Hijacking Religion: How the Pentagon Turned the Sermon on the Mount into a War Manual

Posted: April 1, 2026 in Uncategorized
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“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.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/ymttyrta

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

John W. Whitehead’s weekly commentaries are available for publication to newspapers and web publications at no charge. 

Preemptive War, Permanent Emergency: The Real Cost of Trump’s Iran Strike

Posted: March 4, 2026 in Uncategorized
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“From the least to the greatest, all are greedy for gain; prophets and priests alike, all practice deceit. They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious. ‘Peace, peace,’ they say, when there is no peace.”—Jeremiah 6:13–14

“This is insane. Regime change will result in a bloody civil war… Resist this!”—Charlie Kirk (2025)

The military-industrial complex and the American police state have joined forces.

War abroad and war at home are no longer separate enterprises. They have fused.

This did not happen overnight.

Every modern president has stretched the limits of war-making power. Some have shredded those limits altogether.

Each time that boundary is breached, the Constitution recedes a little further.

This is one of those moments.

In a complete about-face from his claims to being a peace president, Donald Trump has authorized yet another preemptive strike—this time against Iran—without a declaration of war from Congress, without meaningful public debate, and without constitutional clarity.

The gravity of that decision cannot be overstated.

While American troops were being ordered into harm’s way, Trump was hosting a $1 million-a-ticket fundraiser for himself at Mar-a-Lago, trotting out his signature dance moves between curtained war briefings.

That spectacle tells you everything you need to know.

That is how we arrived at Operation Epic Fury.

With its Orwellian proclamations of “peace through strength,” Operation Epic Fury is less strategy than spectacle—an egotistical, muscle-flexing distraction by the Trump administration and an overarching attempt to normalize the use of unilateral force by the executive branch without congressional input or authorization.

This was never about peace. It was always about power.

And the Constitution is clear about how this is supposed to work, even if the White House is not.

Article I, Section 8 grants Congress—not the president—the power to declare war. The president under Article II, Section 2 is designated as commander-in-chief with the power to command the military. He is not commander-of-everything.

Yet here we are.

The Trump administration is advancing a global policing doctrine that mirrors the domestic police state: strike first, ask questions later.

Since January 2025, Trump has carried out more than 600 military strikes on foreign targets that include Iran, Yemen, Nigeria and Venezuela, while threatening forceful military takeovers of Greenland, Colombia and Mexico.

Preemptive force has become policy.

Call it what it is: war.

Despite the word games over its war games—the administration insists its actions in Iran do not constitute a war—members of Trump’s Cabinet use the word “war” freely until congressional authorization is mentioned.

And when the administration is asked to explain themselves, the answer is not constitutional deference but open defiance.

Clearly, they have lost sight of who they answer to—and who funds their war chests: we the taxpayers.

Pete Hegseth—the self-righteous blowhard who brags about lethal weapons and has rebranded the Defense Department as the Department of War—dismissed public accountability outright, expressing in no uncertain terms that it’s none of our business: “Why in the world would we tell you, you, the enemy, anybody what we will or will not do in pursuit of an objective. We fight to win. We fight to achieve the objectives the President of the United States has laid out and we will do so unapologetically.”

The Constitution is the “why.”

The American people have a right to debate war before it begins. We have a right to know how our tax dollars are spent. We have a right to insist our representatives authorize the use of force. We have a right to know why our sons and daughters are sent into harm’s way. We have a right to refuse to have our tax dollars used to kill other people’s daughters and sons.

As Rick Steves, the globetrotting travel writer, put it:

“As an American taxpayer, I believe that every US bomb that falls and every bullet that flies has my name on it. In the last year, our president (who won votes by promising to keep America out of wars and is now famously agitating for a Nobel Peace Prize) has dropped bombs on seven foreign countries—and each of those bombs has your name on it, too…including the one that just recklessly decapitated a nation of 90 million people in a war-torn corner of our world.”

