the narrative to tell the president what he wants to hear, then what remains of civilian control?

If the war machine keeps moving even when the public cannot tell who is steering it, then what remains of constitutional government?

This is the nightmare Rod Serling warned about in Seven Days in May.

Released in 1964, Seven Days in May imagined a dramatic military coup: generals plotting in secret to overthrow an unpopular president because they believed they knew better than the American people what was best for the nation.

The premise is straightforward enough: With the Cold War at its height, President Jordan Lyman signs a nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union. General James Mattoon Scott, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, believes the treaty leaves the United States vulnerable. Convinced that the president is weak and the people are blind, Scott plots a military takeover of the government.

The coup is eventually foiled. The republic is saved. The Constitution survives.

At least on screen.

In the real world, the plot has thickened and spread out over decades.

The old fear was that the military might seize power from the civilian government.

The modern reality is that the permanent government does not need to seize power.

It already has it.

The coup no longer requires generals in smoke-filled rooms plotting to overthrow the president at midnight. It does not require tanks on Pennsylvania Avenue or soldiers storming the Capitol. It does not even require an official suspension of the Constitution.

All it requires is secrecy, fear, endless war, executive power, emergency declarations, classified intelligence, compliant courts, cowardly legislators, corporate profiteers, militarized police, and a public too distracted, exhausted or frightened to resist.

That coup has been underway for decades.

It is the coup that occurs when Congress surrenders its war powers to the president.

It is the coup that occurs when presidents of both parties wage war without meaningful constitutional authorization.

It is the coup that occurs when intelligence agencies spy on the American people and then hide behind national security.

It is the coup that occurs when federal agencies arm themselves like military units.

It is the coup that occurs when local police are transformed into extensions of the military.

It is the coup that occurs when whistleblowers are punished, dissenters are surveilled, protesters are treated like enemies, and the public is told to trust whatever version of events the government chooses to release.

It is the coup that occurs when unelected bureaucrats, contractors, data brokers, intelligence analysts, defense executives and crisis managers exercise more practical control over government policy than the voters do.

This is how freedom disappears: not all at once, not in one dramatic seizure of power, but incrementally, bureaucratically, profitably and in the name of national security.

Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us about this in 1961.

A five-star general who understood war better than most modern politicians ever will, Eisenhower cautioned Americans to “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex.” The danger, he warned, was that “misplaced power” would endanger liberty and democratic processes.

He was right.

The military industrial complex has become one of the most powerful governing forces in America.

It consumes trillions of dollars. It shapes foreign policy. It drives domestic policing. It fuels surveillance. It manufactures enemies. It feeds off fear. It rewards failure. It profits from war whether the wars are won, lost or simply kept going forever.

War is no longer merely a policy choice.

It is an economy.

It is a governing philosophy.

It is a way of life.

The permanent war government needs enemies the way a furnace needs fuel. If there are no enemies abroad, it finds them at home. If there is no declared war, it invents undeclared conflicts. If the public grows weary of one threat, it introduces another.

Terrorists. Extremists. Immigrants. Protesters. Hackers. Drug dealers. Foreign powers. Domestic radicals. Enemies of the people. Threats to democracy. Threats to order. Threats to national security.

The names change. The machinery remains the same.

Once the government convinces the public that it is surrounded by enemies, almost anything can be justified: surveillance, censorship, raids, checkpoints, databases, militarized policing, secret courts, indefinite detention, asset forfeiture, no-knock warrants, drone warfare, emergency powers and more war.

This is how a constitutional republic gets converted into a battlefield.

The battlefield is not just Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Ukraine or whatever foreign conflict is next on the docket.

The battlefield is also Main Street.

It is the protest zone. The airport. The school. The public square. The church. The campus. The internet. The courthouse. The traffic stop. The home.

The war comes home because the war machine must keep moving.

That is why local police now look like occupying armies. That is why federal agents are armed to the teeth. That is why surveillance cameras, drones, license plate readers, fusion centers, biometric databases, AI tracking systems and predictive policing programs have become routine features of American life.

The government has spent decades training Americans to accept the architecture of martial law as the price of safety.

First, it sells the public on the threat.

Then it sells the public on the solution.

Then it makes the solution permanent.

This is not a left-right problem.

Both parties built this.

Republicans and Democrats alike have funded the wars, renewed the surveillance powers, armed the police, expanded executive authority, protected intelligence agencies, rewarded defense contractors, and treated the Constitution as an inconvenience whenever fear could be used to silence dissent.

One president abuses power. The next one inherits it. The next one expands it. The next one normalizes it. The next one weaponizes it.

This is how emergency powers become everyday powers.

This is how temporary measures become permanent law.

This is how the president becomes a king in all but name.

And this is how the people become spectators in their own government.

The genius of Seven Days in May was that it understood the temptation of power. General Scott believed he was saving the country. He believed the people were too weak, too foolish or too uninformed to govern themselves. He believed the Constitution was expendable if national security demanded it.

That is always the excuse.

The tyrant always claims to be saving the country.

The general always claims to be protecting the people.

The bureaucrat always claims to be following procedure.

The president always claims to be acting in the national interest.

The police state always claims to be keeping us safe.

But the Constitution does not exist for easy times. It exists for moments of crisis, fear, panic, uncertainty and war. It exists precisely because government officials cannot be trusted to restrain themselves when power is on the line.

That is why the founders divided power.

That is why Congress was given the power to declare war.

That is why the Fourth Amendment restrains searches and seizures.

That is why the First Amendment protects speech, dissent, assembly and the press.

That is why due process exists.

That is why civilian control of the military matters.

That is why secret government is incompatible with self-government.

A people cannot remain free if they do not know what is being done in their name.

A people cannot control a government they are not allowed to see.

A people cannot restrain a war machine whose decisions are hidden behind classified briefings, private contracts, executive privilege and national security claims.

A people cannot be sovereign if the most consequential decisions—war, peace, surveillance, policing, spending and the use of force—are made by unelected power centers beyond their reach.

That is not a republic.

That is managed democracy with a military chain of command.

The Founders did not trust standing armies. They did not trust concentrated power. They did not trust executives who could wage war without the consent of the people’s representatives. They understood that liberty cannot survive when the machinery of force is allowed to operate without meaningful restraint.

Yet that is exactly where we are.

We have allowed the government to wage war without declarations of war.

We have allowed intelligence agencies to operate behind walls of secrecy.

We have allowed presidents to rule by executive order.

We have allowed Congress to become a spectator.

We have allowed the courts to defer to national security.

We have allowed police to become soldiers.

We have allowed corporations to profit from fear.

We have allowed unelected officials to make decisions that alter the course of the nation.

And then we act surprised when no one seems to know who is actually in charge.

The answer is as obvious as it is disturbing.

The permanent war government is in charge.

The machinery is in charge.

The system is in charge.

The president may bark orders, give speeches, post threats, stage photo ops, hold rallies, sign directives and claim victory. But behind him stands an entrenched apparatus of power that survives every election, outlasts every scandal, feeds off every crisis and answers to no one in any meaningful way.

This is the coup that does not end.

It is the coup that hides in budgets, briefings, contracts, classified memos, emergency powers, fusion centers, surveillance systems and military deployments.

It is the coup that does not need to overthrow the president because it can manage him, flatter him, manipulate him, brief him selectively, feed him talking points, and keep the machinery moving while he performs leadership for the cameras.

It is the coup that does not need to abolish Congress because Congress has already surrendered.

It is the coup that does not need to silence the courts because too many judges have already been trained to defer.

It is the coup that does not need to repeal the Constitution because the government has learned how to work around it.

This is the lesson of our age: the greatest threat to freedom is not always a madman seizing power in a single moment of crisis. Sometimes it is a bureaucracy that never sleeps, a war machine that never stops, a security state that never shrinks, and a political class that never says no.

So what do we do?

We stop pretending that elections alone will save us.

We stop confusing partisan victory with constitutional restoration.

We stop trusting presidents to police themselves.

We stop allowing Congress to hide behind fear, party loyalty and national security.

We stop accepting secret government as normal.

We stop treating war as inevitable.

We stop allowing the government to turn every crisis into a blank check for more power.

And we start insisting, relentlessly, that those who claim to defend the United States must defend it with the tools the Constitution supplies.

Not drones. Not secret memos. Not emergency decrees. Not militarized police. Not classified wars. Not surveillance dragnets. Not executive fiat. Not corporate profiteering. Not propaganda.

The Constitution.

If the government wants war, make Congress vote on it.

If the government wants surveillance, make it get a warrant.

If the government wants to police dissent, make it answer to the First Amendment.

If the government wants to spend trillions on war, make it explain why the American people are being robbed blind to enrich defense contractors.

If the government wants emergency powers, make it prove the emergency and surrender the powers when the crisis passes.

If the Pentagon wants to run foreign policy, remind it that in a constitutional republic, the military answers to civilian authority, and civilian authority answers to the people.

The hour is late.

As Seven Days in May warned, you don’t steal a mandate after midnight when the country has its back turned.

Unfortunately, it is long past midnight.

The question now is whether the American people will finally turn around and see what has been done in their name, with their money, against their freedoms, and under the cover of national security.

The permanent war government has had its turn.

It has given us endless wars, bankrupting debt, militarized police, mass surveillance, constitutional erosion, fear-driven politics, and a republic that increasingly resembles an occupied territory.

Enough.

If we are to remain free, the war machine must be brought back under constitutional control.

The generals, bureaucrats, contractors, intelligence agencies, police forces and presidents must all be reminded of the same truth: They do not own this country.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, they do not rule us.

They work for us.

And if they cannot defend America with the Constitution, then they are not defending America at all.

WC: 2903

“I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody.”—Donald Trump

One way or another, the American taxpayers always get screwed by politicians eager to spend our hard-earned dollars on programs and projects that do little to improve our lives, safeguard our freedoms, or secure our future.

Donald Trump—the billionaire trust-fund baby/reality TV showman who transformed himself into a populist champion of working-class Americans—has proven to be no different, and in many ways worse, than the politicians who came before him.

Trump has given new meaning to government corruption, graft, grift, profiteering, self-dealing and pay-to-play politics.

From the proposed White House ballroom and its taxpayer-backed security upgrades, to the high-dollar UFC spectacle planned for the White House lawn, to pardons that function less like mercy than loyalty rewards, to government access increasingly conditioned on political obedience, Trump has turned the presidency into a private rewards program for himself, his donors, his allies and his enforcers.

Every new abuse is wrapped in the language of patriotism, security or justice. Every bill lands, sooner or later, on the backs of the American people.

Thus, rather than draining the swamp, Trump has shown himself to be the veritable swamp monster, mired in the muck and determined to keep it that way.

Trump’s latest grift? A taxpayer-funded slush fund, dressed up as justice, purportedly to compensate those who claim they were targeted by the “weaponization” of the Biden Justice Department and Democrats.

As part of the same settlement, the government also reportedly agreed to bar the IRS from auditing Trump, his family, the Trump Organization and related entities over tax filings and claims predating the agreement—a breathtaking act of self-protection disguised as legal closure that helps shield the president and his empire from the very kind of government scrutiny ordinary Americans are expected to endure without complaint.

Taken together, the payout fund and the audit shield expose the real purpose of this so-called anti-weaponization crusade: not to end weaponized government, but to decide who gets protected by it, who gets paid by it, and who gets crushed by it

Read between the lines of the deliberately vague information provided about this “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” which will be seeded with $1.776 billion in taxpayer funds, and it starts to look suspiciously like a fund to reimburse those convicted, investigated or politically inconvenienced for crossing legal lines in service to Trump’s agenda.

If it looks like corruption—and it smells like corruption—there’s a good chance it’s corruption.

Donald K. Sherman, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, wasn’t mincing words when he described it as “one of the single most corrupt acts in American history.”

At best, this is an outrageous misuse of taxpayer money. At worst, it is yet another perverted form of Trump’s presidential pardons, which have overwhelmingly benefited political loyalists, donors, grifters, extremists, and individuals either convicted of crimes in pursuit of Trump’s ambitions or useful to advancing those ambitions in the future—or both.

The message is unmistakable: commit crimes that benefit those in power, and those in power will absolve you, reimburse you, excuse you, or reward you.

These are not miscarriages of justice being corrected. They are protection payments, signals to future operatives: do what we need you to do, and we will take care of you.

But who will compensate “we the people” for the damage done when the government weaponizes its powers against us?

Who will compensate the people surveilled without warrants, raided without cause, censored for their views, bankrupted by fines and fees, brutalized by militarized police, jailed without due process, dragged through the courts, disappeared into detention centers, or treated as enemies of the state for exercising their constitutional rights?

Who will compensate the victims of a police state that has been weaponized by Republicans and Democrats alike?

That is the real question.

The Trump administration claims this fund is about redressing government weaponization.

Yet at the very same time, it is weaponizing the government against the citizenry: against protesters, immigrants, law firms, judges, journalists, universities, critics, whistleblowers, and anyone else who stands in the way of executive power.

This is what it means to weaponize the government.

When the government turns its power against its own people—through surveillance, retaliation, censorship, and intimidation—it ceases to serve the public and instead becomes a weapon of oppression.

According to the Political Dictionary, “The term ‘weaponize’ refers to the strategic manipulation or transformation of information, institutions, or social issues into tools for gaining political advantage.” That can mean exploiting existing laws, turning neutral institutions into partisan weapons, using the bureaucracy to delegitimize opponents, or rallying a base by convincing them that oppression is justice.

Time and again, presidents and power-hungry politicians have stretched—or outright shattered—the limits of their authority, weaponizing government power through unjust laws, surveillance, censorship, detention, intimidation and suppression.

Each power grab is another way of turning government into a weapon.

John Adams used the Alien and Sedition Acts to prosecute journalists and political opponents.

Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, allowing the military to detain individuals without trial and suppressing Confederate sympathizers and political dissenters.

Under Woodrow Wilson, the Espionage and Sedition Acts were used to crack down on anti-war activists, socialists, and labor organizers, including Eugene V. Debs, who spoke out against World War I.

Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order that led to the internment of over 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II, based on suspicions of disloyalty, despite little to no evidence.

Richard Nixon harnessed the power of the FBI, CIA, and IRS, to harass, spy on and sabotage his political opponents and perceived enemies.

Spanning numerous presidential administrations, from FDR to Nixon, the FBI’s covert intelligence program COINTELPRO was used to infiltrate, discredit and disrupt civil rights leaders, anti-war activists, and other political dissidents.

In a bid to fight so-called disinformation, Biden pressured social media companies to censor and suppress individuals expressing views perceived as conspiratorial or extremist, especially as they related to COVID-19.

And then there’s Donald Trump, who is setting new records for how far he’s willing to go to retaliate against his perceived enemies and sidestep the rule of law.

Indeed, Ken Hughes, an investigative journalist who spent two decades listening to Richard Nixon’s Secret White House Tapes, has concluded that Nixon’s abuses of presidential power—which included weaponizing the government to sabotage Vietnam peace talks, manipulate the timing of withdrawal from Vietnam, and spring former Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa from prison in return for political support—pale beside Trump’s abuses.

Trump, who once vowed to end government overreach and the weaponization of the federal government, now openly uses its full force against his critics, dismantling democratic norms, consolidating power in ways that defy the Constitution, and directing an all-out weaponization of the federal government against his perceived enemies.

Those “enemies” now include anyone who dares to oppose him.

If Trump were merely a blowhard, that would be one thing.

Unfortunately, having populated his administration with individuals more loyal to him than to the Constitution, Trump has gotten drunk on power.

The danger is not Trump alone. The danger is Trump backed by enablers-to-abuse: the many minions within his administration and beyond who are eager to carry out unlawful orders, defy the courts, ignore Congress, trample rights, and butcher the Constitution in the name of putting America first.

If this keeps up, America—once held up as a bastion of freedom and economic opportunity—will be the last place anyone thinks of when they hear the words freedom, justice and equality.

Every action taken by the Trump administration in defiance of the rule of law—whether or not that action is dressed up as national security, law and order, border control, anti-corruption, or anti-weaponization—pushes us that much closer to the complete dismantling of our constitutional republic.

Don’t be so carried away by fear-inducing tales of rapists, foreign invaders, corruption, crime waves and political persecution that you let the government get away with murder: the painful execution of our rights.

That way lies tyranny.

You can see the pattern forming already.

When protesters are snatched up, arrested, prosecuted or surveilled for challenging government policy, that is government weaponized against dissent.

When immigrants are rounded up, chained, deported or detained without meaningful due process—without being properly identified, charged, heard, or allowed to challenge the government’s claims—that is government weaponized against due process.

When law firms are punished for the clients they represent, barred from federal buildings, stripped of security clearances, threatened with the loss of contracts, or pressured into providing hundreds of millions of dollars in legal services aligned with the administration’s priorities, that is government weaponized against the right to counsel.

When judges are derided, defied or threatened for ruling against the president’s agenda, that is government weaponized against the separation of powers.

When universities are threatened with funding cuts, investigations and ideological purges for failing to toe the government’s line, that is government weaponized against academic freedom and independent thought.

When journalists and critics are branded enemies, liars, radicals, criminals or traitors for questioning official narratives, that is government weaponized against the First Amendment.

When government websites, archives, agencies and public records are rewritten, scrubbed or politicized in order to reshape history, control memory, and enforce ideological obedience, that is government weaponized against truth.

When the president threatens other nations militarily, talks openly about seizing foreign lands, stirs up international tensions, rattles the war drums, and then claims wartime powers at home, that is government weaponized against peace, liberty and constitutional restraint.

Trump, adept at twisting facts and spinning lies, insists these end-runs around the rule of law are for our safety.

Don’t believe him. Words are cheap.

More importantly, don’t trust him. Bind him down with the chains of the Constitution.

The only real protection we have against tyranny is the rule of law, provided that the people and the system of government still hold the rule of law as inviolable.

That is our real power: the extent to which we hold fast to the Constitution and demand that the government and its agents do so, as well.

The moment that we relent in that commitment—the moment that we look the other way and let first a few encroachments slide, then ever more and more—is the moment the Constitution loses its power to protect us against tyranny.

That is what is unfolding right now.

This is the devil’s bargain that we are being asked to enter into with Trump: empty promises and a one-way street to a dictatorship in exchange for our freedoms.

Watch out.

When any politician claims to be saving you money by imposing tariffs that ramp up inflation and cutting government programs aimed at educating the masses, feeding the hungry, and helping the poor, disabled and elderly, all the while spending taxpayer money on his own lavish lifestyle and self-serving political programs, you’d better beware. Your hard-earned dollars will be next in line to be seized, spent and squandered.

When any politician suggests that you relinquish your freedoms—of speech, assembly, due process, association, etc.—in exchange for promises of greater security, you’d better beware. Your freedoms will be next on the chopping block.

When any politician persuades you to look the other way while innocent individuals are rounded up alongside suspected criminals just because they look a certain way, talk a certain way, worship a certain way, protest a certain way, or belong to a particular demographic, you’d better beware. Your right to due process will be next.

When any politician comes up with a vast array of reasons why he doesn’t need to obey court rulings—because they were issued verbally, because his power trumps that of the courts, because the courts are biased, because national security demands obedience, because the law ends at the border—you’d better beware. This shifty reasoning for breaking the law could be used against you next.

There can be no doubt about the nature of what is taking place right now.

This is government weaponized into war.

President Trump’s justification for defying the courts and doing whatever he wants in pursuit of his political agenda (arresting protesters, carrying out mass arrests and deportations, muzzling critics, seizing funds, dismantling agencies, usurping congressional powers) is that “this is war.”

Here’s the thing, though: Trump may be using the language of war to bypass the Constitution at every turn, but the only war being waged is a war against the Constitution, the rule of law and the American people.

Congress, which has the sole power to declare war under Article I, Section 8, Clause 11, has not declared war on the American people. And still Trump is using the emergency powers and wartime rhetoric of the presidency to sidestep accountability and due process.

In ruling after ruling, the courts, which have the judicial power to rein in overreach and misconduct, have pushed back against the Trump administration’s steady dismantling of constitutional limits. And still Trump is unilaterally hacking away at the very foundations of our system of government.

If the president refuses to be held accountable, insists his power is supreme, abuses the power of his office to wreak havoc and revenge, reduces our republic to rubble, tramples the Constitution, and disregards the rule of law, he is aligning himself with every despot, dictator and tyrant to have walked the earth.

We’ve been here before. We know how this story ends.

It takes time and effort and a willingness on the part of “we the people” to look beyond our differences and stand united in opposition to oppression, but when we do that, freedom prevails in the end.

This year will mark the 250^th anniversary of the birth of this country, when America’s founders declared their independence from King George’s tyranny.

What’s just as important, however, is what came before that: the small steps of rebellion, resistance and outrage that said, “enough is enough.”

What we are now experiencing is not simply a partisan power struggle. It is the weaponization of the machinery of government for compliance and control.

The objective: obedience.

The strategy: destabilize the economy, polarize the populace, escalate racial and political tensions, intensify the use of violence, and then, when all hell breaks loose, clamp down on the nation for the good of the people and the security of the nation.

The outcome for this particular conflict is already foregone if we refuse to resist: the Deep State wins.

The Deep State wins by ensuring that we are censored, silenced, muzzled, gagged, zoned out, caged in and shut down.

It wins by monitoring our speech and activities for any sign of “extremist” activity.

It wins by ensuring that we are estranged from each other and kept at a distance from those who are supposed to represent us.

It wins by saddling us with taxation without representation and a government without the consent of the governed.

It wins by terminating the Constitution—or rewriting it until it no longer restrains those in power.

So where does that leave us?

“We” may have contributed to our downfall through our inaction and gullibility, but we are also the only hope for a free future.

After all, the Constitution begins with those three beautiful words, “We the people.”

Those three words were intended as a reminder to future generations that there is no government without us: our sheer numbers, our muscle, our economy, our physical presence in this land.