He is right. War is not abstract—it is done with our money, and too often without our consent.

As Cato Institute’s Katherine Thompson explains, “War…costs American blood and treasure. The Founders placed the power to initiate it in Congress precisely to ensure those costs are confronted and debated before the country walks into battle.”

That safeguard is being ignored.

And the damage does not stop at constitutional injury, because war is not only a constitutional problem. It is an economic one.

War fuels defense contracts, reconstruction deals and intelligence budgets. It sustains a vast military-industrial apparatus whose profits depend on instability.

Nothing about Operation Epic Fury puts America first. It pushes us toward a fiscal cliff.

Within days, the costs were staggering: $300 million for three F-15E jets downed by “friendly” fire. $630 million to transport troops, ships and aircraft to the region in advance of the attacks. More than 50,000 troops deployed to the region. $13 million a day just for two aircraft carriers stationed nearby. $43.8 million for 1,250 Kamikaze drones. $2 million each for Tomahawk missiles. $12.8 million each for anti-ballistic missile interceptors.

Forbes estimates that Trump’s military strikes in Iran have already cost American taxpayers over $1 billion, “with a price tag that could approach $100 billion, depending on how long it can stretch on.” The total economic cost of the conflict “could trigger an economic loss for the U.S. of between $50 billion and $210 billion.”

And that is before accounting for the human cost.

Innocent civilians—over a hundred young girls between the ages of 7 and 12—have died because the U.S. and Israel reportedly launched a deadly strike on a girls’ elementary school in Iran using outdated maps.

American servicepeople are dying because of one man’s unilateral decision to play at war.

So much for “America First.”

Permanent war places empire first.

And as usual, “we the people” will be forced pay for another unpopular forever war—financially, constitutionally, and domestically—and for the presidential hubris and the greed of the military-industrial complex and Deep State undergirding it all.

Congress anticipated this danger.

The War Powers Act was meant to rein in presidents who bypass Congress. But laws are only as strong as the institutions willing to enforce them.

Without congressional authorization, without meaningful debate, without constitutional clarity, the executive branch claims the unilateral authority to wage war.

This is how dictatorships arise and republics erode.

It happens when a president is allowed to treat constitutional limits as inconveniences rather than restraints.

Trump routinely dismisses unfavorable polls, ignores the courts, sidesteps Congress, shows contempt for the will of the American people, and ignorance about the fact that he works for “we the people.” He behaves not as a public servant but as a potentate.

As John Jay warned in The Federalist No. 4:

“Absolute monarchs will often make war when their nations are to get nothing by it, but for the purposes and objects merely personal, such as thirst for military glory, revenge for personal affronts, ambition, or private compacts to aggrandize or support their particular families or partisans. These and a variety of other motives, which affect only the mind of the sovereign, often lead him to engage in wars not sanctified by justice or the voice and interests of his people.”

If this were merely a constitutional dispute, it would be grave enough.

But it is not merely constitutional.

The consequences are immediate, political, and profoundly destabilizing.

Trump has a tendency to bulldoze through constitutional and legal restraints, creating a spectacle or a crisis, and then leaving others to clean up the fallout—whether it is a gutted ballroom, an eviscerated federal agency, a chaotic immigration crackdown, or now a widening war in the Middle East.

Long after the headlines move on, the wreckage remains.

And when the crisis involves war, the consequences are not merely bureaucratic or political — they are measured in lives and liberties.

War, in particular, has always been the most convenient tool of presidents facing troubles at home. When approval ratings slide, when economic policy falters, when scandal threatens to consume the headlines, foreign conflict has a way of shifting the narrative.

Trump’s Iran escalation—a deadly, costly, immoral, unpopular distraction from missteps of Trump’s own making—comes amid dismal polling, a faltering economy, escalating immigration crackdowns, eroding constitutional protections, and renewed scrutiny tied to the Epstein files.

Six out of ten Americans disapprove of Trump’s military action against Iran.

And while there is little to defend about Iran—it is a brutal regime—no nation has the right to declare itself judge, jury and executioner of another without lawful authority. To suggest otherwise is the language of strongmen.

Moreover, what happens abroad does not stay abroad.

The same government that claims unilateral authority to bomb foreign nations claims expanded authority to surveil, detain and silence domestically.

The military-industrial complex and the police state operate in tandem.

At home, we are being subjected to many of the same tactics and technologies deployed overseas. This is how America becomes a battlefield.

The pattern is not new. George W. Bush expanded warrantless surveillance. Obama normalized drone warfare. Presidents of both parties have stretched executive power.

Trump inherited the imperial presidency—and leaned into it. He boasts of his authority, derides the courts, dismisses Congress, and treats constitutional limits as inconveniences rather than guardrails.

He governs as though Article II were a royal charter.

Defense contractors may prosper in such a climate. The Constitution does not.

History teaches that war abroad produces blowback at home. Twenty-five years ago, 9/11 was itself blowback—the consequence of decades of military intervention and occupation in the Middle East.

Blowback justifies emergency powers. Emergency powers justify a police state. A police state justifies a permanent national security state.

The “war on terror” did not end terrorism. It institutionalized emergency. And permanent emergency makes constitutional government fragile.

James Madison warned that “the means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.”

We have seen it unfold over the past quarter century: the militarization of police, battlefield tactics in American neighborhoods, expansive surveillance justified by counterterrorism. The same tactics and rationale deployed abroad eventually get used against the American people here at home.

War abroad justifies control at home. That is the pattern.

As legal scholar Aziz Huq, professor of law at the University of Chicago, warns, the same national-security powers used to justify bombing foreign nations can be turned inward—against domestic opponents and even against the electoral process itself.

That is the long game being played right now.

This unprovoked attack on Iran is turning the Middle East into a war zone, in turn laying the groundwork for Trump to act on the fantasies he has long entertained about cancelling the mid-term elections.

It is not far-fetched to imagine he might attempt it. He has repeatedly hinted about it and has already demonstrated how far he is willing to go to overturn an election.

On the very day bombs began falling on Tehran, Huq notes that the White House was reportedly considering a unilateral executive order asserting the power to control how and when Americans vote in the upcoming midterm elections—citing “national security” and alleged foreign meddling as justification.

As Huq explains, the presidency is especially weakly bound by law when “national security” is invoked. The absence of legal authority did not prevent the strikes on Iran—strikes that are unlawful under the Constitution, which assigns Congress alone the power to initiate war.

If national security can be invoked to bypass Congress abroad, it can be invoked to bypass constitutional limits at home.

In other words, if a president can launch a war without congressional authorization, he can claim similar emergency authority to restrict voting, suppress dissent, or silence opposition.

This is not republican governance. It is rule by force.

Even some of Trump’s former allies sense the instability. As Marjorie Taylor Greene bluntly put it, “I think it’s time for America to rip the Band-Aid off and we need to have a serious conversation about what the f— is happening in this country and who in the hell are these decisions being made for and who is making these decisions.”

America’s founders understood this danger. They structured the Constitution to prevent any one man from dragging the nation into war.

In making the case that decisions about war should never be left to one man, legal scholar David French quotes then-Congressman Abraham Lincoln at the close of the Mexican-American War in 1948: “Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This, our convention understood to be the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us.”

Concludes French: “Those words were true then, and they’re true now. No matter what he thinks, Trump is not a king. But by taking America to war all on his own, he is acting like one.”

If we are to preserve any semblance of constitutional government, Congress must reclaim its war powers. The War Powers Resolution must be enforced. Emergency powers must be narrowed, sunsetted and restrained. Surveillance must be reined in. Domestic military deployment must be limited to the most narrow, exceptional circumstances.