When we forget that—when we allow the “me” of a self-absorbed, narcissistic, politically polarizing culture to override our civic duties as citizens to collectively stand up to tyranny and make the government play by the rules of the Constitution—that is when tyranny rises and freedom falls.

Remember, there is power in numbers.

Not the kinds of numbers that Trump likes to spout about landslide victories and electoral mandates, but the most powerful numbers of all: the sheer, overwhelming mass of humanity that is “we the people” of these United States of America.

If there is any means left to us for thwarting the government in its relentless march towards outright dictatorship, it rests with us.

Ultimately, that’s what the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution is all about: it affirms that “we the people” have all the power, and what powers we do not explicitly give to the federal government or the states, we retain.

We may appoint government representatives to act in our stead, but we never relinquish that power altogether.

That’s where Trump and his Deep State handlers get it wrong. Speaking through him and his administration, they claim that this dismantling of the federal government is a bid to return power to local communities and state governments, but it’s not their government to dismantle, nor is it their power to return.

We are the government.

We are the power.

And it’s time “we the people” reminded the government and its henchmen of that important fact.

The power still lies with us.

We must resist every attempt to erode our freedoms, demand accountability, and uphold the Constitution before it’s too late.

It’s time to invalidate governmental laws, tactics and policies that are illegitimate, egregious or blatantly unconstitutional.

Nullify everything the government does that flies in the face of the Constitution.

Flood your representatives’ phone lines, inboxes and townhall meetings with your discontent.

Protest everything that tramples on the Constitution.

Stand up for your own rights, of course, but more importantly, stand up for the rights of those with whom you might disagree.

Defend freedom at all costs. Defend justice at all costs. Make no exceptions based on race, religion, creed, politics, immigration status, sexual orientation, etc.

Don’t play semantics. Don’t justify. Don’t politicize it.

If it carries even a whiff of tyranny, oppose it.

Demand that your representatives in government cut you a better deal, one that abides by the Constitution and doesn’t just attempt to sidestep it. That’s their job: make them do it.

And don’t let them distract you with slush funds, payouts, pardons and political theater disguised as justice.

If the government is going to compensate anyone for being victimized by weaponized power, then start with “we the people.”

Start with the Americans whose rights have been trampled by SWAT teams, surveillance dragnets, censorship regimes, secret watchlists, police brutality, asset forfeiture schemes, no-knock raids, indefinite detentions, politically motivated prosecutions, and every other tactic by which the police state has turned the Constitution into collateral damage.

Start with the people forced to pay for their own oppression.

Until then, this so-called Anti-Weaponization Fund is not justice.

It is hush money for the powerful, paid for by the powerless.

It is the weaponized government rewarding its own while leaving the rest of us to foot the bill.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, all freedoms hang together.

They fall together, as well.

WC: 3170

“Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information—misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information—information that creates the illusion of knowing something, but which in fact leads one away from knowing.”—Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

Call it what it is: a heist.

The corruption, cronyism, and self-dealing that now define the American government—under Donald Trump in particular—amount to a slow-motion stick-up carried out in broad daylight.

But here’s the trick: it’s a heist hidden behind spectacle. The Trump administration is flooding the stage with noise so “we the people” don’t notice what’s happening behind the curtain.

We’re being manipulated into watching the wrong thing.

The distractions are part of the plan to rob us blind.

You don’t have to look far to see how the con works. Nowhere is the hustle more obvious than in how the presidency itself is being used.

For the Trump family, the presidency isn’t public service. It’s an all-access pass to wealth, power, and privilege—an ongoing exercise in how to squeeze maximum personal gain out of public office.

Taxpayers foot the bill for this massive grift: security for President Trump’s extended family, luxury travel, private business ventures, weekends at Trump-owned golf resorts, and vanity projects with a hidden price tag for the privilege of bearing Trump’s name.

We pay for it. They profit from it.

Even Congress is in on the game.

In a blatant act of political pandering, Senate Republicans are trying to slip a provision into an ICE funding bill that would direct $1 billion in taxpayer money toward Trump’s long-desired White House ballroom—bypassing debate and oversight.

A billion dollars.

Not to lower your grocery bill. Not to fix your healthcare. Not for infrastructure that serves the public.

For a ballroom.

A taxpayer-funded space where donors, insiders, and elites can gather and trade access—while the average American is left outside looking in.

The grift has become so obvious, Americans are finally taking notice.

Poll after poll shows the same thing: people are fed up.

Not just with the economy but with a president who seems more focused on himself, his image, and his vanity projects than on the people he’s supposed to serve.

A Washington Post poll puts it clearly: disapproval with Trump’s job performance is rising, with 62% unhappy about his job as president, 76% dissatisfied with how he’s dealing with the cost of living, 72% unhappy about his handling of inflation, 65% against his handling of the economy, and 66% opposed to the war with Iran.

They’re right to be unhappy.

While Americans struggle to make rent, pay for groceries, and stay afloat, the government is bankrolling ballrooms.

But here’s what most Americans are missing: the ballroom isn’t just a vanity project. It’s a distraction.

So are his plans to redo the East Potomac Golf Course.

So is his repainting of the Reflecting Pool.

So is the spectacle of him staging a UFC fight on the White House lawn.

So are his endless, bombastic, outrage-driven, manic, headline-making Truth Social posts.

Trump is good at pushing people’s buttons. He knows exactly what will outrage, distract, and drag people into one more pointless argument.

The bigger and louder, the better. That’s the show.

And while we’re watching Trump’s bread-and-circus antics, something else is happening.

The real damage to our republic is being buried—delayed, redacted, denied.

This shell game keeps our attention fixed on Trump’s costly antics while his partners-in-crime use the diversion to lock down the country and strip us of what’s rightfully ours.

It’s not just one elaborate ruse, either, but a series of cover-ups and obfuscations meant to keep us from looking too closely or asking too many questions about what’s really going on.

What began as a scramble to redirect public attention—from questions about Epstein to war, White House spectacles, immigration crackdowns, and culture-war theater—has become an ever-widening web of manufactured distractions and diversions.

Consider what’s happening behind the scenes.

Investigative reports reveal that the Trump administration has refused to fully disclose the extent of the damage inflicted by Iran on U.S. military installations.

Satellite imagery has been restricted. Access has been limited. Reporters are forced to rely on foreign aerial images and secondhand accounts just to piece together what’s happening.

And the lack of transparency doesn’t stop there.

Reports suggest the Pentagon has downplayed casualty figures of U.S. troops killed or wounded during the Iran war.

Oversight of DHS, ICE, and private contractors is being curtailed.

Human rights abuses are mounting, while accountability disappears behind a wall of secrecy.

They don’t want us looking too closely—because the less we see, the easier it is to take from us.

We’re meant to watch the show—not the government ledger.

When we can’t see the damage—at home or abroad—we can’t measure the cost. But we’re being asked to pay, and the price is mounting daily.

The same man who bankrupted his own businesses is now running the same play on the U.S. government.

Consider the Trump economy by the numbers. They tell the real story.

The government is spending more than it takes in. By a lot.

The national debt is now bigger than the entire U.S. economy. For the first time since World War II, the debt has surpassed 100 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP).

This is no small thing.

The federal government is now spending $1.33 for every dollar it collects.

And interest payments on that $31 trillion national debt are consuming one out of every seven dollars spent by the government. As Robert Reich, a former Secretary of Labor, warns, “That’s money we don’t spend on education, healthcare, roads and bridges, social safety nets, or (if we actually needed more spending on it) national defense.”

We don’t need an economist to spell it out for us, but there are ample warnings about the toll Trump’s costly policies are taking on the economy.

As Douglas Elmendorf, former director of the Congressional Budget Office, explains, rising debt fuels higher interest rates and inflation, driving up the cost of mortgages, car loans, and everyday life for ordinary Americans.

This is not sustainable.

While both political parties share responsibility for decades of fiscal mismanagement, the Trump administration has accelerated the crisis through a toxic combination of reckless spending, tax giveaways, and costly, unauthorized wars.

Promises to “drain the swamp,” balance the budget, and restore fiscal discipline have given way to ballooning deficits and trillion-dollar spending packages dressed up as economic revival.

Even the administration’s so-called cost-cutting measures fail to hold up under closer scrutiny.

Despite the propaganda pushed by DOGE and its supporters, nothing about the Trump administration has added up to savings for the American people.

Instead, Americans are seeing cuts to healthcare, education, housing assistance, and programs that provide economic stability.

At the very moment Americans are struggling to make ends meet, the Trump administration is spending big—at taxpayer expense—on projects that appeal to Trump’s ego, stoke his vanity, consolidate his power, reward his allies, or entrench the police state’s machinery of control.

Nero fiddled while Rome burned.

Trump is playing golf while America burns—and he keeps striking the match.

While “we the people” are paying more for everything, Trump is getting richer off the presidency—at taxpayer expense.

Much richer.

Billions added to his fortune—while in office. His family’s wealth has exploded.

Trump’s net worth has surged to an estimated $6.5 billion. According to Forbes, Trump added $1.4 billion in a single year by leveraging the presidency for profit—fueled by cryptocurrency ventures, revived licensing deals, favorable legal outcomes, and a rush of foreign business interests seeking proximity to power.

Trump’s family is also cashing in, doubling their net worth since the 2024 election to an estimated $10 billion.

While the Trumps aren’t the first family to leverage the presidency for profit, as Forbes points out, “no first family has used the office to make as much money as Donald Trump’s.”

You know who’s not profiting?

We the people. Especially those of us that do not belong to the political and corporate elite.

For most Americans, life is getting harder.

Gas prices are up. Groceries are up. Healthcare costs are up.

Paychecks? Not keeping up.

And what is the government doing? Not easing the burden. Not restoring balance.

And Trump?

He jets off to Mar-a-Lago at taxpayer expense. He golfs while dragging a full security detail along. He’s turning the White House—and by extension, much of the nation’s capital—into his personal domain, redecorating according to his personal tastes, with little concern for the wishes of the American people.

He lives like a king, while we pay for his excesses, one way or another.

He’s slashing government spending for programs that educate, protect, and support Americans, while building a $1.5 trillion war machine and boosting all aspects of the police state that treats us like suspects—locking us down and locking us up.

He’s building monuments to his own ego: a $400 million ballroom—now potentially a $1 billion taxpayer-funded monument to access and influence if Senate Republicans get their way; professional, taxpayer-funded golf courses that take the place of public parks; a new Trump-class “Golden Fleet” of battleships, costing $13 billion each.

He’s pushing for airports and train stations and other infrastructure to bear his name, then tacking on dubious licensing agreements for the so-called privilege.

At the same time, medical research is gutted. Job training gets cut. Environmental protections get axed. Disaster relief gets hollowed out. Welfare for the most vulnerable gets short-changed.

This isn’t just mismanagement. This isn’t just bad policy.

This is a system that takes from us and gives to the corporate and political oligarchic elite.

We pay more. “They” gain more.

Wars only make it worse.

Every missile. Every deployment. Every “operation.”

Paid for by “we the people.” Not just in taxes—but in higher prices, higher debt, and fewer services.

Pete Hegseth has been boasting that thanks to Trump’s $1.5 trillion defense budget, the Department of War is running war like a business.

The truth is, they’re turning war into big business and cashing in.

In one of the most glaring examples of this, the Associated Press reports that Trump’s sons have, in his second term, expanded their business interests beyond hotels and golf courses to a broad range of investments that include cryptocurrency ventures, prediction markets, federal contractors making rocket parts, and rare earth magnets.

Conveniently timed to coincide with Trump’s war on Iran, his sons have also gotten into the drone manufacturing business, selling to countries in the Middle East eager to curry favor with the Trump administration.

As Richard Painter, a former chief White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush, observed, “These countries are under enormous pressure to buy from the sons of the president so he will do what they want. This is going to be the first family of a president to make a lot of money off war—a war he didn't get the consent of Congress for.”

This is how you turn government into a profit machine.

Once again, we find ourselves confronted by the age-old debate over our national priorities and the choice between investing heavily in guns or butter—military might or domestic needs.

Once again, we find ourselves watching from the sidelines as big-talking politicians justify stealing from “we the people” in order to pad the pockets of the military industrial complex.

As The Guardian notes, to help pay for his expanded military budget, “Trump is seeking a 10% cut in discretionary domestic spending, chopping such popular programs as medical research, job training, home heating assistance, environmental protection and disaster relief after hurricanes.”

This is exactly the moral theft President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about: stealing from social and domestic needs in order to build up the military-industrial complex.

In Trump’s case, he wants guns and caviar: military might for the empire, wealth for himself, and less for America’s most vulnerable.

“We’re fighting wars,” Trump announced at an Easter luncheon. “It’s not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare … They can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal. We have to take care of one thing: military protection.”

Unfortunately, Trump’s version of military protection is a costly display of macho posturing.

Rebranding the Defense Department as the Department of War will cost taxpayers upwards of $125 million in new signs and stationery.

As Steven Greenhouse concludes for The Guardian, “In seeking a mammoth increase in military spending while cutting social programs, Trump is again showing how hollow his promises were about making life better for typical Americans.”

Marjorie Taylor Greene was right to course-correct. “I don’t have Trump Derangement Syndrome,” she said. “I have Trump Disappointment Syndrome.”

Trump Disappointment Syndrome is spreading.

This is, unfortunately, how the game works: less for us, more for them—paid for by “we the people.”

Yet just as important as the math involved in bleeding us dry is the conspiracy of distraction that keeps us in the dark about the theft in our midst.

That’s where the distractions come in: the ballroom, the golf course, the spectacles on the White House lawn.

Give the public something to watch. Something to argue about. Something impossible to ignore.

They want our outrage, not our scrutiny.

Keep the spotlight bright, so no one notices what’s happening in the shadows.

While the public watches the spectacle, the money is moving.

The spectacle is the decoy. The theft is the point.

The damage is being hidden—but the bill is still coming due.

We’re told this is policy. This is leadership. This is necessary for national security and the good of the country.

But what we’re really being given is a show, with Trump playing the part of the greatest showman.

The show has to be loud enough to keep the public’s attention. It has to be constant enough to keep us from asking the real question: where is the money going?

Because while we’re watching the show, the hold-up is taking place. The tellers are filling the bags with stolen loot. And they’re using the government as the get-away car.

That is how the con works.

As we warned in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is how the machinery of the police state expands: not just through endless war, unchecked power, and a government that no longer answers to the people—but through insider profiteering, cronyism and corruption disguised as reform, efficiency and nationalism.

That’s the Trump hustle: while we’re being distracted by the spectacle, they’re emptying the vault.

WC: 2455

See how TRI fought back.

The Rutherford Institute’s 2025 Annual Report documents a year in which constitutional freedoms faced some of the greatest assaults in modern American history. In 2025, the federal government expanded executive power, deployed the National Guard into civilian communities, intensified surveillance partnerships with Big Tech, targeted political dissent, and advanced policies that erode due process, privacy, and free expression.

Against this backdrop, TRI remained steadfast in its mission: to make the government play by the rules of the Constitution.

This report chronicles TRI’s major litigation, advocacy efforts, investigations, and public education initiatives—from challenging speech-based detentions and predictive policing to exposing thought-crime policies, financial deplatforming, religious discrimination, and government coverups.

Read the full report to see how TRI is defending liberty in an age of unchecked power.

2025 Annual Report: Protecting Liberty in a Year of Unchecked Government Power

Today, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments over whether President Trump exceeded his constitutional authority by unilaterally imposing tariffs under broad “national security” powers.

While it may sound like an economic dispute, this case strikes at the heart of our constitutional order.

Under the Constitution, only Congress—the branch closest to the people—has the power to impose taxes and tariffs. Yet for decades, presidents from both parties have relied on vague emergency statutes to expand executive control over trade, budgets, and national security with little oversight.

The Framers debated this very issue during the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Having just thrown off a monarchy that ruled by decree, they vested the taxing and spending powers firmly in Congress—the branch most accountable to the people. As James Madison later wrote in The Federalist No. 58, “This power over the purse may, in fact, be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people.” It was meant to ensure that no president could spend—or tax—the nation into submission without the consent of its citizens’ representatives.

Whether it’s tariffs, surveillance, or the use of military force, every such expansion edges us closer to government by fiat—the very form of rule the Founders warned against.

The question before the Court is bigger than tariffs: it’s whether the limits on presidential power still mean what they say.

Cases: Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump (Tariffs), Trump v. V.O.S. Selections

Stay up-to-speed on The Rutherford Institute’s ongoing work to sound the alarm over threats to our freedoms, restore the balance of power, and make the government play by the rules of the Constitution: https://www.rutherford.org/signup

Power and the Constitution is The Rutherford Institute’s ongoing series examining how the actions of government—no matter who holds office—measure up against the limits set by the U.S. Constitution.

The Rutherford Institute is sounding a renewed warning against efforts by the government to amass extensive, sensitive private information about individual citizens and their households through its mandatory American Community Survey (ACS). Rutherford Institute attorneys have also formally lodged concerns over a proposal by the U.S. Census Bureau to expand the already exhaustive, invasive ongoing monthly survey to include questions about each household member’s sex assigned at birth, current gender (including transgender, nonbinary, or others), and sexual orientation.

For individuals alarmed by the U.S. Census Bureau’s efforts to collect and track private information about the citizenry, their home life and personal habits, The Rutherford Institute has made its updated “Constitutional Q&A: American Community Survey” guidelines available at www.rutherford.org. The Institute has also provided a form letter of complaint for lodging objections to the ACS with the Census Bureau.

“In an age when the government has significant technological resources at its disposal to not only carry out warrantless surveillance on American citizens but also to harvest and mine that data for its own dubious purposes, whether it be crime-mapping or profiling based on race or religion, the potential for abuse is grave,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “Any attempt by the government to encroach upon the citizenry’s privacy rights or establish a system by which the populace can be targeted, tracked and singled out must be met with extreme caution. The American Community Survey qualifies as a government program whose purpose, while seemingly benign, raises significant constitutional concerns.”

The American Community Survey (ACS) is a highly invasive, ongoing monthly survey issued by the U.S. Census Bureau to collect detailed housing and socioeconomic data from about 3.5 million households each year. The ACS requires recipients to provide the government with extensive and sensitive information about each and every person in their household, including their work schedules, their physical disabilities and limitations, the number of automobiles kept at the residence, and their access to phone-service and the internet. The information collected by the ACS is not anonymous: the survey is to contain the name, age, sex, race, and home address of each person at the residence, along with the phone number of the person who fills out the form. There are so many questions on the ACS that it is estimated the average household will have to take 40 minutes to answer the questions. When people do not respond online or by mail, the Census Bureau repeatedly sends field representatives to their homes at unannounced times to harass and interview them until they answer the survey. People have reported that field representatives remained outside their houses for hours while waiting for them to arrive home or come out, have walked around their homes, and have talked to minor children when parents were away. The questions on the ACS are so invasive that many initially think the survey is a phishing scam to steal their personal information. Institute attorneys warn that the data collected and amassed by the Census Bureau through the ACS would be a goldmine for criminals.

The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties organization, defends individuals whose constitutional rights have been threatened or violated and educates the public on a wide spectrum of issues affecting their freedoms.

WASHINGTON, DC —In a major setback for free speech and judicial oversight, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit has refused to rehear the case of Mahmoud Khalil, a lawful U.S. resident detained after engaging in anti-war protest activity critical of U.S. support for Israel’s military actions in Gaza. Khalil was among the first lawful residents targeted by the Trump administration for his political views.

In a blistering dissent joined by three federal judges, the court’s refusal to reconsider the case was condemned as a dangerous abandonment of the judiciary’s constitutional role—one that could allow the government to jail individuals for protected political speech while delaying meaningful judicial review for months or even years. The dissent warned that the Third Circuit’s ruling effectively allows the government to silence speech first and answer constitutional questions later—if at all—while stripping federal courts of their traditional role in protecting constitutional rights. The judges further cautioned that the decision “imperils the civil liberties” not only of Mahmoud Khalil, but of similarly situated noncitizens across the country.

“What makes this ruling especially dangerous is that the judiciary is effectively being told to stand aside while the executive branch targets political speech,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “Once courts stop acting as a check on government power, every constitutional liberty is at risk.”

Mahmoud Khalil, a lawful permanent resident and graduate of Columbia University, was arrested by federal agents in March 2025 after engaging in nonviolent protest activity critical of U.S. foreign policy and Israel’s military actions in Gaza. Although he was not accused of any violence or criminal wrongdoing, the government sought to detain and deport him under a rarely used statute allowing the Secretary of State to remove noncitizens for speech deemed contrary to U.S. foreign policy interests. Khalil was arrested at his home without a warrant in front of his pregnant wife, transported across the country in shackles to a detention facility in Louisiana, and detained for more than 100 days while challenging his confinement in federal court.

A federal district court later found that the government’s actions likely violated due process when combined with First Amendment protections and ordered Khalil released. However, a divided Third Circuit panel ruled that federal courts lack jurisdiction to immediately hear Khalil’s constitutional challenge while immigration proceedings are ongoing, effectively forcing him and others similarly situated to wait months or years before courts can meaningfully review claims that their detention was retaliatory and unconstitutional.  In dissenting from the court’s refusal to rehear the case, Judge Krause warned that the judiciary cannot fulfill its constitutional role “if we write ourselves out of relevance and leave the Executive Branch to check itself.” The dissent further warned that the ruling undermines habeas corpus protections and risks leaving detainees without any meaningful avenue for timely judicial review. Warning that the ruling opens the door to government retaliation against protected political speech while shielding those actions from timely judicial review, a broad coalition of civil liberties organizations—which includes the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), PEN America, The Rutherford Institute, and the First Amendment Lawyers Association—had filed an amicus brief in Khalil v. Trump urging the full Third Circuit to overturn the panel’s ruling.

Jenin Younes with the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee advanced the arguments in the Khalil v. Trump amicus brief.