But structural reform alone will not save a republic that has grown comfortable with permanent war. Because once war abroad and war at home fully merge, the Constitution becomes little more than words on paper.

War is not peace. Preemptive war is not strength. And an imperial presidency—no matter how loudly it wraps itself in flags—is not constitutional government.

The Founders understood that the gravest threat to liberty would not come from foreign enemies alone, but from the concentration of power in the hands of one man who believed himself indispensable.

A president who can send bombs abroad without consent can silence opposition at home without hesitation.

A government that governs by the rule of emergency eventually ceases to govern by the rule of law.

And a nation that trades liberty for spectacle will wake up to find that it has neither.

History is a relentless teacher: military empires may rise on the back of war, but they fall just as quickly from being spread too thin. Already, days after the start of this debacle of a war on Iran, U.S. forces are being used to combat drug trafficking in Ecuador.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the question is no longer whether America can police the globe. The question is whether our Republic can survive the weight of the Empire it has become.

We are at the point where we must choose: the spectacle of permanent war, or the survival of the American experiment in freedom.

We cannot have both.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/u65m2syb

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

John W. Whitehead’s weekly commentaries are available for publication to newspapers and web publications at no charge. 

Fool’s Gold: The Art of the Steal and the Privatization of the Presidency

Posted: February 25, 2026 in Uncategorized
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“Donald Trump took an oath to serve the American people. Instead, he has focused on using the presidency to enrich himself… President Trump has never been a man to ask what he can do for his country. In his second term, as in his first, he is instead testing the limits of what his country can do for him.”—New York Times Editorial Board

In his State of the Union address, President Trump declared that America is entering a “Golden Age.” Golden for whom?

For a president who lives lavishly in a taxpayer-funded mansion, jets around to weekend golf getaways at taxpayer expense, and dismisses concerns about “affordability” as fake news, life might indeed be gilded.

For the rest of the country, it is fool’s gold.

Nearly six-in-ten Americans say the country is worse off now than it was a year ago. Groceries cost more. Utilities cost more. Housing costs more.

For millions of families, this is not a golden age.

It is a painful lesson in imperial economics: the billionaire class lives large while “we the people” are told to live small.

Trump is not working to make America great again. He is working to expand his wealth, protect his investments, and rule in gilded comfort at taxpayer expense.

As a candidate, Trump promised to “drain the swamp.”

Instead, the swamp has been privatized.

When it comes to the true state of our nation, Americans would do well to examine not just what the Trump administration has accomplished—or failed to accomplish—but who has profited.

The highest public office in the land has become a personal revenue stream for Donald Trump & Co.—a vehicle for private enrichment that monetizes access, influence and public assets while the public pays the tab.

To monetize the presidency is to treat public power as property—something to be leased, leveraged and exploited for private gain.

This is how you bilk a nation.

The man who once lent his name to the ghostwritten The Art of the Deal is now authoring a far more instructive manual: The Art of the Steal—a step-by-step guide to how to convert a constitutional republic into a personal brand.

Power attracts conmen and swindlers. It always has. But never has the grift been so openly institutionalized.

One year after the Trump administration’s failed DOGE venture—the Elon Musk-led “Department of Government Efficiency” promised to eliminate waste, but the federal government ended up spending significantly more than the meager amount DOGE claimed to save—“we the people” are left to tally the real cost.

While Americans struggle with soaring food prices, rising utility costs, and economic instability, the White House has perfected one area of growth: personal enrichment and private accumulation.

According to the New York Times Editorial Board, “Trump has used the office of the presidency to make at least $1.4 billion. We know this number to be an underestimate because some of his profits remain hidden from public view. And they continue to grow.”

This is not savvy business. This is graft.

“Throughout the nation’s history, presidents of both parties have taken care to avoid even the appearance of profiting from public service. This president gleefully squeezes American corporations, flaunts gifts from foreign governments and celebrates the rapid growth of his own fortune,” concludes the New York Times. “All told, Mr. Trump has profited from his return to the presidency by an amount of money equal to 16,822 times the median U.S. household income.”

Just consider the entries in this administration’s ledger.

Personal indulgence and vanity projects:

$400 million and counting for a White House ballroom underwritten by corporate giants whose regulatory futures sit squarely in presidential hands.

$70 million for a luxury jet with a private bedroom so DHS secretary Kristi Noem can fly around in comfort with her rumored partner.

$28 million for an Amazon documentary on Melania Trump.

Tens of millions for Trump’s weekend golf trips to Mar-a-Lago, including what he charges the American taxpayer for the Secret Service to be housed at the resort.

Policy decisions that generate revenue or leverage:

Billions in stealth taxes disguised as “emergency” tariff revenues paid for by the American people. According to NPR, the federal government is now collecting roughly $30 billion per month in tariff revenue—far more than it collected from import taxes before Trump returned to office—largely paid for by American consumers. So when Trump tries to sell Americans on the idea that tariffs could eventually replace income taxes—a clear bid to overturn the Supreme Court’s ruling against his tariff policy—don’t believe it. That’s just another money grab.

A $10 billion taxpayer buy-in to a privatized Board of Peace created and controlled by Trump in perpetuity with no real oversight or accountability.

$230 million in damages Trump claims he is owed over investigations into his own past misconduct.

Another $10 billion in damages which Trump claims he is owed after an IRS contractor was convicted of leaking his tax information.

Millions in trademark rights and licensing fees tied to Trump’s name on public infrastructure. As trademark attorney Josh Gerben notes, “The move raises unusual questions about the intersection of public infrastructure and private brand ownership. While presidents and public officials have had landmarks named in their honor, a sitting president’s private company has never in the history of the United States sought trademark rights in advance of such naming.”

At least $23 million from licensing Trump’s name overseas since his re-election.

$4 billion flowing into Trump family coffers in the first year of his second term, including $867 million through cryptocurrency ventures.

Public money redirected toward private allies and enforcement expansion:

$128 million for an ICE warehouse purchased three years earlier for $29 million—a $100 million markup benefiting a Russian-backed company.

$15 million earmarked to feed starving children internationally, which was instead impounded for OMB director Russell Vought’s security detail.

$51 billion in taxes not paid by Amazon, Alphabet,  Meta, and Tesla in 2025 after receiving a 4.9% tax rate.

A $10 billion government contract between the Army and Palantir, founded by Trump supporter Peter Thiel.

Foreign entanglements and gifts:

A $400 million luxury plane from the Qatari government, which will be retrofitted at taxpayer expense for Trump’s official use as Air Force One and which he plans to take with him when he leaves office.

Hundreds of millions more from foreign government-linked investors gaining access through the purchase of the Trump family’s cryptocurrency ventures.

These are not isolated expenditures. They reveal a pattern.

They speak to the blueprint Trump has used to monetize his stint in the White House.

The Founders anticipated precisely this danger: a president tempted to convert public trust into private profit. The Constitution’s Foreign and Domestic Emoluments Clauses were intended to prevent a president from profiting from office.

The Framers were explicit about this. The Foreign Emoluments Clauses bar any federal officeholder from accepting any present, Emolument, Office, or Title from a foreign state without congressional consent.

An emolument is not merely a bribe. It is any profit, gain, or advantage derived from office.

The prohibition exists for one reason: to prevent foreign powers from purchasing influence over American decision-making.

With Congress unwilling to enforce the Constitution and the courts slow to intervene, these guardrails have weakened.

“Never in our history had a president come to office presenting the same threat of harming America’s national interest in favor of their personal financial interests,” concluded Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “In spite of Trump’s efforts to avoid transparency, publicly available records reveal a mountain of violations of the Emoluments Clauses during his administration, resulting in a level of corruption that has no analogue in American history.”