The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties organization, defends individuals whose constitutional rights have been threatened or violated and educates the public on a wide spectrum of issues affecting their freedoms.

Who is actually running the government?

That is no longer a rhetorical question.

As America’s war with Iran lurches from escalation to ceasefire to renewed threats of military force, Americans are being asked to trust that someone, somewhere, knows what they are doing.

But who?

This is the constitutional crisis hiding in plain sight.

The question is not merely whether Donald Trump is fit to lead. The question is whether any president still leads in any meaningful constitutional sense once the permanent war government gets moving.

The Iran war is merely the latest test case.

If the war machine keeps moving even when the public cannot tell who is steering it, then what remains of constitutional government?

This is the nightmare Rod Serling warned about in Seven Days in May.

Released in 1964, Seven Days in May imagined a dramatic military coup: generals plotting in secret to overthrow an unpopular president because they believed they knew better than the American people what was best for the nation.

The coup is eventually foiled. The republic is saved. The Constitution survives.

At least on screen.

In the real world, the plot has thickened and spread out over decades.

The old fear was that the military might seize power from the civilian government.

The modern reality is that the permanent government does not need to seize power.

It already has it.

The coup no longer requires generals in smoke-filled rooms plotting to overthrow the president at midnight. It does not require tanks on Pennsylvania Avenue or soldiers storming the Capitol. It does not even require an official suspension of the Constitution.

All it requires is secrecy, fear, endless war, executive power, emergency declarations, classified intelligence, compliant courts, cowardly legislators, corporate profiteers, militarized police, and a public too distracted, exhausted or frightened to resist.

That coup has been underway for decades.

It is the coup that occurs when Congress surrenders its war powers to the president.

It is the coup that occurs when presidents of both parties wage war without meaningful constitutional authorization.

It is the coup that occurs when intelligence agencies spy on the American people and then hide behind national security.

It is the coup that occurs when federal agencies arm themselves like military units.

It is the coup that occurs when local police are transformed into extensions of the military.

It is the coup that occurs when whistleblowers are punished, dissenters are surveilled, protesters are treated like enemies, and the public is told to trust whatever version of events the government chooses to release.

It is the coup that occurs when unelected bureaucrats, contractors, data brokers, intelligence analysts, defense executives and crisis managers exercise more practical control over government policy than the voters do.

This is how freedom disappears: not all at once, not in one dramatic seizure of power, but incrementally, bureaucratically, profitably and in the name of national security.

Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us about this in 1961.

A five-star general who understood war better than most modern politicians ever will, Eisenhower cautioned Americans to “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex.” The danger, he warned, was that “misplaced power” would endanger liberty and democratic processes.

He was right.

The military industrial complex has become one of the most powerful governing forces in America.

This is not a left-right problem.

Both parties built this.

Republicans and Democrats alike have funded the wars, renewed the surveillance powers, armed the police, expanded executive authority, protected intelligence agencies, rewarded defense contractors, and treated the Constitution as an inconvenience whenever fear could be used to silence dissent.

One president abuses power. The next one inherits it. The next one expands it. The next one normalizes it. The next one weaponizes it.

This is how emergency powers become everyday powers.

This is how temporary measures become permanent law.

This is how the president becomes a king in all but name.

And this is how the people become spectators in their own government.

This is exactly where we are.

We have allowed the government to wage war without declarations of war.

We have allowed intelligence agencies to operate behind walls of secrecy.

We have allowed presidents to rule by executive order.

We have allowed Congress to become a spectator.

We have allowed the courts to defer to national security.

We have allowed police to become soldiers.

We have allowed corporations to profit from fear.

We have allowed unelected officials to make decisions that alter the course of the nation.

And then we act surprised when no one seems to know who is actually in charge.

The answer is as obvious as it is disturbing.

The permanent war government is in charge.

This is the coup that does not end.

This is the lesson of our age: the greatest threat to freedom is not always a madman seizing power in a single moment of crisis. Sometimes it is a bureaucracy that never sleeps, a war machine that never stops, a security state that never shrinks, and a political class that never says no.

So what do we do?

We stop allowing the government to turn every crisis into a blank check for more power.

And we start insisting, relentlessly, that those who claim to defend the United States must defend it with the tools the Constitution supplies.

If the government wants war, make Congress vote on it.

If the government wants surveillance, make it get a warrant.

If the government wants to police dissent, make it answer to the First Amendment.

If the government wants to spend trillions on war, make it explain why the American people are being robbed blind to enrich defense contractors.

If the government wants emergency powers, make it prove the emergency and surrender the powers when the crisis passes.

If the Pentagon wants to run foreign policy, remind it that in a constitutional republic, the military answers to civilian authority, and civilian authority answers to the people.

The permanent war government has given us endless wars, bankrupting debt, militarized police, mass surveillance, constitutional erosion, fear-driven politics, and a republic that increasingly resembles an occupied territory.

If we are to remain free, the war machine must be brought back under constitutional control.

The generals, bureaucrats, contractors, intelligence agencies, police forces and presidents must all be reminded of the same truth: They do not own this country.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, they do not rule us.

They work for us.

WC: 1096

One way or another, the American taxpayers always get screwed by politicians eager to spend our hard-earned dollars on programs and projects that do little to improve our lives, safeguard our freedoms, or secure our future.

Donald Trump—the billionaire trust-fund baby/reality TV showman who transformed himself into a populist champion of working-class Americans—has proven to be no different, and in many ways worse, than the politicians who came before him.

Trump has given new meaning to government corruption, graft, grift, profiteering, self-dealing and pay-to-play politics.

From the proposed White House ballroom and its taxpayer-backed security upgrades, to the high-dollar UFC spectacle planned for the White House lawn, to pardons that function less like mercy than loyalty rewards, to government access increasingly conditioned on political obedience, Trump has turned the presidency into a private rewards program for himself, his donors, his allies and his enforcers.

Every new abuse is wrapped in the language of patriotism, security or justice. Every bill lands, sooner or later, on the backs of the American people.

Thus, rather than draining the swamp, Trump has shown himself to be the veritable swamp monster, mired in the muck and determined to keep it that way.

Trump’s latest grift? A taxpayer-funded slush fund, dressed up as justice, purportedly to compensate those who claim they were targeted by the “weaponization” of the Biden Justice Department and Democrats.

As part of the same settlement, the government also reportedly agreed to bar the IRS from auditing Trump, his family, the Trump Organization and related entities over tax filings and claims predating the agreement—a breathtaking act of self-protection disguised as legal closure that helps shield the president and his empire from the very kind of government scrutiny ordinary Americans are expected to endure without complaint.

Taken together, the payout fund and the audit shield expose the real purpose of this so-called anti-weaponization crusade: not to end weaponized government, but to decide who gets protected by it, who gets paid by it, and who gets crushed by it

Read between the lines of the deliberately vague information provided about this “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” which will be seeded with $1.776 billion in taxpayer funds, and it starts to look suspiciously like a fund to reimburse those convicted, investigated or politically inconvenienced for crossing legal lines in service to Trump’s agenda.

The message is unmistakable: commit crimes that benefit those in power, and those in power will absolve you, reimburse you, excuse you, or reward you.

These are not miscarriages of justice being corrected. They are protection payments, signals to future operatives: do what we need you to do, and we will take care of you.

But who will compensate “we the people” for the damage done when the government weaponizes its powers against us?

Who will compensate the people surveilled without warrants, raided without cause, censored for their views, bankrupted by fines and fees, brutalized by militarized police, jailed without due process, dragged through the courts, disappeared into detention centers, or treated as enemies of the state for exercising their constitutional rights?

Who will compensate the victims of a police state that has been weaponized by Republicans and Democrats alike?

That is the real question.

The Trump administration claims this fund is about redressing government weaponization.

Yet at the very same time, it is weaponizing the government against the citizenry: against protesters, immigrants, law firms, judges, journalists, universities, critics, whistleblowers, and anyone else who stands in the way of executive power.

This is what it means to weaponize the government.

When the government turns its power against its own people—through surveillance, retaliation, censorship, and intimidation—it ceases to serve the public and instead becomes a weapon of oppression.

When protesters are snatched up, arrested, prosecuted or surveilled for challenging government policy, that is government weaponized against dissent.

When immigrants are rounded up, chained, deported or detained without meaningful due process—without being properly identified, charged, heard, or allowed to challenge the government’s claims—that is government weaponized against due process.

When law firms are punished for the clients they represent, barred from federal buildings, stripped of security clearances, threatened with the loss of contracts, or pressured into providing hundreds of millions of dollars in legal services aligned with the administration’s priorities, that is government weaponized against the right to counsel.

When judges are derided, defied or threatened for ruling against the president’s agenda, that is government weaponized against the separation of powers.

When universities are threatened with funding cuts, investigations and ideological purges for failing to toe the government’s line, that is government weaponized against academic freedom and independent thought.

When journalists and critics are branded enemies, liars, radicals, criminals or traitors for questioning official narratives, that is government weaponized against the First Amendment.

When government websites, archives, agencies and public records are rewritten, scrubbed or politicized in order to reshape history, control memory, and enforce ideological obedience, that is government weaponized against truth.

When the president threatens other nations militarily, talks openly about seizing foreign lands, stirs up international tensions, rattles the war drums, and then claims wartime powers at home, that is government weaponized against peace, liberty and constitutional restraint.

Trump, adept at twisting facts and spinning lies, insists these end-runs around the rule of law are for our safety.

This is the devil’s bargain that we are being asked to enter into with Trump: empty promises and a one-way street to a dictatorship in exchange for our freedoms.

There can be no doubt about the nature of what is taking place right now.

This is government weaponized into war.

President Trump’s justification for defying the courts and doing whatever he wants in pursuit of his political agenda (arresting protesters, carrying out mass arrests and deportations, muzzling critics, seizing funds, dismantling agencies, usurping congressional powers) is that “this is war.”

Here’s the thing, though: Trump may be using the language of war to bypass the Constitution at every turn, but the only war being waged is a war against the Constitution, the rule of law and the American people.

Likewise, this so-called Anti-Weaponization Fund is not justice.

It is hush money for the powerful, paid for by the powerless.

It is the weaponized government rewarding its own while leaving the rest of us to foot the bill.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, all freedoms hang together.

They fall together, as well.

WC: 1080

WASHINGTON, D.C. — At a time when Americans are increasingly being subjected to aggressive policing, politicized prosecutions, and a criminal justice system stacked in favor of the government, the U.S. Supreme Court has once again declined to stop the government from weakening one of the Constitution’s most fundamental protections: the right to trial by jury.

In refusing to hear an appeal in Minor v. Florida, the Supreme Court left intact a state system in which defendants facing serious criminal charges can be tried by juries of only six people instead of the traditional twelve-member jury long understood to be required by the Sixth Amendment. The Rutherford Institute and the ACLU argued in an amicus brief that the Founders understood the word “jury” to mean twelve members when the Constitution and Bill of Rights were ratified, and that allowing states to reduce that number undermines both the integrity of the justice system and the constitutional rights of the accused.

“At a time when prosecutors already hold enormous power over the lives and liberties of ordinary Americans, shrinking juries means fewer voices, less deliberation, and fewer safeguards against malicious prosecutions and government abuse,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “The Constitution was designed to restrain the government—not make wrongful convictions easier.”

While the Sixth Amendment does not specify the exact number of jurors required for a criminal trial, the historical understanding of a “jury” at the time the Constitution and Bill of Rights were ratified overwhelmingly pointed to twelve members. As Justice Neil Gorsuch has observed, “only 6 states…tolerate smaller panels [than twelve jurors]—and it is difficult to reconcile their outlying practices with the Constitution.” Florida is one of those states. The Florida Constitution allows juries of “not fewer than six,” and state law provides that six jurors may decide all non-capital criminal cases.

The Rutherford Institute and the ACLU have repeatedly urged the U.S. Supreme Court to address what they argue is a dangerous departure from the Constitution’s original meaning and from centuries of American legal tradition. In an earlier case raising the same issue, Justices Gorsuch noted in a dissent that “a mountain of evidence suggests that, both at the time of the Amendment’s adoption and for most of our Nation’s history, the right to a trial by jury for serious criminal offenses meant a trial before 12 members of the community—nothing less.” Historically, even small reductions in jury size were viewed as incompatible with the Constitution.

The concern is not merely historical or procedural. Empirical research cited indicates that smaller juries are less likely to reflect diverse viewpoints, more likely to overlook dissenting opinions, and more likely to favor the prosecution. By contrast, twelve-member juries deliberate longer, recall evidence more accurately, and provide stronger safeguards against wrongful convictions and government overreach.

At a time when Americans are confronting expanding prosecutorial power, increasingly politicized and aggressive law enforcement tactics, and growing public distrust in the fairness of the criminal justice system, The Rutherford Institute warns that weakening the jury system further erodes one of the Constitution’s last protections against unchecked government authority.

Alejandra Ávila, Annamaria M. Morales-Kimbal, and Natalie E. Giotta of Kellogg, Hansen, Todd, Figel & Frederick, P.L.L.C., advanced the arguments in the brief with help from previous amicus brief arguments advanced by Stuart Banner of the UCLA School of Law Supreme Court Clinic.

The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties organization, provides legal assistance at no charge to individuals whose constitutional rights have been threatened or violated and educates the public on a wide spectrum of issues affecting their freedoms.

Call it what it is: a heist.

The corruption, cronyism, and self-dealing that now define the American government—under Donald Trump in particular—amount to a slow-motion stick-up carried out in broad daylight.

But here’s the trick: it’s a heist hidden behind spectacle. The Trump administration is flooding the stage with noise so “we the people” don’t notice what’s happening behind the curtain.

We’re being manipulated into watching the wrong thing.

The distractions are part of the plan to rob us blind.

You don’t have to look far to see how the con works. Nowhere is the hustle more obvious than in how the presidency itself is being used.

For the Trump family, the presidency isn’t public service. It’s an all-access pass to wealth, power, and privilege—an ongoing exercise in how to squeeze maximum personal gain out of public office.

Taxpayers foot the bill for this massive grift: security for President Trump’s extended family, luxury travel, private business ventures, weekends at Trump-owned golf resorts, and vanity projects with a hidden price tag for the privilege of bearing Trump’s name.

We pay for it. They profit from it.

Even Congress is in on the game.

In a blatant act of political pandering, Senate Republicans are trying to slip a provision into an ICE funding bill that would direct $1 billion in taxpayer money toward Trump’s long-desired White House ballroom—bypassing debate and oversight.

A billion dollars.

Not to lower your grocery bill. Not to fix your healthcare. Not for infrastructure that serves the public.

For a ballroom.

But here’s what most Americans are missing: the ballroom isn’t just a vanity project. It’s a distraction.

So are his plans to redo the East Potomac Golf Course.

So is his repainting of the Reflecting Pool.

So is the spectacle of him staging a UFC fight on the White House lawn.

So are his endless, bombastic, outrage-driven, manic, headline-making Truth Social posts.

Trump is good at pushing people’s buttons. He knows exactly what will outrage, distract, and drag people into one more pointless argument.

The bigger and louder, the better. That’s the show.

And while we’re watching Trump’s bread-and-circus antics, something else is happening.

The real damage to our republic is being buried—delayed, redacted, denied.

This shell game keeps our attention fixed on Trump’s costly antics while his partners-in-crime use the diversion to lock down the country and strip us of what’s rightfully ours.

It’s not just one elaborate ruse, either, but a series of cover-ups and obfuscations meant to keep us from looking too closely or asking too many questions about what’s really going on.

What began as a scramble to redirect public attention—from questions about Epstein to war, White House spectacles, immigration crackdowns, and culture-war theater—has become an ever-widening web of manufactured distractions and diversions.

We’re meant to watch the show—not the government ledger.

When we can’t see the damage—at home or abroad—we can’t measure the cost. But we’re being asked to pay, and the price is mounting daily.

The same man who bankrupted his own businesses is now running the same play on the U.S. government.

Consider the Trump economy by the numbers. They tell the real story.

The government is spending more than it takes in.

The national debt is now $31 trillion, bigger than the entire U.S. economy. For the first time since World War II, the debt has surpassed 100 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP).

This is no small thing.

While both political parties share responsibility for decades of fiscal mismanagement, the Trump administration has accelerated the crisis through a toxic combination of reckless spending, tax giveaways, and costly, unauthorized wars.

At the very moment Americans are struggling to make ends meet, the Trump administration is spending big—at taxpayer expense—on projects that appeal to Trump’s ego, stoke his vanity, consolidate his power, reward his allies, or entrench the police state’s machinery of control.

Nero fiddled while Rome burned.

Trump is playing golf while America burns—and he keeps striking the match.

While “we the people” are paying more for everything, Trump is getting richer off the presidency—at taxpayer expense.

Much richer.

Billions added to his fortune—while in office. His family’s wealth has also exploded.

You know who’s not profiting?

We the people. Especially those of us that do not belong to the political and corporate elite.

And what is Trump doing?

He is jetting off to Mar-a-Lago at taxpayer expense. He golfs while dragging a full security detail along. He’s turning the White House—and by extension, much of the nation’s capital—into his personal domain, redecorating according to his personal tastes, with little concern for the wishes of the American people.

He lives like a king, while we pay for his excesses, one way or another.

He’s slashing government spending for programs that educate, protect, and support Americans, while building a $1.5 trillion war machine and boosting all aspects of the police state that treats us like suspects—locking us down and locking us up.

He’s building monuments to his own ego: a $400 million ballroom—now potentially a $1 billion taxpayer-funded monument to access and influence if Senate Republicans get their way; professional, taxpayer-funded golf courses that take the place of public parks; a new Trump-class “Golden Fleet” of battleships, costing $13 billion each.

He’s pushing for airports and train stations and other infrastructure to bear his name, then tacking on dubious licensing agreements for the so-called privilege.

He’s turning war into big business and cashing in.

Yet just as important as the math involved in bleeding us dry is the conspiracy of distraction that keeps us in the dark about the theft in our midst.

Because while we’re watching the show, the hold-up is taking place. The tellers are filling the bags with stolen loot. And they’re using the government as the get-away car.

That is how the con works.

As we warned in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is how the machinery of the police state expands: not just through endless war, unchecked power, and a government that no longer answers to the people—but through insider profiteering, cronyism and corruption disguised as reform, efficiency and nationalism.

That’s the Trump hustle: while we’re being distracted by the spectacle, they’re emptying the vault.

WC: 1063

WASHINGTON, DC — In the digital age, simply having a smartphone in your pocket can lead to the government collecting your data to investigate you as a suspect for a crime. That is the constitutional danger posed by geofence warrants—sweeping surveillance orders that compel technology companies to disclose location data for every device within a defined area and time frame, regardless of whether the individuals involved are suspected of wrongdoing.

The legality of these warrants is now before the U.S. Supreme Court in Chatrie v. United States, which must decide whether such dragnet searches violate the Fourth Amendment. In an amicus brief filed with the Court, The Rutherford Institute warns that geofence warrants represent a modern version of the general warrants that sparked the American Revolution. Rather than requiring law enforcement to identify a suspect and establish probable cause before conducting a search, these warrants reverse the constitutional order—authorizing the government to search first and decide later who might be suspicious.

“Geofence warrants allow the government to cast a wide net over innocent people, track their movements, and then narrow the list until someone fits the bill. That flips the presumption of innocence on its head,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “This case is about whether constitutional protections keep pace with technology—or whether technological capability becomes an excuse to erode them.”

Unlike traditional warrants, which must describe with particularity the person or place to be searched, geofence warrants begin with a location and sweep in everyone who happened to be nearby. Law enforcement can then request progressively more detailed information—movement patterns, account data, subscriber identities—until individuals are singled out for investigation.

In Chatrie, law enforcement obtained a geofence warrant directing Google to disclose anonymized device data for phones located within a 17.5-acre area surrounding the scene of a bank robbery. That meant the geofence area was about the size of over three New York City blocks with a diameter longer than three football fields and encompassed part of a nearby church. Although the district court found that “this particular geofence warrant plainly violates the rights enshrined in [the Fourth] Amendment,” the evidence was ultimately admitted based on an exception for the police officer acting in good-faith. But the Supreme Court’s review now squarely presents the question for future cases of whether this form of suspicionless location tracking is compatible with the Fourth Amendment at all.

During oral arguments, members of the Court grappled with the implications of allowing the government access to detailed location histories capable of revealing far more than proximity to a crime scene—such as where Americans worship, seek medical treatment, attend political meetings, or gather with family and friends. The Rutherford Institute’s brief argues that permitting geofence warrants at all, or at least without significant restrictions to protect privacy rights of innocent bystanders, would entrench a dangerous precedent in which digital convenience becomes a gateway to constant government oversight. By authorizing the bulk collection of location data from untold numbers of innocent people, these warrants threaten to normalize a system in which Americans must effectively surrender their privacy simply to move about in public life.

Ethan H. Townsend and Maura R. Cremin of McDermott Will & Schulte LLP advanced the arguments in the Chatrie amicus brief. This filing builds on Rutherford’s earlier challenge to geofence warrants in Wells v. Texas.

The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties organization, defends individuals whose constitutional rights have been threatened or violated and educates the public on a wide spectrum of issues affecting their freedoms.

“Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freedom of speech.”—Benjamin Franklin

Everything this nation once stood for is being turned on its head.

We are being asked—no, told—to believe that the greatest threat to America today is not government overreach, endless war, corruption, surveillance, or the steady erosion of constitutional rights.

No, the real threat, it seems, is speech.

Dangerous speech. Hateful speech. Critical speech. Speech that dares to challenge power.

In the wake of the reported assassination attempt on President Trump, the Trump administration has wasted no time advancing a dangerous narrative: that criticism of the president—especially criticism labeling him authoritarian or fascist—is not just wrong, but responsible for violence.

The implication is as chilling as it is unconstitutional: if you criticize the government too harshly, you may be to blame for what happens next.

Taken to its logical conclusion, the government’s argument is this: criticism fuels anger, and anger leads to violence against the Trump administration.

Which means the solution, in the government’s eyes, is simple: silence the criticism—but only when it is leveled at the Trump administration.

When White House officials suggest that calling a president a fascist may constitute libel or slander, they are not merely defending reputations—they are laying the groundwork for criminalizing dissent.

This is how it begins.

This is how republics become regimes.

First, criticism is labeled dangerous. Then it is labeled harmful. Then it is labeled illegal. And before long, it is gone.

Beware of those who want to monitor, muzzle, catalogue and censor speech—especially when the justification is “safety.” Because every time the government claims it must limit freedom to protect the public, what it is really doing is expanding its own power.

The irony is almost too glaring to ignore.

By the standards now being floated by those in power, America’s founders themselves would be considered extremists.

Seditionists. Radicals. Domestic threats.

Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Marquis De Lafayette, and John Adams would certainly have been placed on an anti-government watch list for suggesting that Americans should not only take up arms but be prepared to protect their liberties and defend themselves against the government should it violate their rights.

“What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance. Let them take arms,” declared Jefferson. He also concluded that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

Observed Franklin: “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!”

“It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from its government,” insisted Paine.

“When the government violates the people’s rights,” Lafayette warned, “insurrection is, for the people and for each portion of the people, the most sacred of the rights and the most indispensable of duties.”

Adams cautioned, “A settled plan to deprive the people of all the benefits, blessings and ends of the contract, to subvert the fundamentals of the constitution, to deprive them of all share in making and executing laws, will justify a revolution.”

And who could forget Patrick Henry with his ultimatum: “Give me liberty or give me death!”

By today’s standards, these are not the words of patriots.

They are the words of people who would be surveilled, flagged, censored—and likely arrested.

Had the government of their day succeeded in suppressing their “dangerous speech,” there would have been no Revolution. No Declaration of Independence. No Constitution. No Bill of Rights.

You see, the right to criticize the government is not a side issue.

It is the foundation of a free society. And yet, that foundation is already cracking.

Conduct your own experiment in how much dissent is tolerated: stand on a street corner—or in a courtroom, at a city council meeting, or on a university campus—and try denouncing the government using the founders’ rhetoric.

You won’t last long.

At best, you’ll be dismissed. At worst, you’ll be labeled a threat.

So much for a nation built on dissent.

That principle of free speech is supposed to be non-negotiable. Increasingly, it is treated as optional. Which is precisely why it is under attack.

Anti-government speech has become a four-letter word.

More and more, any speech that challenges authority—exposes corruption, questions policy, or calls out abuses of power—is being recast as dangerous, extremist, or even violent.

The categories keep expanding: Hate speech. Misinformation. Disinformation. Conspiratorial speech. Radical speech. Anti-government speech.

Different labels, same goal: control the narrative.

What has changed is not the tactic—it’s the target.

Under the previous administration, “dangerous speech” meant election denial, COVID dissent, and those who challenged official narratives about public health and national security.

Now, under the Trump administration, “dangerous speech” means media outlets that report unfavorably on the government, comedians who mock those in power, and citizens who dare to call authoritarianism by its name.

The script keeps flipping depending on who is in power, but the ending never changes: censorship.

If the government can control speech, it can control thought. And if it can control thought, it can control you.

As comedian Lenny Bruce once observed, “If you can’t say ‘F@#k,’ you can’t say, ‘F@#k the government.’”

Bruce understood what those in power have always known: language is power. That’s why he was prosecuted.

That’s why dissenters are always targeted first.

And that’s why the government’s growing obsession with policing speech should alarm every American—regardless of political affiliation.

Here is where the hypocrisy becomes impossible to ignore.

When conservative commentator Charlie Kirk was assassinated, the Trump administration and its allies demanded consequences not just for the assassin but for anyone who dared to criticize Kirk.

Public figures were targeted. Jobs were threatened. Comedians were singled out. Among them: late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, who faced calls to be fired for voicing criticism of Kirk.

Now, the same playbook is being used again—this time against those who mock or criticize President Trump and his family.

The message is unmistakable: criticize the wrong people, and your livelihood may be next—not because you committed a crime, but because your words were treated as one.

The latest example: the Trump administration is once again targeting former FBI director James Comey—this time for posting a photo of seashells spelling out “8647,” a slang expression of opposition to Trump, the nation’s 47^th president.

A social media post. Treated like a threat.

This is how dissent is being redefined—not as a constitutional right but as a threat.

Yet while the government wrings its hands over so-called dangerous rhetoric, it continues to wield—and expand—its own machinery of violence.

Most recently, the Justice Department has signaled its intent to expand the use of the death penalty, including execution by firing squad.

Let that sink in.

Criticism is being treated as a threat to public safety, while the police state openly embraces more brutal forms of punishment.

This is the same government that claims speech must be curtailed to prevent violence, even as it institutionalizes violence as a matter of policy.

This is not about safety.

It is about control. Because once speech is treated as violence, it becomes easy to justify real violence by the government in response.

History makes one thing clear: governments do not fear violence nearly as much as they fear dissent. That is why the first target of any regime drifting toward authoritarianism is not the gun. It is the voice.

What we are witnessing now is the slow but steady normalization of censorship. A creeping acceptance that some ideas are too dangerous to be heard.

We’ve seen this before. As George Orwell warned, “In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

We are dangerously close to that point.

The First Amendment was not designed to protect polite speech.

It was designed to protect political speech—uncomfortable speech, provocative speech, dissenting speech, anti-government speech.

Speech that challenges power.

Because once that speech is gone, everything else goes with it.

And if we allow the government to decide which words are too dangerous to be spoken, it won’t be long before we discover that the most dangerous words of all are the ones that speak truth to power.

We are further down that road than most Americans realize.

This is the part of the story Americans should recognize.

First, the government tells you certain speech is dangerous. Then it tells you those who engage in it are dangerous. Then it tells you those people must be monitored, silenced, and, eventually, punished. And all the while, it wraps these measures in the language of safety, unity, and national security.

This is not new. It is as old as tyranny itself.

What we’re dealing with today is a government that wants to suppress dangerous words—words about its warring empire, words about its land grabs, words about its militarized police, words about its killing, its poisoning and its corruption—in order to keep its lies going.

What we are witnessing is a nation undergoing a nervous breakdown over this growing tension between our increasingly untenable reality and the lies being perpetrated by a government that has grown too power-hungry, egotistical, militaristic and disconnected from its revolutionary birthright.

As we warned in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the road to authoritarianism is paved with small compromises—especially when it comes to speech, dissent, and the willingness of the citizenry to push back.

And the only antidote is the truth.

If the government censors get their way, there will be no more First Amendment.

There will be no more Bill of Rights.

And there will be no more freedom in America as we have known it.

This is how freedom rises or falls.

The government’s tolerance for dissent is shrinking. And as that tolerance disappears, the danger is no longer theoretical.

Anti-government speech is becoming a liability.

Speech that exposes corruption, challenges authority, or questions official narratives is being flagged, monitored, and, in some cases, punished.

The list of “dangerous” speech keeps growing. The space for dissent keeps shrinking.

And for those who still believe in exercising their First Amendment rights, the risks are becoming harder to ignore.

With every passing day, the line between a free society and a controlled one is being erased—replaced by a system where speech is monitored, dissent is punished, and truth itself is treated as a threat.

And once that happens, freedom doesn’t just fade—it dies, one silenced voice at a time.

WC: 1789

Everything this nation once stood for is being turned on its head.

We are being asked—no, told—to believe that the greatest threat to America today is not government overreach, endless war, corruption, surveillance, or the steady erosion of constitutional rights.

No, the real threat, it seems, is speech.

Dangerous speech. Hateful speech. Critical speech. Speech that dares to challenge power.

In the wake of the reported assassination attempt on President Trump, the Trump administration has wasted no time advancing a dangerous narrative: that criticism of the president—especially criticism labeling him authoritarian or fascist—is not just wrong, but responsible for violence.

The implication is as chilling as it is unconstitutional: if you criticize the government too harshly, you may be to blame for what happens next.

Taken to its logical conclusion, the government’s argument is this: criticism fuels anger, and anger leads to violence against the Trump administration.

Which means the solution, in the government’s eyes, is simple: silence the criticism—but only when it is leveled at the Trump administration.

When White House officials suggest that calling a president a fascist may constitute libel or slander, they are not merely defending reputations—they are laying the groundwork for criminalizing dissent.

This is how it begins.

This is how republics become regimes.

First, criticism is labeled dangerous. Then it is labeled harmful. Then it is labeled illegal. And before long, it is gone.

Beware of those who want to monitor, muzzle, catalogue and censor speech—especially when the justification is “safety.” Because every time the government claims it must limit freedom to protect the public, what it is really doing is expanding its own power.

The irony is almost too glaring to ignore.

By the standards now being floated by those in power, America’s founders themselves would be considered extremists.

Seditionists. Radicals. Domestic threats.

Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Marquis De Lafayette, and John Adams would certainly have been placed on an anti-government watch list for suggesting that Americans should not only take up arms but be prepared to protect their liberties and defend themselves against the government should it violate their rights.

“What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance. Let them take arms,” declared Jefferson. He also concluded that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

“It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from its government,” insisted Paine.

And who could forget Patrick Henry with his ultimatum: “Give me liberty or give me death!”

By today’s standards, these are not the words of patriots.

They are the words of people who would be surveilled, flagged, censored—and likely arrested.

Had the government of their day succeeded in suppressing their “dangerous speech,” there would have been no Revolution. No Declaration of Independence. No Constitution. No Bill of Rights.

You see, the right to criticize the government is not a side issue.

It is the foundation of a free society. And yet, that foundation is already cracking.

More and more, any speech that challenges authority—exposes corruption, questions policy, or calls out abuses of power—is being recast as dangerous, extremist, or even violent.

The categories keep expanding: Hate speech. Misinformation. Disinformation. Conspiratorial speech. Radical speech. Anti-government speech.

Different labels, same goal: control the narrative.

What has changed is not the tactic—it’s the target.

Under the previous administration, “dangerous speech” meant election denial, COVID dissent, and those who challenged official narratives about public health and national security.

Now, under the Trump administration, “dangerous speech” means media outlets that report unfavorably on the government, comedians who mock those in power, and citizens who dare to call authoritarianism by its name.

The script keeps flipping depending on who is in power, but the ending never changes: censorship.

The message is unmistakable: criticize the wrong people, and your livelihood may be next—not because you committed a crime, but because your words were treated as one.

The latest example: the Trump administration is once again targeting former FBI director James Comey—this time for posting a photo of seashells spelling out “8647,” a slang expression of opposition to Trump, the nation’s 47^th president.

A social media post. Treated like a threat.

This is how dissent is being redefined—not as a constitutional right but as a threat.

Yet while the government wrings its hands over so-called dangerous rhetoric, it continues to wield—and expand—its own machinery of violence.

Criticism is being treated as a threat to public safety, while the police state openly embraces more brutal forms of punishment, soon in the form of execution by firing squads.

History makes one thing clear: governments do not fear violence nearly as much as they fear dissent. That is why the first target of any regime drifting toward authoritarianism is not the gun. It is the voice.

As George Orwell warned, “In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

If we allow the government to decide which words are too dangerous to be spoken, it won’t be long before we discover that the most dangerous words of all are the ones that speak truth to power.

We are further down that road than most Americans realize.

This is the part of the story Americans should recognize.

First, the government tells you certain speech is dangerous. Then it tells you those who engage in it are dangerous. Then it tells you those people must be monitored, silenced, and, eventually, punished. And all the while, it wraps these measures in the language of safety, unity, and national security.

This is not new. It is as old as tyranny itself.

As we warned in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the road to authoritarianism is paved with small compromises—especially when it comes to speech, dissent, and the willingness of the citizenry to push back.

This is how freedom rises or falls.

For those who still believe in exercising their First Amendment rights, the risks are becoming harder to ignore.

With every passing day, the line between a free society and a controlled one is being erased—replaced by a system where speech is monitored, dissent is punished, and truth itself is treated as a threat.

And once that happens, freedom doesn’t just fade—it dies, one silenced voice at a time.

WC: 1083

“The cost of war is too damn high
Not another nickel
Not another dime
We won’t pay for Trump’s war crimes.”
—Chanted by anti-war military veteran protesters in DC

Reports of food shortages on naval ships deployed to the Middle East.

Video footage of disabled military veterans—some in wheelchairs, others leaning on canes—being zip-tied and dragged out of the Capitol Rotunda for staging a peaceful, anti-war protest. Sixty-six veterans were arrested while conducting a flag-folding ceremony in recognition of the 13 military servicemembers who have died so far in Trump’s war with Iran.

A growing number of active-duty military service members asking how to end their service, become conscientious objectors, and refuse unlawful orders.

And a president openly threatening to commit war crimes by targeting civilian infrastructure in Iran—and floating preemptive strikes against Cuba.

This is where we are now.

Almost two months into Donald Trump’s disastrous, unauthorized war with Iran, the United States is in freefall.

The economy is struggling. Inflation and fuel prices are rising. America’s standing in the world is eroding by the day.

The war itself is spiraling—threats one day, concessions the next—as the Trump administration scrambles to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway that had remained stable until Trump recklessly pushed us into this disastrous war.

Meanwhile, the so-called “peace deal” being floated appears worse—for the U.S. and the world—than the nuclear agreement Trump tore up during his first term in a fit of ego and arrogance.

At home, the government is unraveling. Corruption is flourishing.

The constitutional guardrails are gone.

Leadership inside the White House is in disarray.

And Congress—rather than acting as a constitutional check—has chosen blind devotion, competing to outdo itself in displays of loyalty: proposing to carve Trump’s face into Mt. Rushmore, rename airports in his honor, create a “Trump Peace Prize,” declare his birthday a federal holiday, mint a $250 bill bearing his likeness, and even fund research into “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

This is not governance.

This is fealty.

And at the center of it all is a man who avoided military service during Vietnam through a series of deferments—four as a student, one for a conveniently diagnosed bone spur—now posturing as a wartime commander, strategist and dealmaker.

The reality tells a far different story about the man steering the nation into war.

Trump—fixated on securing his legacy with a ballroom and a triumphal arch—appears increasingly erratic, unfocused, and unfit for the job assigned to him.

As journalists Josh Dawsey and Annie Linskey report, “The president sometimes loses focus, spending time on the details of his plans for the White House ballroom... Advisers said he has multiple meetings a week on the topic and views himself as the general contractor.”

This is a man woefully unprepared to deal with the many catastrophes he brings about.

Reporting from the Wall Street Journal indicates that Trump, after learning that two American airmen were missing in Iran, “screamed at aides for hours,” obsessing over how it would impact his image, legacy and the midterm elections, “veering between belligerent and conciliatory approaches and grappling behind the scenes with just how badly things could go wrong.”

It only went downhill from there.

Concerned that Trump’s impatience would make things worse, aides kept the nation’s Commander-in-Chief out of the Situation Room, delivering updates at key moments.

Concerns about Trump’s ability to carry out his duties have grown so voluble that there are now competing efforts to either invoke the 25^th amendment or compel him to resign in a last-ditch effort to contain the damage.

As William Becker observes:

"The Trump decade should be remembered as a period when a president commandeered every news cycle by creating fresh controversies. As his power crumbled, he escalated his outrages so that each one distracted national attention from the last. Many theorize that he even launched a war to divert persistent attention from the most sordid scandal in American history: the Epstein affair. His badly conceived attack has so far cost the lives of 15 U.S. soldiers, wounded 400, and killed or injured nearly 30,000 Iranians while pushing the world economy to the brink of recession and imposing economic costs on people around the world."

Against this messy backdrop of ineptitude, arrogance, greed, corruption and a Constitution in crisis, consider this: the government is making it easier to send our nation’s young people to war—and harder for the citizenry to have a say in it.

At the same time that the Trump administration is expanding its war machine abroad, it is moving to automate military draft registration at home—making it easier than ever to conscript young men to fight and die in wars they did not choose.

Under a provision tucked into the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, all men between the ages of 18 and 25 will be automatically registered for the draft within 30 days of turning 18.

There was never anything voluntary about the draft.

Established in 1917 during World War I, suspended in 1975, and reinstated in 1980, the draft requires men—citizens and immigrants alike—to register under penalty of $250,000 and jail time of up to five years.

Register—or face the consequences.

Now even the illusion of choice is being stripped away—and the system itself is about to become far more powerful.

Although 46 states and territories already implement some form of automatic registration, how the federal government plans to automate the process is unclear. But it will almost certainly rely on the integration and cross-referencing of vast amounts of personal data across government agencies.

In other words, a database.

A potentially powerful one.

And in the wrong hands, a weaponized one.

Beware anytime the government insists it’s making things more “convenient” or “efficient.”

More often than not, “efficiency” is a Trojan Horse used to mask the government’s ongoing power grabs and assaults on our freedoms as something benevolent and in our best interests.

The government has never had our best interests at heart.

Nor has it ever been in the business of making life easier for its citizens.

It is in the business of control.

In the modern surveillance state, that control starts with data.

Once control is built on data, it doesn’t stay in government hands alone.

Enter Palantir Technologies—one of the government’s largest defense contractors, with billions in military contracts and a long track record of data-driven surveillance.

Already linked to AI-assisted military targeting systems and the “kill lists” used by the Israeli military in Gaza, Palantir has been a driving force behind the push to automate the draft.

This is the future of modern warfare they are building.

Not just smarter wars but more efficient ones.

More expansive. More detached. More deadly.

And built with an army of people the government views as fully expendable.

Consider the hypocrisy at work.

The Trump administration has spent months demonizing immigrants—detaining them, deporting them, tearing apart families, and casting them as threats to national security.

And yet, when it comes time to fill the ranks of its endless wars, those same individuals—green card holders, refugees, asylum seekers, even undocumented men—suddenly become expendable assets.

Too dangerous to belong. Not too dangerous to die.

Increasingly, the same could be said of all of us.

We are all being viewed as potential threats by the government.

A government that views its people as expendable will always find ways to use them—whether as labor, as data points, or as cannon fodder.

And it will just as quickly look for ways to silence them.

While the government is making it easier for Americans to be conscripted and killed in war, it is simultaneously working to make it harder for us to have any say in the decisions that send our young men and women to war in the first place.

Rather than ensuring all American citizens access to the ballot box, the Trump administration has moved to restrict it—pushing measures that would tighten voter eligibility, limit mail-in voting, and centralize control over election systems.

Why not automate voter registration?

If efficiency were truly the goal, that would be the logical place to start.

As the Brennan Center for Justice explains, automatic voter registration flips the system from “opt-in” to “opt-out,” allowing eligible citizens who interact with government agencies to be registered automatically, with their information transmitted electronically to election officials. The result is higher participation, more accurate voter rolls, and a more efficient system overall.

In other words, the same kind of streamlined, data-driven infrastructure being used to prepare Americans for war could just as easily be used to strengthen democracy.

Which is precisely why it isn’t being prioritized.

Because this is not about efficiency.

It is about power.

The Constitution is clear on this point: authority over elections rests primarily with the states and Congress—not the president.

That is not a technicality.

It is a safeguard.

A deliberate check against the very kind of centralized control this administration is now attempting to assert.

This is not a new playbook.

It is an old one—one the Founders knew well, and warned against.

As the nation approaches the 250th anniversary of its founding, the parallels to the grievances listed in the Declaration of Independence are becoming impossible to ignore.

A government that wages war without meaningful consent of the governed.

A government that maintains standing armies and engages in foreign conflicts without accountability.

A government that obstructs the will of the people and undermines their ability to participate in the political process.

A government that treats its citizens not as participants in a republic, but as resources to be managed, tracked, and deployed.

This is not the system the Founders envisioned.

It is the system they rebelled against.

The American police state is making it easier to send you to war.

They’re making it harder for you to vote.

They are automating what kills us but complicating what empowers us: building databases to track us, systems to conscript us, and laws to silence us.

This is not about efficiency. This is not about national security.

We are living the reality I warned of in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries: a nation where the citizenry is the enemy and the state is the predator.

This is about control.

WC: 1736

Reports of food shortages on naval ships deployed to the Middle East.

Video footage of disabled military veterans—some in wheelchairs, others leaning on canes—being zip-tied and dragged out of the Capitol Rotunda for staging a peaceful, anti-war protest. Sixty-six veterans were arrested while conducting a flag-folding ceremony in recognition of the 13 military servicemembers who have died so far in Trump’s war with Iran.

A growing number of active-duty military service members asking how to end their service, become conscientious objectors, and refuse unlawful orders.

And a president openly threatening to commit war crimes by targeting civilian infrastructure in Iran—and floating preemptive strikes against Cuba.

This is where we are now.

Almost two months into Donald Trump’s disastrous, unauthorized war with Iran, the United States is in freefall.

The economy is struggling. Inflation and fuel prices are rising. America’s standing in the world is eroding by the day.

The war itself is spiraling—threats one day, concessions the next—as the Trump administration scrambles to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway that had remained stable until Trump recklessly pushed us into this disastrous war.

Meanwhile, at home, the government is unraveling. Corruption is flourishing.

The constitutional guardrails are gone.

Leadership inside the White House is in disarray.

Congress—rather than acting as a constitutional check—has chosen blind devotion, competing to outdo itself in displays of loyalty.

And at the center of it all is a man who avoided military service during Vietnam through a series of deferments—four as a student, one for a conveniently diagnosed bone spur—now posturing as a wartime commander, strategist and dealmaker.

The reality tells a far different story about the man steering the nation into war.

Trump—fixated on securing his legacy with a ballroom and a triumphal arch—appears increasingly erratic, unfocused, and unfit for the job assigned to him.

This is a man woefully unprepared to deal with the many catastrophes he brings about.