By continuing to operate private ventures while in office, including his crypto companies, hosting foreign dignitaries at Trump-branded properties, pursuing crypto enterprises, and reportedly entertaining extravagant gifts from foreign governments, Trump has raised urgent ethical and legal concerns about self-dealing, corruption and backdoor arrangements by which foreign and domestic governments can funnel money into Trump’s personal coffers.

As the Brennan Center concludes, “Not even the most notorious public corruption scandals from American history can match the scale of Trump’s profiteering in terms of total dollar amount.”

It is difficult to determine which is worse: a kleptocracy—government by thieves—or a kakistocracy—government by the worst.

Increasingly, we appear to have both.

And this is where the danger becomes clear.

When a president turns public office into a source of personal revenue, corruption does not stop at enrichment. It spreads.

It spreads into the Justice Department.

It spreads into the courts.

It spreads into law enforcement.

It spreads into the very machinery that is supposed to hold power accountable.

Rather than being restrained by the rule of law, this administration increasingly behaves as though the law exists to serve it.

One system of justice for allies and investors. Another for everyone else.

For instance, President Trump wants his own Justice Department to put American taxpayers on the line to pay him $230 million in damages over FBI investigations into his alleged past misconduct.

When the president seeks to use the Justice Department to pursue his own financial grievances, the line between public duty and private interest disappears.

Journalist David D. Kirkpatrick calculates that Donald Trump and his immediate family have made more than $3.4 billion from his time in the White House, including more than $2.3 billion from various cryptocurrency ventures alone.

In May 2025, Trump was accused of selling access to accumulate personal wealth when he hosted a private event for 220 crypto investors who had bought into his meme coin. News reports estimate that buyers spent about $148 million in total on the coin and associated perks, with some spending $1.8 million to attend.

This is how access to power is sold to the highest bidders.

The average American waits. The wealthy pay.

The emerging revelations from the Epstein files only underscore how deeply the monetization of access has infected the culture of power. For years, wealthy and politically connected figures moved through a shadow network in which proximity to influence appeared to buy protection, silence, or both.

That culture does not disappear when one scandal fades. It seeps into institutions. It normalizes the idea that influence can be purchased and consequences can be avoided.

Measured against this reality, Thomas Jefferson’s warning to bind government down “by the chains of the Constitution” sounds almost quaint.

What good is a Constitution if those sworn to uphold it treat it as optional?

It has become increasingly difficult to pretend that we are still dealing with a functioning republic.

What we have instead is a government that rewards loyalty, punishes dissent, and treats public power as private property.

The American system of government was designed as a constitutional covenant: power delegated, limited, and bound by law.

What we are witnessing is transactional governance: access traded, favors exchanged, loyalty rewarded, and policy negotiated like a business deal.

This pay-to-play culture now permeates the highest levels of power.

The Foreign Gifts and Decoration Act bars the president and federal officials from accepting gifts worth more than $480 from foreign governments (unless they’re accepted on behalf of the United States—meaning they would then belong to the American people—or purchased by the official). Yet congressional investigators have already documented more than a hundred foreign gifts to Trump and his family that went unreported for months in violation of disclosure rules.

The publicly-reported gifts being showered upon President Trump by foreign governments and politically connected foreign corporations include: a gold crown, a Rolex desk clock and a one-kilogram personalized gold bar worth $130,000, and a $400 million luxury Boeing 747.

These are not tokens of diplomacy; they are investments in influence.

As Richard Painter, a former chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, explains, “It’s unconstitutional in the United States for the president or anyone else in a position of power to receive anything of value from a foreign government. That is unconstitutional. But if the gift is from a foreign corporation or a private interest, it’s not technically prohibited under the emoluments clause of the Constitution. But it’s still a very, very dangerous precedent to set that foreign interests can give gifts to the president and then get a concession on tariffs or anything else.”