Concerns about Trump’s ability to carry out his duties have grown so voluble that there are now competing efforts to either invoke the 25^th amendment or compel him to resign in a last-ditch effort to contain the damage.

Against this messy backdrop of ineptitude, arrogance, greed, corruption and a Constitution in crisis, consider this: the government is making it easier to send our nation’s young people to war—and harder for the citizenry to have a say in it.

At the same time that the Trump administration is expanding its war machine abroad, it is moving to automate military draft registration at home—making it easier than ever to conscript young men to fight and die in wars they did not choose.

Under a provision tucked into the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, all men between the ages of 18 and 25 will be automatically registered for the draft within 30 days of turning 18.

There was never anything voluntary about the draft.

Established in 1917 during World War I, suspended in 1975, and reinstated in 1980, the draft requires men—citizens and immigrants alike—to register under penalty of $250,000 and jail time of up to five years.

Register—or face the consequences.

Now even the illusion of choice is being stripped away—and the system itself is about to become far more powerful.

Although 46 states and territories already implement some form of automatic registration, how the federal government plans to automate the process is unclear. But it will almost certainly rely on the integration and cross-referencing of vast amounts of personal data across government agencies.

In other words, a database.

A potentially powerful one.

And in the wrong hands, a weaponized one.

Enter Palantir Technologies—one of the government’s largest defense contractors, with billions in military contracts and a long track record of data-driven surveillance.

Already linked to AI-assisted military targeting systems and the “kill lists” used by the Israeli military in Gaza, Palantir has been a driving force behind the push to automate the draft.

This is the future of modern warfare they are building.

Not just smarter wars but more efficient ones.

More expansive. More detached. More deadly.

And built with an army of people the government views as fully expendable.

Consider the hypocrisy at work.

The Trump administration has spent months demonizing immigrants—detaining them, deporting them, tearing apart families, and casting them as threats to national security.

And yet, when it comes time to fill the ranks of its endless wars, those same individuals—green card holders, refugees, asylum seekers, even undocumented men—suddenly become expendable assets.

Too dangerous to belong. Not too dangerous to die.

Increasingly, the same could be said of all of us.

We are all being viewed as potential threats by the government.

A government that views its people as expendable will always find ways to use them—whether as labor, as data points, or as cannon fodder.

And it will just as quickly look for ways to silence them.

While the government is making it easier for Americans to be conscripted and killed in war, it is simultaneously working to make it harder for us to have any say in the decisions that send our young men and women to war in the first place.

Rather than ensuring all American citizens access to the ballot box, the Trump administration has moved to restrict it—pushing measures that would tighten voter eligibility, limit mail-in voting, and centralize control over election systems.

Why not automate voter registration?

If efficiency were truly the goal, that would be the logical place to start.

But this is not about efficiency.

It is about power.

The American police state is making it easier to send you to war.

They’re making it harder for you to vote.

They are automating what kills us but complicating what empowers us: building databases to track us, systems to conscript us, and laws to silence us.

This is not about efficiency. This is not about national security.

We are living the reality I warned of in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries: a nation where the citizenry is the enemy and the state is the predator.

This is about control.

WC: 1039

WASHINGTON, D.C. — After more than a year of escalating efforts by the Trump administration to blacklist critics, censor dissent, and punish those who challenge its policies, a coalition of civil liberties organizations is urging a federal appeals court to draw a constitutional line against what it calls a sweeping and unconstitutional campaign to silence legal opposition.

The coalition filed amicus briefs with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in four consolidated cases—Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block, WilmerHale, and Susman Godfrey—and in Mark Zaid, on behalf of an attorney who represents national security whistleblowers in cases involving classified information. The coalition’s briefs challenge presidential actions that targeted law firms for representing clients and causes disfavored by the Trump administration. The coalition argues that the executive orders violate the First Amendment, the separation of powers, and due process, and represent an unprecedented attempt by the executive branch to weaponize government power against the legal profession itself. At stake, the coalition warns, is not just the fate of a handful of law firms—but whether lawyers across the country can continue to challenge the government without fear of retaliation.

“If the government can blacklist a law firm for representing an unpopular client or expressing an unpopular idea, then no one’s rights are safe,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “This is not just an abuse of power—it’s a direct assault on the Constitution. The right to dissent, to associate freely, and to challenge the government in court is what keeps tyranny in check.”

The legal challenge stems from a series of executive orders and actions issued by President Trump in 2025 targeting prominent law firms that had represented clients or causes opposed by the Trump administration. Framing such advocacy as partisan lawfare, Trump’s executive orders imposed sweeping sanctions—including revoking security clearances, terminating federal contracts, restricting access to government facilities, and discouraging federal agencies and contractors from doing business with the firms. Several were singled out for their involvement in election-related litigation, civil rights advocacy, and other matters seen as adverse to the administration’s political agenda. These measures appeared designed to coerce law firms into abandoning disfavored clients and causes and to deter others from challenging the administration in court. As the coalition argues in its brief, an independent judiciary depends on an independent bar willing to represent unpopular clients and challenge government overreach.

The Rutherford Institute joined a broad coalition in filing the amicus brief, including the ACLU, ACLU of D.C., Cato Institute, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), Institute for Justice, Knight First Amendment Institute, National Coalition Against Censorship, Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, and the Society for the Rule of Law.

 Cecillia D. Wang, Ben Wizner, Brian Hauss, Ashley Gorski, Hina Shamsi, Arthur B. Spitzer, Laura K. Follansbee, and Scott Michelman at ACLU advanced the arguments in the briefs.

The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties organization, defends individuals whose constitutional rights have been threatened or violated and educates the public on a wide spectrum of issues affecting their freedoms.

“In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”— Friedrich Nietzsche

One week after posting a profanity-laced Easter message threatening to wipe out the entire civilization of Iran, Donald J. Trump, the 47^th president of the United States, spent the night of April 12 and into the early morning hours unleashing a barrage of AI-generated images, threats and insults.

One post depicted Trump as Jesus, imbued with divine power, healing the sick.

Another imagined a Trump-branded hotel on the Moon.

Yet another lashed out at Pope Leo XIV as weak on crime, suggesting he owed his papacy to Trump and “should get his act together as Pope, use Common Sense, stop catering to the Radical Left, and focus on being a Great Pope, not a Politician.”

After significant outcry—including from his own evangelical and MAGA supporters—Trump deleted the post but refused to apologize for it.

Blasphemous. Profane. Threatening. Self-aggrandizing.

These posts are not anomalies.

They are part of a pattern—one that appears to be escalating.

What was once dismissed as erratic now feels increasingly unhinged. What was once provocative now borders on delusional. What was once ego now approaches outright megalomania.

Consider the trajectory.

In May 2025, after returning from the funeral of Pope Francis, Trump posted an AI generated image of himself as pope.

In December 2025, he posted more than 160 times over a five-hour period.

In January 2026, another late-night posting binge featured what the Poynter Institute described as “false economic claims, election conspiracies and political attacks.”

In February 2026, Trump shared a racist video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes—while casting himself as the king of the jungle.

This is not normal.

Nor is it merely rhetorical excess.

It is behavior that mirrors the governing style: impulsive, self-serving, detached from reality, and increasingly dangerous.

The same egomania driving Trump’s online persona is shaping his presidency.

He has alienated allies, threatened the sovereignty of other nations—including Canada, Greenland and Cuba—and pushed the country toward ill-advised wars with devastating human and financial costs.

Having inherited one of the strongest economies in the world, he has overseen policies that have left average Americans struggling to stay afloat, even as his allies and corporate partners grow richer.

Whether driven by ego or manipulation—by flattery, spectacle or greed—the result is the same: America is being hollowed out while the president redecorates it in gold.

Literally.

Operating on the philosophy that it’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission, Trump bulldozed the East Wing to construct a lavish ballroom. He has proposed monuments in his own honor, covered the White House in gold embellishments, affixed his name to national institutions, and floated renaming major landmarks after himself.

He is even staging a UFC fight on the White House lawn on his 80^th birthday as part of the nation’s 250^th anniversary celebrations.

All of this while Americans struggle with rising grocery costs, unaffordable healthcare, and economic instability driven by his reckless policy decisions.

This is not serious governance. This is spectacle.

This is not rational.

This is not presidential.

And yet, despite widespread fatigue, desensitization, and normalization of this behavior, there must come a point when we acknowledge what is plainly visible: something is deeply wrong with the president.

This is no longer a matter of partisan disagreement or political style.

To any objective viewer, Donald Trump’s behavior—which has always been erratic at best—has become increasingly unstable.

As the New York Times reports:

“Trump seems even less restrained and more incoherent at times. He uses more profanity, speaks longer and regularly makes comments rooted in fantasy rather than fact. He keeps saying that his father was born in Germany when in fact he was born in the Bronx. He repeats an invented story about his uncle, an M.I.T. professor, telling him about teaching the terrorist known as the Unabomber. He wanders off into odd tangents — an eight-minute ramble at a Christmas reception about poisonous snakes in Peru, a long digression during a cabinet meeting about Sharpie pens, an interruption of an Iran war update to praise the White House drapes. He has confused Greenland with Iceland and more than once boasted of ending a fictional war between Cambodia and Azerbaijan, two countries separated by nearly 4,000 miles.”

As the oldest person elected to the White House, Trump—who turns 80 this year—oscillates between vicious politicking, relentless self-idolatry, and serving as the sleight-of-hand prop for what increasingly resembles an organized crime operation—one that operates behind the floodlights to consolidate power and wealth while robbing the American electorate blind.

Trump’s self-mythologizing is unprecedented in modern American politics.

As journalist Peter Baker notes, Trump “regularly depicts himself in a heroic, almost godly fashion, as a monarch, as a Superman, as a Jedi knight, as a military hero, even as a pope in a white cassock.”

“His picture has been splashed all over the White House, on multistory banners on the side of federal buildings, on annual passes to national parks and maybe even soon on a one-dollar coin. His name has been etched on the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, on the U.S. Institute of Peace, on federal investment accounts, special visas and a discount drug program and, if he has his way, on Washington Dulles International Airport, Penn Station in New York and the future stadium of the Washington Commanders.”

Baker’s catalogue of Trump’s efforts to brand himself as the face of a new America is expansive, ranging from a 15-foot-tall gold-covered “Don Colossus” statue to a new class of battleships and adding his face to Mt. Rushmore. Trump even toyed with the idea of renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of Trump.

This is not branding.

It is the architecture of a cult of personality.

“This is a man drunk on power with an already enormous ego,” said Sarah Matthews, deputy White House press secretary during the first Trump administration. “It reinforces the perception that this presidency is more about elevating one man than serving the country.”

As always, history points the way.

Cults of personality are hallmarks of authoritarian regimes—not constitutional republics. They are associated with figures like Stalin, Mao, Mussolini and, more recently, Vladimir Putin.

The parallels are difficult to ignore.

So, too, are Trump’s similarities to the megalomania of Saparmurat Niyazov, the former dictator of Turkmenistan, whose own cult of personality gave rise to policies based on his changeable whims, pet peeves and ego.

As Slate reports, Niyazov not only outlawed beards, lip syncing, and gold teeth but also installed a 350 foot, rocket-shaped monument­—the Arch of Neutrality—topped with a golden statue of Niyazov that rotated so it constantly faced the sun.

But such power does not exist in a vacuum.

It is enabled.

While Niyazov was, indeed, a megalomaniac, it was his cult of personality—the hard-core followers who formed his base—that empowered him to act as a dictator.

Likewise, Trump’s personality cult has, as the New York Times Editorial Board noted, “transformed the Republican Party from a political organization into a cult of personality”—one that reinforces and amplifies his excesses.

We are, as Pope Leo XIV warned, mired in a “delusion of omnipotence” that “is becoming increasingly unpredictable and aggressive.”

Which brings us to the unavoidable question: what happens when the president appears unable to discharge the duties of his office in a rational, coherent, and responsible manner?

In other words, what can we do when the president appears to be losing his mind?

This is a constitutional crisis.

And the Constitution provides a remedy.

The 25^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1967 in the wake of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, provides a process by which the government continues to function should the president be unable to carry out his duties.

There are four clauses to the amendment, which outlines the procedure for “replacing the president or vice president in the event of death, removal, resignation, or incapacitation.”

Section 4 is explicit:

“Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.”

A growing chorus of individuals—a lineup of the usual Trump critics, as well as some of his onetime defenders—have loudly called to invoke the 25^th Amendment, insisting that the president is not fit for office.

Yet as Gaby Hinsliff concludes in The Guardian:

“In practice, constitutional safeguards are only as strong as the resolve of a leader’s inner circle—people often devoted to keeping them in power at all costs—to expose the boss publicly at his or her most vulnerable… But it’s precisely to override such emotional dilemmas that, in the case of political leaders, constitutional safeguards exist. For without them, we’re all potentially just passengers in some superpower’s speeding truck: watching helplessly from the back seat as the driver weaves all over the road, and wondering just how close we have to get to crashing before someone speaks up.”

Notably silent among those calling to invoke the 25^th Amendment: anyone in Trump’s cabinet or among those who would benefit most from keeping Trump as a figurehead, including the Republicans in Congress (minus Thomas Massie).

History suggests this is not unusual.

There has long been a tendency to shield those in power from scrutiny, to conceal frailty in the name of stability, and to protect the office even at the expense of the public.

That instinct—to cover up rather than confront—can be as dangerous as the instability itself.

This was never supposed to be about politics.

It was never supposed to be about ideology.

It is about constitutional capability.

Yet the same voices that once called for invoking the 25th Amendment against Joe Biden have fallen silent—or worse, attempted to dismiss Trump’s instability as authentic and refreshingly unfiltered.

But there is no filter for this level of dysfunction.

Somewhere between Trump’s attempts to overthrow the 2020 election and his threats of war crimes against civilians, we crossed a line—from controversial leadership into dangerous incapacity.

“What’s alarming is how the rate of Trump’s bizarre speech and political decisions have been increasing,” said Harry Segal, a senior lecturer in the Psychology Department at Cornell University and in the Psychiatry Department at Weill Cornell Medicine. “Trump has shown evidence of dementia … as indicated by his strange gait, phonemic paraphasia—when he begins a word and can’t finish it—and decline in the complexity of his words and concepts… he is avoiding events where he has to respond coherently and spontaneously … he has become more impulsive, another sign of incipient dementia.”

Even those within Trump’s orbit have acknowledged the risk.

As former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci observed, “It was at this point that our Founders thought the best thing to do would be to remove a mad man who has the executive office. It became more formalized with the 25th amendment, but more people now should be calling for this man’s removal.”

Yet again, the troubling parallels to America’s nascent beginnings are hard to ignore.

King George III—believed to have suffered from severe mental instability, including manic episodes and delusions—lost the American colonies in part because of his inability to govern rationally.

Two hundred fifty years later, America once again finds itself charting dangerous territory.

Yet even so, this moment is about so much more than one man and his cult of personality.

Because while the president may be unraveling in plain sight, the machinery of the American Police State continues to expand—quietly, relentlessly, and with bipartisan support.

Surveillance is expanding.

Policing is becoming more militarized.

Power is becoming more centralized and less accountable.

And unlike the presidency, there is no 25th Amendment for the police state.

No mechanism to declare it unfit.

No procedure to remove it.

Or is there?

After all, isn’t that what the Declaration of Independence was—a formal recognition that a ruler was no longer fit to govern, followed by a blueprint for replacing that power with something accountable to the people?

The American Revolution was, at its core, a judgment: that unchecked power must be resisted.

That principle still stands.

As I make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the answer is not violence, but vigilance.

Not chaos, but constitutional resistance.

If the government has become unfit—whether through madness, corruption or unchecked power—then it is up to “we the people” to hold it accountable.

Because if we fail to act, we may soon find that the problem is no longer one unstable leader—but a system that no longer answers to the people at all.

WC: 2187

One week after posting a profanity-laced Easter message threatening to wipe out the entire civilization of Iran, Donald J. Trump, the 47^th president of the United States, spent the night of April 12 and into the early morning hours unleashing a barrage of AI-generated images, threats and insults.

One post depicted Trump as Jesus, imbued with divine power, healing the sick.

Another imagined a Trump-branded hotel on the Moon.

Yet another lashed out at Pope Leo XIV as weak on crime, suggesting he owed his papacy to Trump and “should get his act together as Pope, use Common Sense, stop catering to the Radical Left, and focus on being a Great Pope, not a Politician.”

After significant outcry—including from his own evangelical and MAGA supporters—Trump deleted the post but refused to apologize for it.

Blasphemous. Profane. Threatening. Self-aggrandizing.

These posts are not anomalies.

They are part of a pattern—one that appears to be escalating.

What was once dismissed as erratic now feels increasingly unhinged. What was once provocative now borders on delusional. What was once ego now approaches outright megalomania.

This is not normal.

Nor is it merely rhetorical excess.

It is behavior that mirrors the governing style: impulsive, self-serving, detached from reality, and increasingly dangerous.

The same egomania driving Trump’s online persona is shaping his presidency.

He has alienated allies, threatened the sovereignty of other nations—including Canada, Greenland and Cuba—and pushed the country toward ill-advised wars with devastating human and financial costs.

Having inherited one of the strongest economies in the world, he has overseen policies that have left average Americans struggling to stay afloat, even as his allies and corporate partners grow richer.

Whether driven by ego or manipulation—by flattery, spectacle or greed—the result is the same: America is being hollowed out while the president redecorates it in gold.

Literally.

He is even staging a UFC fight on the White House lawn on his 80^th birthday as part of the nation’s 250^th anniversary celebrations.

All of this while Americans struggle with rising grocery costs, unaffordable healthcare, and economic instability driven by his reckless policy decisions.

This is not serious governance. This is spectacle.

This is not rational.

This is not presidential.

And yet, despite widespread fatigue, desensitization, and normalization of this behavior, there must come a point when we acknowledge what is plainly visible: something is deeply wrong with the president.

This is no longer a matter of partisan disagreement or political style.

To any objective viewer, Donald Trump’s behavior—which has always been erratic at best—has become increasingly unstable.

As the New York Times reports, “Trump seems even less restrained and more incoherent at times. He uses more profanity, speaks longer and regularly makes comments rooted in fantasy rather than fact.”

As the oldest person elected to the White House, Trump—who turns 80 this year—oscillates between vicious politicking, relentless self-idolatry, and serving as the sleight-of-hand prop for what increasingly resembles an organized crime operation—one that operates behind the floodlights to consolidate power and wealth while robbing the American electorate blind.

Trump’s self-mythologizing is unprecedented in modern American politics.

As journalist Peter Baker notes, Trump “regularly depicts himself in a heroic, almost godly fashion, as a monarch, as a Superman, as a Jedi knight, as a military hero, even as a pope in a white cassock.” Trump even toyed with the idea of renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of Trump.

This is not branding.

It is the architecture of a cult of personality.

Cults of personality are hallmarks of authoritarian regimes—not constitutional republics. They are associated with figures like Stalin, Mao, Mussolini and, more recently, Vladimir Putin.

Trump’s personality cult has, as the New York Times Editorial Board noted, “transformed the Republican Party from a political organization into a cult of personality”—one that reinforces and amplifies his excesses.

We are, as Pope Leo XIV warned, mired in a “delusion of omnipotence” that “is becoming increasingly unpredictable and aggressive.”

Which brings us to the unavoidable question: what happens when the president appears unable to discharge the duties of his office in a rational, coherent, and responsible manner?

In other words, what can we do when the president appears to be losing his mind?

The Constitution provides a remedy.

The 25^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution provides a process by which the government continues to function should the president be unable to carry out his duties.

A growing chorus of individuals have loudly called to invoke the 25^th Amendment, insisting that the president is not fit for office.

The same voices that once called for invoking the 25th Amendment against Joe Biden have fallen silent—or worse, attempted to dismiss Trump’s instability as authentic and refreshingly unfiltered.

But there is no filter for this level of dysfunction.

Yet again, the troubling parallels to America’s nascent beginnings are hard to ignore.

King George III—believed to have suffered from severe mental instability, including manic episodes and delusions—lost the American colonies in part because of his inability to govern rationally.

Two hundred fifty years later, America once again finds itself charting dangerous territory.

Yet even so, this moment is about so much more than one man and his cult of personality.

Because while the president may be unraveling in plain sight, the machinery of the American Police State continues to expand—quietly, relentlessly, and with bipartisan support.

Surveillance is expanding.

Policing is becoming more militarized.

Power is becoming more centralized and less accountable.

And unlike the presidency, there is no 25th Amendment for the police state.

No mechanism to declare it unfit.

No procedure to remove it.

Or is there?

After all, isn’t that what the Declaration of Independence was—a formal recognition that a ruler was no longer fit to govern, followed by a blueprint for replacing that power with something accountable to the people?

The American Revolution was, at its core, a judgment: that unchecked power must be resisted.

That principle still stands.

As I make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the answer is not violence, but vigilance.

Not chaos, but constitutional resistance.

If the government has become unfit—whether through madness, corruption or unchecked power—then it is up to “we the people” to hold it accountable.

Because if we fail to act, we may soon find that the problem is no longer one unstable leader—but a system that no longer answers to the people at all.

WC: 1090

WASHINGTON, DC — As the U.S. government escalates military conflicts abroad and confronts rising anti-war resistance at home, a broad coalition of civil liberties organizations is warning that dissent itself is being treated as a threat.

In asking the Third Circuit Court of Appeals to rehear the case of Mahmoud Khalil—a legal U.S. resident, Columbia University graduate, husband to and father of U.S. citizens—the coalition cautions that the government is claiming the power to jail individuals for their political views while delaying any meaningful or timely judicial review. Khalil was among the first lawful residents targeted by ICE as part of the Trump administration’s crackdown on students engaged in nonviolent, anti-war protests critical of Israel’s war in Gaza.

Warning that a recent Third Circuit panel decision opens the door to government retaliation against protected political speech, the coalition—which includes the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), PEN America, The Rutherford Institute, and the First Amendment Lawyers Association—has filed an amicus brief in Khalil v. Trump calling on the full court to review and overturn the panel’s ruling. At issue is whether federal courts can immediately hear habeas corpus petitions challenging the government’s detention of an individual as being in retaliation for constitutionally protected speech before immigration proceedings have concluded. The panel ruled they cannot, effectively allowing the government to jail individuals for their speech indefinitely while insulating that conduct from timely judicial review.

“You don’t defend freedom by silencing dissent—especially in times of war,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “This is how rights disappear: when the government punishes lawful activity, delays justice, and normalizes the abuse of power. That’s not how constitutional government works—and if it’s allowed to stand, no one’s rights are secure.”

Mahmoud Khalil, a lawful permanent resident and graduate of Columbia University, was arrested by federal agents in March 2025 after engaging in nonviolent protest activity critical of U.S. foreign policy and Israel’s military actions in Gaza. Although he was not accused of any violence or criminal wrongdoing, the government sought to detain and deport him under a rarely used statute that allows the Secretary of State to remove noncitizens for speech deemed contrary to U.S. foreign policy interests. Khalil was transported to a detention facility in Louisiana, far from his family and legal counsel, and held for months while challenging his detention in federal court.

A federal district court later found that the government’s actions likely violated due process when combined with First Amendment protections and ordered his release. However, the government continued to pursue removal proceedings on alternate grounds, which Khalil maintains are pretextual and retaliatory. The civil liberties coalition’s brief warns that the Third Circuit panel’s ruling creates a dangerous precedent by allowing the government to detain individuals in retaliation for protected speech without meaningful judicial oversight for months or even years. By forcing individuals to wait until the conclusion of immigration proceedings to raise constitutional claims, the government is effectively permitted to silence speech first and answer for it later—if at all.

Jenin Younes with the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee advanced the arguments in the Khalil v. Trump amicus brief.

The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties organization, defends individuals whose constitutional rights have been threatened or violated and educates the public on a wide spectrum of issues affecting their freedoms.

“We’re fighting wars, we can’t take care of … daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things… We have to take care of one thing: military protection.”—President Donald J. Trump

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”— President Dwight D. Eisenhower

Every bomb dropped abroad is a bill sent home.

Every war waged in the name of “security” is paid for by Americans who go without—without affordable healthcare, without stable housing, without a government that prioritizes their well-being.

As the U.S. pours trillions into endless wars and military expansion, Americans are left paying the price—not just in dollars, but in lost freedoms and eroded constitutional protections.

This is not national defense.

This is organized theft.

While Americans struggle with rising gas prices, soaring grocery bills, and mounting debt—fueled in part by reckless tariffs and preemptive wars—the federal government is spending money it doesn’t have on military expansion, foreign conflicts, and presidential excess.

This is not America First.

If anything, it is becoming painfully clear that Donald Trump’s “America First” approach to governing puts America last every time.

Trump has not made it a priority to rebuild America’s crumbling infrastructure. He has not made it a priority to invest in innovation or ensure that the nation remains competitive in a rapidly advancing technological world. Nor has he shown much concern for caring for veterans, the elderly, or the young.

Instead, the government is cutting back on programs that make Americans healthier, smarter, and more secure—while the president builds monuments to himself and indulges in a taxpayer-funded lifestyle of staggering excess.

Despite once claiming he would be too busy to play golf, Trump is on track to leave taxpayers with a bill exceeding $300 million in travel and security expenses—much of it tied to frequent trips to his Florida properties. Each visit to Mar-a-Lago costs an estimated $3.4 million.

Meanwhile, taxpayers are shelling out $273,063 per hour to keep Air Force One in the air.

And while millions of Americans struggle to afford basic necessities, Trump is demanding $377 million—an 866 percent increase—to renovate the White House residence.

But these excesses, outrageous as they are, pale in comparison to the true cost of this administration’s priorities: war.

The Trump administration has requested $1.5 trillion for its FY 2027 military budget—separate from an additional $200 billion in emergency funding for the war in Iran.

The sitting president of the United States is spending money that is not his to spend in order to fight endless wars unauthorized by Congress that do nothing to protect the American people or our interests, while insisting that the federal government’s only priority should be the military industrial complex.

The president’s fiscal priorities include:

• $65.8 billion for Navy shipbuilding, including a new “Trump-class” Golden Fleet battleship.
• Pay raises for military troops, while freezing pay raises for civilian federal workers.
• $152 million to start rebuilding Alcatraz as a working federal prison.
• $10 billion for beautification projects in Washington, D.C.

In addition to increasing the budget for the military, prisons, nuclear weapons, and a weaponized Justice Department, the Trump administration has also proposed budget cuts of $73 billion to non-military programs—slashing funding for medical research, public schools, and low-income heating assistance, as well as cuts to affordable housing, job training, small-business lending, anti-poverty programs, agriculture, NASA, research in social sciences and economics, humanitarian assistance and global health programs, among others.

As Dominik Lett writes for Cato, “Shifting dollars from domestic programs to the Pentagon is shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic given our mounting fiscal crisis.”

This is how empires fall.

The Constitution does not permit a president to wage war on a whim.

The founders were clear: the power to declare war rests with Congress, not the executive. The president, as Commander in Chief, was meant to oversee the military—not unleash it unchecked.

And yet, once again, we find ourselves embroiled in an unauthorized war—funded by taxpayers, justified with shifting narratives, and carried out without meaningful oversight.

With Congress unwilling to act as a check on executive overreach, and the courts increasingly sidelined, the constitutional safeguards meant to prevent this very scenario have all but collapsed.

War is no longer a last resort.

It has become a business model.

The man who campaigned on a pledge of “no new wars” has instead propelled the nation into endless military conflicts that promise to become endless wars that enrich defense contractors, reward political allies, and deepen the financial burden on the American people.

Reports of insider profiteering tied to shifting policy decisions only reinforce what many Americans already suspect: that war, in the Trump era, is as much about profit as it is about power.

Historian Timothy Snyder, who has written extensively on authoritarian regimes, sees the administration’s expanded war budget through a darker and more troubling lens—by which military spending functions as a way to bribe the military into supporting a Trump-led government takeover.

Translation: the Trump administration could be laying the groundwork for a false flag terrorist attack that would allow Trump to declare martial law, cancel or nullify the midterm elections and shift the nation further towards a dictatorship.

There is precedent for it, not only with Trump’s own actions in January 2020, but also by the man he most admires—Vladimir Putin, who masterminded his own false flag terrorist attacks in Russia in 1999 as a means of entrenching his own power.

In that light, the obscene escalation of military funding raises the specter of a government preparing not just for foreign conflict—but for domestic control.

This tracks closely with the Pentagon’s chilling Megacities training video, which predicts that by 2030, armed forces would be used against civilian populations to solve domestic political and social problems.

The danger is not theoretical.

History has shown, time and again, that leaders who accumulate unchecked power, surround themselves with loyalists, and normalize perpetual war often turn those powers inward.

But what happens when that unchecked power is placed in the hands of someone who appears increasingly erratic and unmoored from reality?

In recent weeks, Trump has issued profanity-laced threats on social media targeting civilian infrastructure in Iran—actions that would constitute war crimes under international law.

On Easter Sunday, when Christians the world over were celebrating the hope and resurrection of Jesus Christ, Trump shared a profanity-laden post to his Truth Social account, threatening to target civilian infrastructure in Iran—war crimes under the Geneva Convention. “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

He has used public appearances to rant about political enemies, threaten foreign nations, and boast about military actions with little regard for accuracy or consequence.

In front of an audience of children gathered for the White House’s annual Easter Egg Roll, Trump ranted about Biden’s autopen, expounded on the war in Iran, referred to Kamala Harris as a “low IQ person,” described the Biden administration as not knowing “what the hell they were doing,” and once again threatened to obliterate Iran’s power plants and bridges, which constitute a war crime.

He has suggested he could start charging “tolls” on global shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, claimed victory in the war with Iran even while American forces and Middle Eastern allies continue to come under fire, and floated fantastical political ambitions untethered from constitutional limits, including the idea that he could quickly learn Spanish in order to run for president of Venezuela and win.

This pattern of behavior—reckless, inflammatory, and detached from reality—has prompted a growing number of voices, across the political spectrum, to question whether the president should be removed from office under the 25^th Amendment.

Not surprisingly, the very same individuals who loudly called to invoke the 25^th Amendment against Joe Biden have fallen silent in the face of Trump’s increasingly erratic behavior.

The standard, it seems, is not constitutional—it is political.

Which brings us back to the war in Iran—a costly, dangerous, and deeply suspect conflict that raises more questions than answers and provides a conveniently timed distraction from Trump’s presence within the Epstein files.

Despite President Trump and Pete Hegseath’s incessant claims of lethality and success, victory is not a foregone conclusion.

And the price we are paying is high indeed, in treasure and life.

Credible concerns point to the fact that key details about the true cost of this war—which “we the people” are entitled to know—are being withheld from the public.

An investigative report by The Intercept suggests that “U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM, which oversees military operations in the Middle East, appears to be engaged in what a defense official called a ‘casualty cover-up,’ offering The Intercept low-ball and outdated figures and failing to provide clarifications on military deaths and injuries.”

Far from providing a true accounting of the human and financial burden to be borne by the American people, the Trump administration has apparently continued to stonewall and slow-walk information about the numbers of troops injured and killed, and the number of U.S. bases attacked. Indeed, U.S. troops throughout the Middle East have reportedly been forced to abandon their bases and retreat to hotels and office buildings, which are ill-equipped to provide defensive cover.

Even the administration’s account of a dramatic rescue mission of a downed weapons system officer—one involving massive resources and the destruction of U.S. aircraft—is coming under scrutiny, with some suggesting it may have been something far more ambitious and far less successful than advertised.

Although Trump has insisted that he directed the military to send in more than 150 aircraft—including 64 fighter jets, four bombers, 48 refuelers, 13 rescue aircraft and 26 intelligence and jamming aircraft, hundreds of troops, munitions, and multiple aircraft (two of which were reportedly destroyed by U.S. forces to avoid them falling into enemy hands) to rescue this one airman, there is a growing groundswell of voices suggesting that the administration’s rescue mission was, in fact, a failed ground invasion to seize Iran’s enriched uranium—a prospect Trump has teased for weeks.

As Financial Review concluded, “Trump’s daring special ops rescue comes at a hefty price. Some 100 special operations forces were involved in the high-stakes mission while several multimillion-dollar US aircraft were destroyed to secure the airman.”

Which begs the question: can we trust the U.S. government to tell us the truth?

Can we trust a government that has historically engaged in cover-ups—medical, military, political, and environmental?

Can we trust a government that treats its citizens as data points to be tracked, monitored, and manipulated?

Can we trust a government that wages wars for profit, jails its own people for profit, and shields those in power from accountability?

This is a government that lies, cheats, steals, spies, kills, and overreaches its authority at almost every turn.

It treats human beings as expendable—resources to be used, controlled, and discarded.

It is not guided by morality, restraint, or constitutional principle.

It is power unbound—corrupt, unaccountable, and increasingly indifferent to the freedoms it was meant to protect.

This is a government that wages wars for profit and turns a blind eye while its agents abuse their power.

And increasingly, the wars being waged are not just overseas.

Those wars are also here at home.

Through mass surveillance programs that track every movement and communication. Through militarized policing and the deployment of National Guard units against civilian populations. Through federal agencies empowered to detain, deport, and disappear individuals with little regard for due process. Through policies that attempt to redefine who is entitled to the protections of citizenship—and who can be stripped of them.

This is what it looks like when the machinery of war—built for foreign battlefields—is turned inward.

This is what it looks like when “we the people” become the enemy.

And in this moment, we find ourselves brought full circle.

Nearly 250 years after the American colonists rose up against a distant ruler for waging war against his own people—through standing armies, arbitrary rule, and the stripping away of rights—we are once again confronting a government that views its citizens not as sovereign individuals, but as subjects to be controlled.

As I make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the government was never meant to be trusted. It was meant to be restrained by the chains of the Constitution.

The greatest threat to freedom is not a foreign enemy.

The greatest threat to freedom is a government that no longer fears, values or serves its people.

Don’t fall for the lie.

WC: 2170

“We’re fighting wars, we can’t take care of … daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things… We have to take care of one thing: military protection.”—President Donald J. Trump

Every bomb dropped abroad is a bill sent home.

Every war waged in the name of “security” is paid for by Americans who go without—without affordable healthcare, without stable housing, without a government that prioritizes their well-being.

As the U.S. pours trillions into endless wars and military expansion, Americans are left paying the price—not just in dollars, but in lost freedoms and eroded constitutional protections.

This is not national defense.

This is organized theft.

While Americans struggle with rising gas prices, soaring grocery bills, and mounting debt—fueled in part by reckless tariffs and preemptive wars—the federal government is spending money it doesn’t have on military expansion, foreign conflicts, and presidential excess.

This is not America First.

If anything, it is becoming painfully clear that Donald Trump’s “America First” approach to governing puts America last every time.

Trump has not made it a priority to rebuild America’s crumbling infrastructure. He has not made it a priority to invest in innovation or ensure that the nation remains competitive in a rapidly advancing technological world. Nor has he shown much concern for caring for veterans, the elderly, or the young.

Instead, the government is cutting back on programs that make Americans healthier, smarter, and more secure—while the president builds monuments to himself and indulges in a taxpayer-funded lifestyle of staggering excess.

Despite once claiming he would be too busy to play golf, Trump is on track to leave taxpayers with a bill exceeding $300 million in travel and security expenses—much of it tied to frequent trips to his Florida properties. Each visit to Mar-a-Lago costs an estimated $3.4 million.

Meanwhile, taxpayers are shelling out $273,063 per hour to keep Air Force One in the air.

And while millions of Americans struggle to afford basic necessities, Trump is demanding $377 million—an 866 percent increase—to renovate the White House residence.

But these excesses, outrageous as they are, pale in comparison to the true cost of this administration’s priorities: war.

The Trump administration has requested $1.5 trillion for its FY 2027 military budget—separate from an additional $200 billion in emergency funding for the war in Iran.

The sitting president of the United States is spending money that is not his to spend in order to fight endless wars unauthorized by Congress that do nothing to protect the American people or our interests, while insisting that the federal government’s only priority should be the military industrial complex.

In addition to increasing the budget for the military, prisons, nuclear weapons, and a weaponized Justice Department, the Trump administration has also proposed budget cuts of $73 billion to non-military programs—slashing funding for medical research, public schools, and low-income heating assistance, as well as cuts to affordable housing, job training, small-business lending, anti-poverty programs, agriculture, NASA, research in social sciences and economics, humanitarian assistance and global health programs, among others.

As Dominik Lett writes for Cato, “Shifting dollars from domestic programs to the Pentagon is shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic given our mounting fiscal crisis.”

This is how empires fall.

The Constitution does not permit a president to wage war on a whim.

The founders were clear: the power to declare war rests with Congress, not the executive. The president, as Commander in Chief, was meant to oversee the military—not unleash it unchecked.

And yet, once again, we find ourselves embroiled in an unauthorized war—funded by taxpayers, justified with shifting narratives, and carried out without meaningful oversight.

With Congress unwilling to act as a check on executive overreach, and the courts increasingly sidelined, the constitutional safeguards meant to prevent this very scenario have all but collapsed.

War is no longer a last resort.

It has become a business model.

The man who campaigned on a pledge of “no new wars” has instead propelled the nation into endless military conflicts that promise to become endless wars that enrich defense contractors, reward political allies, and deepen the financial burden on the American people.

Reports of insider profiteering tied to shifting policy decisions only reinforce what many Americans already suspect: that war, in the Trump era, is as much about profit as it is about power.

Historian Timothy Snyder, who has written extensively on authoritarian regimes, sees the administration’s expanded war budget through a darker and more troubling lens—by which military spending functions as a way to bribe the military into supporting a Trump-led government takeover.

Translation: the Trump administration could be laying the groundwork for a false flag terrorist attack that would allow Trump to declare martial law, cancel or nullify the midterm elections and shift the nation further towards a dictatorship.

The danger is not theoretical.

History has shown, time and again, that leaders who accumulate unchecked power, surround themselves with loyalists, and normalize perpetual war often turn those powers inward.

Which brings us back to the war in Iran—a costly, dangerous, and deeply suspect conflict that raises more questions than answers and provides a conveniently timed distraction from Trump’s presence within the Epstein files.

Despite President Trump and Pete Hegseath’s incessant claims of lethality and success, victory is not a foregone conclusion.

And the price we are paying is high indeed, in treasure and life.

Credible concerns point to the fact that key details about the true cost of this war—which “we the people” are entitled to know—are being withheld from the public.

Even the administration’s account of a dramatic rescue mission of a downed weapons system officer—one involving massive resources and the destruction of U.S. aircraft—is coming under scrutiny, with some suggesting it may have been more in the way of a failed ground invasion to seize Iran’s enriched uranium.

Which begs the question: can we trust the U.S. government to tell us the truth?

Can we trust a government that wages wars for profit, jails its own people for profit, and shields those in power from accountability?

As I make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the government was never meant to be trusted. It was meant to be restrained by the chains of the Constitution.

It turns out that the greatest threat to freedom is not a foreign enemy.

The greatest threat to freedom is a government that no longer fears, values or serves its people.

Don’t fall for the lie.

WC: 1096

“Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.” — Matthew 5:3-12

“We negotiate with bombs.”— Pete Hegseth, Defense Secretary for the Trump Administration

The language of modern government is the language of empire.

It is the language of domination, retaliation, conquest and control—of enemies to be crushed, nations to be subdued, and dissenters to be silenced.

Under the Trump Administration, the language of empire has also been imbued with a religious fervor that recasts Jesus Christ—not as a peacemaker—but as a mascot for power, conquest and control.

War has been dressed up in patriotism. Wrapped in Scripture. Called “righteous.” Marketed as “peace through strength.”

But this is not a holy war. It is a political war dressed up as holy.

Despite the pageantry—crosses held aloft, prayers offered from podiums, politicians invoking God while demanding loyalty—the values animating America’s wars and power plays bear no resemblance to the teachings of Jesus Christ.

Jesus said: Love your enemies. The government says: destroy them.

Jesus said: Blessed are the peacemakers. The government says: blessed are the war-makers.

Jesus said: Whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me. The government cages the poor, criminalizes the homeless, bombs the foreigner, and calls it security.

This is not a misunderstanding of Christianity.

It is a deliberate rewriting of it.

Consider the prayer offered by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at a Pentagon worship service: “Let every round find its mark… Give … overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy. We ask these things with bold confidence in the mighty and powerful name of Jesus Christ.”

No mercy. Spoken in the name of the Prince of Peace.

This is not faith. This is blasphemy baptized in nationalism.

It is the hijacking of religion to sanctify violence—the turning of the Sermon on the Mount into a war manual.

It is also an attempt to recast modern warfare as a holy war—sanctioned by God, justified by faith, and beyond moral reproach.

That idea is as unconstitutional as it is un-Christian.

And it raises a constitutional question that should alarm every American, regardless of faith.

The First Amendment was designed to prevent exactly this kind of fusion of church and state power. It protects the free exercise of religion—but it also forbids the government from establishing, endorsing or advancing religion.

There is a difference between religious freedom and religious indoctrination.

There is a difference between private belief and state-sponsored theology.

When government officials invoke God to justify violence, when military power is cloaked in religious language, when prayer becomes a tool of state policy—we are no longer dealing with freedom of religion.

We are staring at the early stages of religious establishment.

History has shown us where that road leads.

As Thomas Jefferson warned, the Constitution erects a “wall of separation between church and state” precisely to prevent this kind of fusion of political power and religious authority.

When government begins to speak in the language of divine mandate, that wall is already being breached.

And more to the point—it is the very abuse of religion that Jesus Himself stood against.

Jesus did not preach “overwhelming violence.” He did not bless empire. He did not anoint governments to kill in His name.

As he was being executed—wrongly accused, beaten, nailed to a cross—Jesus did not call down vengeance. He prayed: “Father, forgive them.”

Forgive them. Not revenge. Not retaliation. Not “overwhelming violence.” Not “no mercy.”

And yet today, we are told that violence brings peace, domination ensures security, and revenge is strength.

It contradicts everything Jesus stood for. Everything Christianity is supposed to stand for.

What we are witnessing is not Christianity.

It is Christian nationalism—a counterfeit religion that wraps political power in religious language and calls it holy.

It is idolatry of the nation masquerading as devotion to God.

As theologian Mark Lewis Taylor warned, the true power of Jesus lies in His ability to critique empire—not to crown it.

Christians are not called to identify with power, but to speak truth to power—even at great cost.

That has always been the dividing line between genuine faith and political religion.

Yet today, far too many churches have traded prophecy for proximity to power. They have exchanged the cross for the flag.

As Peter Wehner writes in The Atlantic:

“The marketing genius of Donald Trump [is] that he never sold himself to Christians as one of them—pious, devoted, merciful, forgiving, irenic, biblically literate, a faithful husband and father, a man of high moral standards. Instead, he sold himself as their protector. He didn’t hide his cruelty or his belief that the ends justify the means; doing so would have been impossible for him because they are central features of his personality. So he did the opposite: He presented himself to Christians as a fierce, even ruthless, warrior on their behalf. It worked. He built a huge, loyal, fanatical following . . . Much of today’s evangelical world sees Trump’s viciousness not as a vice but as a virtue, so long as it is employed against those they perceive as their enemies, against those whom they resent and for whom they have a seething hatred.”

In abandoning the radical, disruptive, inconvenient Jesus, today’s evangelical church in America has opted to replace Him with a coarse, vindictive political savior in the form of Donald Trump.

This is the same man who has spitefully relished the deaths of political opponents from John McCain and Rob Reiner to Robert Mueller. Yet as Bret Stephens points out in the New York Times:

“Good people and good nations do not stomp on the grief of others. Politics is meant to end at the graveside. That’s not just some social nicety. It’s a foundational taboo that any civilized society must enforce to prevent transient personal differences from becoming generational blood feuds. That is where history will record that the deepest damage by the Trump presidency was done… But the damage that cuts deepest is never financial, legal or institutional.”

That this egomaniacal, bloviating demagogue has become the face of today’s evangelical movement underscores the profound disconnect between what Christianity should be and what it has become in the American police state.

The same Christians wholeheartedly supporting Trump’s policies rooted in cruelty, deception, violence and vengeance will proudly display their crosses, flood social media with Bible verses, and loudly proclaim Christ as the Prince of Peace.

That contradiction—celebrating leaders who lie, cheat, dehumanize and kill, so long as those leaders claim to be “on God’s side”—speaks louder than any sermon.

It tells the world that Christianity is not about following Jesus—it is about wielding power.

This is not new.

Power has always sought to co-opt religion.

Politicians court pastors. Campaigns mimic revivals. Prayer rallies double as political launches. Faith becomes a voting bloc. Scripture becomes a talking point.

Yet there is always a price to be paid for proximity to power.

Time and again, religious institutions that align themselves with the government find their message compromised, their witness diluted, and their moral authority traded for access, influence and political favor.

And in the process, the message of Jesus is hollowed out. Stripped of its challenge. Neutralized.

Because the real Jesus is dangerous to power. He doesn’t flatter kings. He confronts them.

Jesus was not crucified for being polite. He was executed as a threat.

To the authorities of his day—both religious and political—Jesus was a destabilizing force. He challenged the legitimacy of power built on coercion, greed and violence. He exposed hypocrisy. He disrupted systems of exploitation.

And for that, the empire killed Him.

Crucifixion was not just execution.

It was a warning.

This is what happens to those who refuse to submit.

Which raises a question modern Christians would rather avoid: If Jesus walked into today’s halls of power—into the Pentagon, the White House, the halls of Congress—would He be welcomed?

Or would He be surveilled, silenced, labeled a threat?

Would He bless drone strikes and military parades? Or overturn tables?

Or would he be told, as Americans increasingly are, to comply, submit, obey and defer to authority?

Because the version of Christianity now being sold to the public is not one of resistance to injustice, but one of obedience to power.

The Jesus of the Gospels was not aligned with empire. He was aligned with the poor. The outcast. The imprisoned. The stranger. “I was hungry… I was a stranger… I was in prison…”

Not: I was powerful, and you defended me.

Yet today’s political religion flips that script.

It exalts power. It sanctifies wealth. It demands loyalty to the state. And it calls this inversion of the Gospel “faith.”

But Jesus was clear:

“Those who exalt themselves will be humbled.”

“Blessed are the merciful.”

“Blessed are the meek.”

“Blessed are the peacemakers.”

There is no footnote that says—except in matters of national security.

This is the great moral crisis of our time.

Not just that the government wages endless war, but that it dares to do so in the name of God—and too many cheer it on.

The early Christians understood something we have forgotten. Their allegiance was not to Rome. It was not to Caesar. It was not to the machinery of empire.

Their allegiance was to a higher law. And for that, they were persecuted, imprisoned, executed.

They did not seek to control the empire.

They refused to conform to it.

Today, by contrast, much of the modern church has chosen comfort over courage. Influence over integrity. Access over accountability.

As a result, it has become indistinguishable from the power it once challenged.

But the teachings of Jesus have not changed.

They still confront us.

They still demand something costly.

They still refuse to be weaponized for political gain.

So we are left with a choice.

The Constitution was designed to guard against the union of political power and religious authority.

As I make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, what we are witnessing today is not just a theological failure—it is a constitutional one.

Will we follow the empire? Or will we follow Jesus? Will we bless violence—or embody mercy? Will we conform—or will we resist?

Because the two paths are not the same. And they never have been.

“Jesus wept.”

He wept for a world that confuses power with righteousness.

He wept for a people who would rather conquer than love.

He wept for those who would invoke His name while betraying everything He stood for.

And if we’re paying attention—He is still weeping now.

WC: 1819

“We negotiate with bombs.”— Pete Hegseth, Defense Secretary for the Trump Administration

The language of modern government is the language of empire.

It is the language of domination, retaliation, conquest and control—of enemies to be crushed, nations to be subdued, and dissenters to be silenced.

Under the Trump Administration, the language of empire has also been imbued with a religious fervor that recasts Jesus Christ—not as a peacemaker—but as a mascot for power, conquest and control.

War has been dressed up in patriotism. Wrapped in Scripture. Called “righteous.” Marketed as “peace through strength.”

But this is not a holy war. It is a political war dressed up as holy.

Despite the pageantry—crosses held aloft, prayers offered from podiums, politicians invoking God while demanding loyalty—the values animating America’s wars and power plays bear no resemblance to the teachings of Jesus Christ.

Jesus said: Love your enemies. The government says: destroy them.

Jesus said: Blessed are the peacemakers. The government says: blessed are the war-makers.

Jesus said: Whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me. The government cages the poor, criminalizes the homeless, bombs the foreigner, and calls it security.

This is not a misunderstanding of Christianity.

It is a deliberate rewriting of it.

Consider the prayer offered by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at a Pentagon worship service: “Let every round find its mark… Give … overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy. We ask these things with bold confidence in the mighty and powerful name of Jesus Christ.”

No mercy. Spoken in the name of the Prince of Peace.

This is not faith. This is blasphemy baptized in nationalism.

It is the hijacking of religion to sanctify violence—the turning of the Sermon on the Mount into a war manual.

It is also an attempt to recast modern warfare as a holy war—sanctioned by God, justified by faith, and beyond moral reproach.

That idea is as unconstitutional as it is un-Christian.

And it raises a constitutional question that should alarm every American, regardless of faith.

The First Amendment was designed to prevent exactly this kind of fusion of church and state power. It protects the free exercise of religion—but it also forbids the government from establishing, endorsing or advancing religion.

There is a difference between religious freedom and religious indoctrination.

There is a difference between private belief and state-sponsored theology.

When government officials invoke God to justify violence, when military power is cloaked in religious language, when prayer becomes a tool of state policy—we are no longer dealing with freedom of religion.

We are staring at the early stages of religious establishment.

History has shown us where that road leads.

As Thomas Jefferson warned, the Constitution erects a “wall of separation between church and state” precisely to prevent this kind of fusion of political power and religious authority.

When government begins to speak in the language of divine mandate, that wall is already being breached.

And more to the point—it is the very abuse of religion that Jesus Himself stood against.

Jesus did not preach “overwhelming violence.” He did not bless empire. He did not anoint governments to kill in His name.

And yet today, we are told that violence brings peace, domination ensures security, and revenge is strength.

What we are witnessing is not Christianity.

It is Christian nationalism—a counterfeit religion that wraps political power in religious language and calls it holy.

It is idolatry of the nation masquerading as devotion to God.

Christians are not called to identify with power, but to speak truth to power—even at great cost.

Yet today, far too many churches have traded prophecy for proximity to power. They have exchanged the cross for the flag.

And in the process, the message of Jesus is hollowed out. Stripped of its challenge. Neutralized.

Because the real Jesus is dangerous to power. He doesn’t flatter kings. He confronts them.

Jesus was not crucified for being polite. He was executed as a threat.

To the authorities of his day—both religious and political—Jesus was a destabilizing force. He challenged the legitimacy of power built on coercion, greed and violence. He exposed hypocrisy. He disrupted systems of exploitation.

And for that, the empire killed Him.

Crucifixion was not just execution.

It was a warning.

This is what happens to those who refuse to submit.

Which raises a question modern Christians would rather avoid: If Jesus walked into today’s halls of power—into the Pentagon, the White House, the halls of Congress—would He be welcomed?

Or would He be surveilled, silenced, labeled a threat?

Would He bless drone strikes and military parades? Or overturn tables?

Or would he be told, as Americans increasingly are, to comply, submit, obey and defer to authority?

Because the version of Christianity now being sold to the public is not one of resistance to injustice, but one of obedience to power.

The Jesus of the Gospels was not aligned with empire. “I was hungry… I was a stranger… I was in prison…”

Not: I was powerful, and you defended me.

Yet today’s political religion flips that script.

It exalts power. It sanctifies wealth. It demands loyalty to the state. And it calls this inversion of the Gospel “faith.”

But Jesus was clear: “Blessed are the peacemakers.” There is no footnote that says—except in matters of national security.

This is the great moral crisis of our time.

Not just that the government wages endless war, but that it dares to do so in the name of God—and too many cheer it on.

The early Christians understood something we have forgotten. Their allegiance was not to Rome. It was not to Caesar. It was not to the machinery of empire.

Their allegiance was to a higher law. And for that, they were persecuted, imprisoned, executed.

They did not seek to control the empire.

They refused to conform to it.

Today, by contrast, much of the modern church has become indistinguishable from the power it once challenged.

But the teachings of Jesus have not changed.

They still confront us.

They still demand something costly.

They still refuse to be weaponized for political gain.

So we are left with a choice.

The Constitution was designed to guard against the union of political power and religious authority.

As I make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, what we are witnessing today is not just a theological failure—it is a constitutional one.

WC: 1097

“There is no art which one government sooner learns of another than that of draining money from the pockets of the people.”—Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations

You’re not imagining it.

Everything costs more. Everything is monitored.

Everything feels like it’s designed to take—from your wallet, your time, your freedom.

That’s because it is.

The government has turned everyday life into a revenue stream—funding endless wars, bloated agencies, surveillance systems, and profit-driven policing… all on your dime.

You’re not just paying taxes. You’re paying to be watched. Paying to be policed. Paying to be controlled.

This isn’t government. It’s a business model.

By now, it has become painfully clear that the only economic plan being advanced by the Trump administration is the kind that enriches the oligarchy at the expense of everyone else.

If the government’s newly dubbed “war on waste,” headed by Vice President J.D. Vance, is anything like its deceptively futile past efforts to drain the swamp and use DOGE to cut spending that is inefficient, we should expect to see corruption, graft and waste rise while vital programs that benefit the taxpayer get slashed.

The level of self-serving corruption, indulgence and excess by the elite ruling class while Americans struggle to make ends meet is off the charts.

Under President Trump, his gilding of the White House has coincided with the dawn of a new self-serving age of indulgence for the American oligarchy. As Debbie Millman writes for the New York Times: “Trump is showing the world that his presidency is a royal court where a select few are invited to pledge their allegiance… Trump is refashioning the presidential residence into a palace; our democracy is now a members-only club.”

This is Donald Trump’s “let them eat cake” moment.

Tens of millions in one year alone for the president’s weekend golf trips while government agencies are dismantled and tens of thousands of federal workers have their jobs slashed. According to the web tracker “Did Trump Golf Today?” Trump has spent 23.5% of his presidency golfing at an estimated cost of $141 million to the taxpayer.

An extra $200 billion in additional defense funding so Pete Hegseth can make a game out of war with Iran. More than $16 billion was spent in the first 12 days of Trump’s war on Iran. That does not include the rising cost of gas and consumer goods or the long-term costs of supporting those injured in the war.

$1 billion to a French company to not develop two wind projects off the coasts of North Carolina and New York.

$14 billion in oil revenue to Iran to fund its war with the U.S. 

$22 million in one month on lobsters and ribeye steak so the Defense Department wouldn’t have to risk losing some of their taxpayer-funded budget. $1.8 million for musical instruments, including a “$98,329 Steinway & Sons grand piano for the Air Force chief of staff’s home, a $26,000 violin, and a $21,750 custom handmade flute from the luxury Japanese brand Muramatsu.”

$400 million for a 90,000-square-foot ballroom to which most taxpayers will never be invited.

$75 - $150 million to turn a public golf course into a championship-level golf course in the nation’s capital.

$100 million for a 250-foot “Arc de Trump” next to Arlington National Cemetery.

At least $60 million for a UFC event on the White House South Lawn to commemorate Donald Trump’s 80^th birthday.

While members of Trump’s inner circle dine on lobster and filet mignon, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suggests that Americans struggling with the high cost of beef instead buy and eat “cheap cuts” like liver.

Meanwhile, the rest of the country is left to absorb a higher cost of living driven by Trump’s tariffs, inflation, and economic policies that punish the many to benefit the few.

At every turn, the Trump administration’s claims of slashing government spending have translated into even greater expense for the taxpayer with little to nothing to show for it.

All of those DOGE layoffs may have reduced the size of the federal workforce on paper, but in reality they have resulted in taxpayers footing the bill for unemployment benefits instead of salaries.

Trump may have dropped oversight into police misconduct—effectively giving a green light to police violence—but taxpayers will still be forced to pay for every lawsuit and settlement that follows.

In the eyes of Trump and his cohorts, you are not a citizen—you are a revenue stream, and the government is cashing in.

Call it what you will—taxes, penalties, fees, fines, regulations, tariffs, tickets, permits, surcharges, tolls, asset forfeitures—but the only word that truly describes the constant bilking of the American taxpayer by the government and its corporate partners is this: theft.

We’re living in a topsy-turvy Sherwood Forest where the government and its corporate allies aren’t stealing from the rich to feed the poor—they’re stealing from the poor, the middle class, and anyone not politically connected to further enrich the powerful.

The result is as predictable as it is devastating: the poor get poorer, the rich get richer, and the American Dream has been replaced by a surveillance state propped up by endless war, crippling debt, and legalized plunder.

What Americans still fail to grasp is this: if the government can take your property, your income, your privacy, and your freedom at will, you don’t have rights—you have privileges.

And privileges can be revoked.

The American police state, with its surveillance cameras, militarized police, SWAT raids, fusion centers, drones, AI tracking systems, predictive policing algorithms, asset forfeiture schemes, and privatized prisons, is not about keeping you safe.

It is about profit.

It is a sprawling, multi-trillion-dollar ecosystem designed to move money from taxpayers through government agencies and into corporate hands, all under the ever-shifting justifications of “security,” “law and order,” and “national emergency.”

The rationalizations never change.

We are told it is about terrorism, drugs, immigration, public safety, or civil unrest. Today, those justifications have simply been expanded to include artificial intelligence, foreign adversaries, domestic extremism, and a permanent state of war abroad.

But these are pretexts.

The real motive has remained the same for decades: control the population, monetize the system, and keep the money flowing upward.

Follow the money and the truth becomes impossible to ignore: The government isn’t serving you. It’s billing you.

The federal government is now barreling toward $1.5 trillion in annual military spending, a staggering escalation that will add trillions more to the national debt in the coming decade. At the same time, the Trump administration is pouring hundreds of billions more into a widening conflict with Iran, where the cost of war is measured not only in lives lost but in taxpayer dollars funneled directly into the coffers of defense contractors.

At home, policing has become a billion-dollar industry unto itself. Federal, state and local governments spend more than $80 billion a year on policing, much of it used to transform civilian police forces into paramilitary units equipped with battlefield weapons and surveillance technology.

The prison system continues to operate as a profit engine, costing more than $100 billion annually while warehousing nearly 2 million people and placing millions more under government supervision. It costs taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars each year to incarcerate a single individual, many of them nonviolent offenders, while private prison corporations reap the financial rewards of a system designed to keep cells full.

Through civil asset forfeiture, law enforcement agencies seize billions of dollars in cash, cars and property, often without ever charging the owner with a crime, creating a perverse incentive to police for profit rather than justice.

The Department of Homeland Security, once sold to the public as a temporary safeguard, has become a permanent fixture of the American landscape, consuming more than $100 billion annually while expanding its reach into every corner of domestic life.

Immigration enforcement has evolved into a sprawling detention and deportation machine fueled by tens of billions in taxpayer funding, increasingly targeting not only undocumented immigrants but also legal residents and individuals whose only offense is dissent.

Layered on top of all of this is a rapidly expanding digital dragnet in which government agencies partner with private tech companies to deploy artificial intelligence systems capable of tracking, predicting and cataloging human behavior, turning everyday life into a series of data points to be monitored, analyzed and controlled.

Even local governments have been drawn into the scheme, generating billions through fines, fees, traffic cameras and automated enforcement systems that disproportionately target those least able to pay, turning ordinary citizens into revenue streams.

This is not accidental. It is a business model.

The same government that claims it cannot afford healthcare, education or housing somehow always finds unlimited funds for war. As President Eisenhower warned, the military-industrial complex feeds on conflict, and today that machine has become both global and permanent.

The wars do not end.

The spending does not stop.

And the bill always comes due to the American taxpayer.

Every bomb that falls, every missile launched, every drone strike carried out carries a price tag, and that price tag has your name on it.

At home, the logic is no different.

Policing has shifted away from protecting communities and toward managing populations, particularly those deemed inconvenient, undesirable or expendable. SWAT raids are deployed for minor offenses, predictive policing programs target individuals before any crime has been committed, and surveillance technologies are used to monitor activists, journalists and political dissenters.

Poverty itself has been criminalized, with people fined, ticketed and jailed for low-level infractions, while homelessness is treated not as a social failure but as a law enforcement opportunity.

Even the nation’s schools have been folded into this pipeline, where zero-tolerance policies and truancy enforcement funnel children into the criminal justice system at an early age.

What passes for law enforcement today is increasingly indistinguishable from revenue enforcement.

None of this happens in isolation.

Corporate America is deeply embedded in every aspect of this system. Defense contractors profit from war. Technology companies profit from surveillance. Private prison corporations profit from incarceration. Data brokers profit from harvesting and selling your personal information. Financial institutions profit from the ever-expanding national debt.

Even prison labor, paid pennies on the dollar, feeds directly into corporate supply chains, creating yet another incentive to keep the system running at full capacity.

When government power and corporate profit become intertwined in this way, the Constitution becomes optional and profit becomes policy.

In this new economy, you are no longer just a citizen.

You are a revenue stream, a data point, a potential suspect, and a body to be managed.

Whether through taxes, fines, surveillance or forced labor, the system is designed to extract value from you at every stage of your life.

And when you add it all up, the cost is not merely financial—it is constitutional.

Every dollar poured into this machinery comes at the expense of your privacy, your property, your due process rights, your freedom of movement, and your freedom of speech.

As I make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is the real bottom line: you are paying for the erosion of your own freedoms.

If this system continues unchecked, the future is already taking shape—a nation in which everything is monitored, everything is monetized, and nothing is truly free.

The solution is not more funding, more surveillance or more enforcement.

It is the opposite.

It is time to defund the police state, dismantle the profit incentives, restore constitutional limits, and return power—and resources—to the people.

Because until that happens, the theft will continue.

And the only question left will be how much is left to steal.

WC: 1964

You’re not imagining it.

Everything costs more. Everything is monitored.

Everything feels like it’s designed to take—from your wallet, your time, your freedom.

That’s because it is.

The government has turned everyday life into a revenue stream—funding endless wars, bloated agencies, surveillance systems, and profit-driven policing… all on your dime.

You’re not just paying taxes. You’re paying to be watched. Paying to be policed. Paying to be controlled.

This isn’t government. It’s a business model.

By now, it has become painfully clear that the only economic plan being advanced by the Trump administration is the kind that enriches the oligarchy at the expense of everyone else.

This is Donald Trump’s “let them eat cake” moment.

Tens of millions in one year alone for the president’s weekend golf trips while government agencies are dismantled and tens of thousands of federal workers have their jobs slashed. According to the web tracker “Did Trump Golf Today?” Trump has spent 23.5% of his presidency golfing at an estimated cost of $141 million to the taxpayer.

An extra $200 billion in additional defense funding so Pete Hegseth can make a game out of war with Iran. More than $16 billion was spent in the first 12 days of Trump’s war on Iran. That does not include the rising cost of gas and consumer goods or the long-term costs of supporting those injured in the war.

$1 billion to a French company to not develop two wind projects off the coasts of North Carolina and New York.

$14 billion in oil revenue to Iran to fund its war with the U.S. 

$22 million in one month on lobsters and ribeye steak so the Defense Department wouldn’t have to risk losing some of their taxpayer-funded budget. $1.8 million for musical instruments, including a “$98,329 Steinway & Sons grand piano for the Air Force chief of staff’s home, a $26,000 violin, and a $21,750 custom handmade flute from the luxury Japanese brand Muramatsu.”

$400 million for a 90,000-square-foot ballroom to which most taxpayers will never be invited.

$75 - $150 million to turn a public golf course into a championship-level golf course in the nation’s capital.

$100 million for a 250-foot “Arc de Trump” next to Arlington National Cemetery.

At least $60 million for a UFC event on the White House South Lawn to commemorate Donald Trump’s 80^th birthday.

While members of Trump’s inner circle dine on lobster and filet mignon, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suggests that Americans struggling with the high cost of beef instead buy and eat “cheap cuts” like liver.

Meanwhile, the rest of the country is left to absorb a higher cost of living driven by Trump’s tariffs, inflation, and economic policies that punish the many to benefit the few.

At every turn, the Trump administration’s claims of slashing government spending have translated into even greater expense for the taxpayer with little to nothing to show for it.

All of those DOGE layoffs may have reduced the size of the federal workforce on paper, but in reality they have resulted in taxpayers footing the bill for unemployment benefits instead of salaries.

Trump may have dropped oversight into police misconduct—effectively giving a green light to police violence—but taxpayers will still be forced to pay for every lawsuit and settlement that follows.

In the eyes of Trump and his cohorts, you are not a citizen—you are a revenue stream, and the government is cashing in.

Call it what you will—taxes, penalties, fees, fines, regulations, tariffs, tickets, permits, surcharges, tolls, asset forfeitures—but the only word that truly describes the constant bilking of the American taxpayer by the government and its corporate partners is this: theft.

We’re living in a topsy-turvy Sherwood Forest where the government and its corporate allies aren’t stealing from the rich to feed the poor—they’re stealing from the poor, the middle class, and anyone not politically connected to further enrich the powerful.

The result is as predictable as it is devastating: the poor get poorer, the rich get richer, and the American Dream has been replaced by a surveillance state propped up by endless war, crippling debt, and legalized plunder.

What Americans still fail to grasp is this: if the government can take your property, your income, your privacy, and your freedom at will, you don’t have rights—you have privileges.

And privileges can be revoked.

The American police state, with its surveillance cameras, militarized police, SWAT raids, fusion centers, drones, AI tracking systems, predictive policing algorithms, asset forfeiture schemes, and privatized prisons, is not about keeping you safe.

It is about profit.

It is a sprawling, multi-trillion-dollar ecosystem designed to move money from taxpayers through government agencies and into corporate hands, all under the ever-shifting justifications of “security,” “law and order,” and “national emergency.”

The rationalizations never change.

We are told it is about terrorism, drugs, immigration, public safety, or civil unrest. Today, those justifications have simply been expanded to include artificial intelligence, foreign adversaries, domestic extremism, and a permanent state of war abroad.

But these are pretexts.

The real motive has remained the same for decades: control the population, monetize the system, and keep the money flowing upward.

Follow the money and the truth becomes impossible to ignore: The government isn’t serving you. It’s billing you.

The same government that claims it cannot afford healthcare, education or housing somehow always finds unlimited funds for war.

And the bill always comes due to the American taxpayer.

In this new economy, you are no longer just a citizen.

You are a revenue stream, a data point, a potential suspect, and a body to be managed.

Whether through taxes, fines, surveillance or forced labor, the system is designed to extract value from you at every stage of your life.

And when you add it all up, the cost is not merely financial—it is constitutional.

Every dollar poured into this machinery comes at the expense of your privacy, your property, your due process rights, your freedom of movement, and your freedom of speech.

As I make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is the real bottom line: you are paying for the erosion of your own freedoms.

It is time to defund the police state, dismantle the profit incentives, restore constitutional limits, and return power—and resources—to the people.

Because until that happens, the theft will continue.

And the only question left will be how much is left to steal.

WC: 1088

WASHINGTON, DC —In a unanimous ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court has cleared the way for a Mississippi street preacher to challenge a local law that restricted his ability to share his faith—making clear that Americans do not lose their right to challenge the future enforcement of unconstitutional laws simply because they were punished under those laws in the past.

In Olivier v. City of Brandon, the Supreme Court narrowed the scope of its prior ruling from Heck v. Humphrey, which has often been used by government officials to shut down constitutional challenges before they ever get heard. The decision removes a major obstacle not just for street preachers, but for anyone speaking out in public. Protesters, journalists, students, and everyday citizens who are convicted under questionable laws can still ask the courts to stop those laws from being used against them going forward.

The ruling comes as The Rutherford Institute is warning officials in South Padre Island, Texas, not to target street preachers during Spring Break through selective enforcement of local laws. For decades, The Rutherford Institute has defended the rights of individuals to speak freely in public spaces, standing firm on the principle that the government cannot pick and choose which messages are allowed.

“Street preachers today are the canaries in the coal mine for the First Amendment. If the government can silence them, it can silence anyone—protesters, dissidents, and anyone whose speech runs afoul of those in power,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “For too long, officials have imposed minor violations as an excuse to shut down speech and then argued that those same violations prevent any legal challenge. This ruling pushes back against that playbook and makes clear that the Constitution still applies.”

In a letter sent to the South Padre Island City Council, Rutherford Institute attorneys detail how city officials allegedly targeted street preachers for noise ordinance violations during Spring Break in 2025 while allowing nearby bars and beachgoers to blast louder music without consequence—an example of unconstitutional, viewpoint-based discrimination. According to the Institute’s letter, street preachers were warned or cited for using sound amplification, while others producing equal or greater noise in the exact same area were left alone, suggesting that enforcement was aimed at silencing a particular message rather than addressing noise levels. Rutherford attorneys argue that this kind of unequal treatment violates the First Amendment, runs afoul of basic due process protections, and infringes on religious freedom under the Texas Religious Freedom Restoration Act (TRFRA). Warning that such actions expose the city to legal liability, the letter urges officials to ensure that the law is enforced fairly and not used as a tool to suppress protected speech.

The situation in South Padre Island highlights the very concerns at the heart of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Olivier. Although the Court’s ruling centered on access to the courts, its implications reach much further: the government cannot shield potentially unconstitutional laws from review simply by having punished people who violated them.

The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties organization, defends individuals whose constitutional rights have been threatened or violated and educates the public on a wide spectrum of issues affecting their freedoms.

“When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything... Grab ‘em by the pussy. You can do anything.”— Donald J. Trump on seizing women, Access Hollywood (2005)

“I think I can do anything I want with it. Whether I free it, take it, I think I can do anything I want with it.”—Donald Trump on seizing Cuba (2026)

It’s been 20 years since Donald Trump bragged that, as a star, he could do anything—even assault women—and get away with it.

Two decades later, what once sounded like crude bravado has become a governing philosophy: might makes right, power excuses everything, and accountability is for other people—not this president.

Despite the Access Hollywood recording—and everything it revealed about his character—Trump was elected to the White House twice. And ever since, he has governed exactly as he promised: as a man who believes he is unaccountable, entitled, and free to act without limits.

The same mindset that once bragged about being able to “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters” has now been scaled up and weaponized through the presidency.

With a core MAGA following that seems unwilling to hold him accountable for any wrongdoing, Trump has justifiably earned his nickname as “Teflon Don.”

He can be accused of sexually assaulting young girls, and he won’t lose any voters. He can, as commander-in-chief, sanction the bombing of a girls’ school in Iran—killing young girls, their mothers and teachers—and he won’t lose any voters. He can torpedo a thriving economy, sending inflation and gas prices soaring, and he won’t lose any voters. He can dismantle a government structure that has been in place for over 200 years, and he won’t lose any voters. He can be a walking—talking—living contradiction of everything Christians claim to stand for, and he won’t lose any voters. He can send Americans servicemen and women to die in wars that the U.S. had no business starting, and he won’t lose any voters.

This is the mindset now shaping American policy.

Trump’s acts of aggression against other nations—Venezuela. Iran. Greenland. Canada. Now Cuba—are expansions of the same worldview, only this time backed by the full force of the U.S. military and funded by American taxpayers.

It is the logic of the schoolyard bully: Take what you want. Dare others to stop you. Punish anyone who resists.

That same might-makes-right mindset has transformed the American presidency into something that tracks more closely with the abuses of King George III than with our revolutionary forebears who risked their lives and fortunes to stand against tyranny.

Our Founders didn’t just fight a war—they fought a mindset. They stood against a King who thought his word was the law.

By treating the Constitution like a list of suggestions, Trump is bringing that King back to life. He’s trading our hard-won freedom for the ego of one man who thinks he is untouchable.

We are trading a republic for a playground where the bully makes the rules.

Trump wanted Venezuela’s oil, so he used the military to get it—and then bullied the country’s leaders into letting him keep it and its profits.

The tactics—swaggering, arrogant, and always prepared to browbeat and mow over anyone and anything in his way—have become all too familiar.

Trump wants a new ballroom? Tear down the old one and build another.

Trump wants to be in charge of global peace? Seize the U.S. Institute of Peace and rename it.

Trump wants to prove his economic prowess? Levy tariffs against any nations who refuse to fall in line.

Trump wants to be seen as the one who solved Iran? Launch a preemptive war that kills civilians, destabilizes regions, and threatens the global economy—then turn to the same allies he once disparaged to bail him out.

The pattern is unmistakable: Power without restraint. Action without accountability. Force without principle.

And when the law stands in the way, it is bent—or ignored. Justice is weaponized. Congress is sidelined. The courts are defied, their rulings delayed or disregarded when inconvenient. Due process becomes conditional—a privilege for the favored few, optional for the disfavored.

This is not constitutional governance. This is how a bully operates: rules are for other people, constitutional prohibitions are inconveniences, and the law becomes whatever the one in power says it is.

The same egomaniacal traits are evident in how Trump treats dissent.

Criticism is not tolerated—it is punished.

Media outlets that report unfavorably are threatened with government retaliation. The FCC is weaponized to intimidate broadcasters. “Fake news” is redefined to mean anything that challenges the narrative.

Truth, in Trump’s America, is whatever serves power.

And those who challenge that power are ridiculed, demeaned, and dehumanized.

Trump insults, belittles, and mocks anyone he considers an opponent.

He calls California Governor Gavin Newsom “Newscum” and mocks him as “low IQ” for being dyslexic.

He routinely disparages women, attacking their appearance and intelligence if they dare to challenge him. He referred to New York Times correspondent Maggie Haberman as “Maggot Hagerman” and a “SLEAZEBAG writer.” He told Bloomberg reporter Catherine Lucey to be “quiet, piggy.”

This is not behavior that should be brushed off as a personality quirk.

It is a reflection of character.

And when that character is paired with unchecked power, it becomes dangerous.

Trump’s embrace of the so-called unitary executive theory—which elevates the presidency into an all-powerful office under a distorted reading of Article II—reveals the logical endpoint of this mindset: a president who believes he can do anything, answer to no one, and operate above the law.

In a constitutional republic, no one is supposed to be above the law.

A bully—an autocrat—a dictator—believes he is the law.

One think tank has rightly concluded that the U.S. under Trump is going through a rapid process of “autocratisation,” faster than any other dictatorship in the world.

As The Guardian reports, “the speed with which US democracy is being dismantled is unprecedented in modern history. The main factor is a ‘rapid and aggressive concentration of powers in the presidency’… Congress has been marginalised, jeopardising the ‘checks and balances’ (judicial and legislative constraints on the executive) so crucial to US democracy. At the same time, civil rights have been rapidly declining and freedom of expression is now at its lowest level since the 1940s.”

This is what happens when a man who believes he can do anything is given the power to do almost everything.

“Peace through strength” has become the Trump administration’s rhetorical cover for preemptive violence, military incursions, and acts of aggression that bypass Congress and ignore constitutional limits.

Distractions. Deflections. Wag-the-dog theatrics. That is the spectacle.

It’s increasingly hard not to feel as if the noise on the world stage—the wars, the threats, the swagger—is a convenient distraction meant to keep us from asking the hard questions about the man who reportedly appears tens of thousands of times in the Epstein files.

Perhaps if we are distracted enough—by the brutality of war and the easy dismissal of innocent lives lost—we will fail to grapple with the deeply troubling allegations and connections raised in the Epstein files. One account alleges that Epstein introduced a 13-year-old girl to Trump, “who subsequently forced her head down to his exposed penis which she subsequently bit. In response, Trump punched her in the head and kicked her out.”

This allegation alone deserves serious scrutiny. Because if there is even a grain of truth to it, it raises profound questions about Trump’s character and fitness for public office.

This should never be a partisan issue.

It is a question of character.

And even setting aside the most disturbing allegations, the public record alone tells a troubling story: a man who has long boasted of his treatment of women, who has admitted to infidelity and exploitation, and who has faced repeated accusations of dishonesty, fraud, and abuse of power.

Is this really the man we want as a role model for our young people?

Is this really the image of leadership we want to project to the nation—and the world?

At what point do we admit that character still matters?

Because the character on display here—cruel, arrogant, insulting, egomaniacal, and devoid of restraint—is not incidental to Trump’s presidency.

It defines it.

For too long, Trump’s supporters have excused his behavior as a refreshing willingness to “tell it like it is.” His press secretary has described his insults as “frank” and open and honest.

But vulgarity is not honesty. Cruelty is not strength. And abuse of power is not leadership.

Americans recognize this. According to Pew Research, nearly seven in ten Americans believe Trump is attempting to expand presidential power beyond that of his predecessors—and most view that as a danger, not a virtue.

When asked to rank U.S. presidents, Trump comes in last, with nearly half of respondents rating him as poor.

History has set a higher standard.

Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, and George Washington—they were rated as “outstanding.” Not perfect men, but men who understood that leadership requires restraint, responsibility, and a sense of duty beyond oneself.

John F. Kennedy challenged Americans to ask what they could do for their country.

Trump, by contrast, governs as if the country exists to serve him.

We should be better than this.

America deserves better than a president whose conduct is defined by insult, impulse, and intimidation.

Because in the end, this is what it comes down to: we have put a schoolyard bully on the world stage, and we are pretending it is leadership.

A man who measures strength by how much he can dominate others. A man who confuses cruelty with leadership. A man who believes that power means never having to say no—to himself.

The bully doesn’t follow rules—he rewrites or ignores them. And like all bullies, this particular bully thrives not just on aggression, but on silence, fear, and complicity.

Bullies don’t rise to power alone.

They are enabled. Excused. Defended. Normalized. Until their behavior becomes the standard.

That is how a nation loses its moral center.

We are already seeing the consequences.

A government that mocks instead of leads. A presidency that intimidates instead of inspires. A political culture that rewards aggression and punishes restraint.

The bully’s code—might makes right—has replaced the Constitution’s promise of equal justice under law. But history warns us that power without restraint is just another name for a King.

This nation was born in defiance of a bully.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, a king who believed himself untouchable used force, intimidation, and unchecked power to bend a people to his will.

The colonists refused.

They stood their ground—not because they were the strongest, but because they believed they were right.

They understood something we seem to be forgetting: Power without principle is tyranny. And tyranny, no matter how loud or forceful, is not invincible.

The question now is whether we still believe that.

Whether we still have the courage to reject the politics of domination. Whether we are willing to demand leaders who embody something better than ego, arrogance and aggression. Whether we will continue to reward the bully—or finally refuse to be ruled by one.

Because the example we tolerate is the example we become.

And right now, the lesson we are teaching our children, our country, and the world is this: the bully wins—unless someone finally refuses to play by his rules.

We’ve seen this script before.

As I’ve warned in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the collapse of a country starts the moment we decide that the bully is the hero.

We may already be in the final act of that story. But we can still change the ending—if we remember that in America, the law is king, and the citizenry are supposed to be the masters, not the servants.

WC: 2025

“When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything... Grab ‘em by the pussy. You can do anything.”— Donald J. Trump on seizing women, Access Hollywood (2005)

“I think I can do anything I want with it. Whether I free it, take it, I think I can do anything I want with it.”—Donald Trump on seizing Cuba (2026)

It’s been 20 years since Donald Trump bragged that, as a star, he could do anything—even assault women—and get away with it.

Two decades later, what once sounded like crude bravado has become a governing philosophy: might makes right, power excuses everything, and accountability is for other people—not this president.

Despite the Access Hollywood recording—and everything it revealed about his character—Trump was elected to the White House twice. And ever since, he has governed exactly as he promised: as a man who believes he is unaccountable, entitled, and free to act without limits.

The same mindset that once bragged about being able to “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters” has now been scaled up and weaponized through the presidency.

With a core MAGA following that seems unwilling to hold him accountable for any wrongdoing, Trump has justifiably earned his nickname as “Teflon Don.”

He can be accused of sexually assaulting young girls, and he won’t lose any voters. He can, as commander-in-chief, sanction the bombing of a girls’ school in Iran—killing young girls, their mothers and teachers—and he won’t lose any voters. He can torpedo a thriving economy, sending inflation and gas prices soaring, and he won’t lose any voters. He can dismantle a government structure that has been in place for over 200 years, and he won’t lose any voters. He can be a walking—talking—living contradiction of everything Christians claim to stand for, and he won’t lose any voters. He can send Americans servicemen and women to die in wars that the U.S. had no business starting, and he won’t lose any voters.

This is the mindset now shaping American policy.

Trump’s acts of aggression against other nations—Venezuela. Iran. Greenland. Canada. Now Cuba—are expansions of the same worldview, only this time backed by the full force of the U.S. military and funded by American taxpayers.

It is the logic of the schoolyard bully: Take what you want. Dare others to stop you. Punish anyone who resists.

Trump wanted Venezuela’s oil, so he used the military to get it—and then bullied the country’s leaders into letting him keep it and its profits.

The tactics—swaggering, arrogant, and always prepared to browbeat and mow over anyone and anything in his way—have become all too familiar.

Trump wants a new ballroom? Tear down the old one and build another.

Trump wants to be in charge of global peace? Seize the U.S. Institute of Peace and rename it.

Trump wants to prove his economic prowess? Levy tariffs against any nations who refuse to fall in line.

Trump wants to be seen as the one who solved Iran? Launch a preemptive war that kills civilians, destabilizes regions, and threatens the global economy—then turn to the same allies he once disparaged to bail him out.

The pattern is unmistakable: Power without restraint. Action without accountability. Force without principle.

This is not constitutional governance. This is how a bully operates: rules are for other people, constitutional prohibitions are inconveniences, and the law becomes whatever the one in power says it is.

The same egomaniacal traits are evident in how Trump treats dissent.

Criticism is not tolerated—it is punished.

Media outlets that report unfavorably are threatened with government retaliation. The FCC is weaponized to intimidate broadcasters. “Fake news” is redefined to mean anything that challenges the narrative.

Truth, in Trump’s America, is whatever serves power.

And those who challenge that power are ridiculed, demeaned, and dehumanized.

This is not behavior that should be brushed off as a personality quirk.

It is a reflection of character.

And when that character is paired with unchecked power, it becomes dangerous.

In a constitutional republic, no one is supposed to be above the law.

A bully—an autocrat—a dictator—believes he is the law.

“Peace through strength” has become the Trump administration’s rhetorical cover for preemptive violence, military incursions, and acts of aggression that bypass Congress and ignore constitutional limits.

Yet abuse of power is not leadership.

America deserves better.

Because in the end, this is what it comes down to: we have put a schoolyard bully on the world stage, and we are pretending it is leadership.

A man who measures strength by how much he can dominate others. A man who confuses cruelty with leadership. A man who believes that power means never having to say no—to himself.

The bully doesn’t follow rules—he rewrites or ignores them. And like all bullies, this particular bully thrives not just on aggression, but on silence, fear, and complicity.

The bully’s code—might makes right—has replaced the Constitution’s promise of equal justice under law. But history warns us that power without restraint is just another name for a King.

This nation was born in defiance of a bully.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, a king who believed himself untouchable used force, intimidation, and unchecked power to bend a people to his will.

The colonists refused.

They stood their ground—not because they were the strongest, but because they believed they were right.

They understood something we seem to be forgetting: Power without principle is tyranny. And tyranny, no matter how loud or forceful, is not invincible.

The question now is whether we still believe that. Whether we will continue to reward the bully—or finally refuse to be ruled by one.

Because the example we tolerate is the example we become.

And right now, the lesson we are teaching our children, our country, and the world is this: the bully wins—unless someone finally refuses to play by his rules.

We’ve seen this script before.

As I’ve warned in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the collapse of a country starts the moment we decide that the bully is the hero.

We may already be in the final act of that story. But we can still change the ending—if we remember that in America, the law is king, and the citizenry are supposed to be the masters, not the servants.

WC: 1092

WASHINGTON, DC — The U.S. Supreme Court has paved the way for police to enter homes without a warrant under the pretext of emergency aid.

In a blow to longstanding Fourth Amendment protections inside the home, the Court ruled in Case v. Montana that police need only an “objectively reasonable basis” for believing an occupant is seriously injured or imminently threatened with injury in order to enter a home without a warrant.

Attorneys for The Rutherford Institute warned the Court in an amicus brief that an expansive emergency-aid exception could be easily manipulated to allow unchecked government intrusion into the home. Although the Court declined to require the higher standard of probable cause—insisting that probable cause is “peculiarly related to criminal investigations”—it agreed with the Institute in rejecting the Montana Supreme Court’s broader “community caretaker” justification that would have allowed warrantless entry based merely on reasonable suspicion.

“There was a time in America when a person’s home was a sanctuary, protected from unlawful searches and seizures by the Fourth Amendment. That promise is dead,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “When government agents can invade homes on flimsy pretexts, every American’s privacy is at risk.”

The case arose after police were dispatched to William Case’s residence for a welfare check. Case’s ex-girlfriend had called 911 to report that he was intoxicated and suicidal and that she heard a sound resembling a gun being cocked before the line went dead. When officers arrived, no one responded to their knocking and announcements. Through the windows, officers observed empty beer cans, an empty holster, and a notepad. After approximately forty minutes, officers breached the home with long-barrel firearms and a ballistic shield—but without a warrant. During the sweep of the home, an officer shot Case when he emerged from a closet holding an object the officer believed was a weapon.

Case survived and was later charged with assaulting a police officer. He moved to suppress the evidence obtained following the warrantless entry, arguing that the Fourth Amendment requires police to meet the higher probable cause standard before entering a home. The Supreme Court disagreed, holding that officers need only an “objectively reasonable basis” to believe an occupant is seriously injured or imminently threatened with injury in order to justify warrantless entry. The Court noted, however, that an emergency-aid entry does not authorize officers to search beyond what is reasonably necessary to address the emergency while ensuring officer safety.

Civil liberties advocates warn that the ruling could have dangerous consequences in situations involving mental health crises. The Institute’s brief cited a Washington Post report showing that during a two-year period, calls for help resulted in police killing 178 of the very people officers had been summoned to assist. Justice Sotomayor referenced the same report in her concurring opinion, cautioning that unwanted police entry into a home during a mental health crisis “can escalate the situation rather than ameliorate it.”

Advocates also warn that the Court’s decision, combined with another recent ruling allowing warrantless searches of homes based on suspicion that a probationer or parolee may reside there, continues to erode the Fourth Amendment’s protection of the home.

Michael J. Lockerby, Matthew Horton, Samuel M. Habein, and Molly Hayssen of Foley & Lardner LLP advanced the arguments in the amicus brief.

The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties organization, defends individuals whose constitutional rights have been threatened or violated and educates the public on a wide spectrum of issues affecting their freedoms.