In many cases, these gifts went unreported to the State Department, only coming to light through House investigations and watchdog reports—concealed from the public and from Congress until after the fact.

That secrecy was not accidental. It was strategic.

Federal contracts, regulatory decisions, and diplomatic overtures increasingly appear correlated with the interests of those giving the gifts. A growing number of domestic and foreign business interests appear to be receiving preferential treatment from agencies whose regulatory decisions align suspiciously with Trump’s personal business deals advancing behind the scenes.

This quid pro quo governance—private profit in exchange for public policy—does not resemble republican self-government. It resembles a protection racket, where the powerful exchange favors not for the public good but for personal gain—and access and immunity are available for purchase by those willing to pay.

Unfortunately, the rot doesn’t stop there.

The presidential pardon—meant as a safeguard against injustice—has become a reward system.

During his first term, Trump issued 238 pardons and commutations. A year into his second term, he has issued nearly 2,000 pardons.

Who benefits? Political loyalists. Donors. Operatives. Financial criminals. Those who proved useful.

A congressional report found that Trump’s pardons have allowed convicted fraudsters and white-collar criminals to avoid more than $1.3 billion in restitution and penalties—money owed to victims and taxpayers.

In other words, the pardon power has been used to return stolen wealth to the people who stole it.

This is not mercy. It is a protection racket.

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.

The resemblance to a cartel grows harder to ignore.

The U.S. government is fast becoming a self-serving, money-laundering enterprise masquerading as legitimate authority.

As the Editorial Board of the New York Times concluded:

“[A] government whose leaders worked to enrich themselves might still call itself a republic, and might still go through the motions, but when the aim of government shifts from public good to private gain, its constitution becomes an empty shell. The government is no longer for the people. The demands of avarice gradually corrupt the work of government as officials facilitate the accumulation of personal wealth. Worse, such a government corrupts the people who live under its rule… The United States risks falling into this cynical spiral as Mr. Trump hollows out the institutions of government for personal gain.”

The choice before us is not partisan. It is constitutional.

A republic cannot survive when public office becomes private property.

A Constitution cannot restrain power when those sworn to uphold it treat it as optional.

When loyalty is rewarded, dissent punished, and wealth transferred upward through the machinery of government, we are no longer witnessing politics as usual.

We are witnessing the hollowing out of a constitutional republic.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is how republics fall.

Not in a single dramatic collapse, but in the steady conversion of public trust into private gain.

If we allow the presidency to become a profit center, the Constitution becomes window dressing. And “we the people” become subjects.

It is time to reclaim our role as the ultimate check on government power.

It is time to drain the swamp.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/265c2yfs

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

John W. Whitehead’s weekly commentaries are available for publication to newspapers and web publications at no charge. 

Protecting Sex Predators: The Sordid Reality of the Global Power Elite

Posted: February 18, 2026 in Uncategorized
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“When did pedophilia become a partisan issue? The American people deserve to know the whole truth about Jeffrey Epstein and every single powerful person who enabled him. Every name, every flight log, every cover up, all of it … If there’s one thing we should all be able to agree on Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and progressives—it’s that no one, including the President of the United States, should be able to cover up crimes against children.”—James Talarico (Texas politician, Presbyterian seminarian, and former public school teacher)

Nearly 30 years after the first complaints were filed, the Epstein files remain a masterclass in how the ruling class shields its own.

This is no longer just about one man’s crimes—it is about the machinery of silence that keeps the global elite untouchable.

We are long past the point for partisan excuses and institutional gaslighting.

The question is no longer whether Jeffrey Epstein—the hedge fund billionaire/convicted serial pedophile and sex trafficker—committed monstrous crimes against young girls, many of them children.

We know he did.

What remains unresolved is something far more troubling.

We know that Epstein did not act alone.

A decision by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals allowing thousands of pages of Epstein-related documents to be unsealed referenced allegations involving “numerous prominent American politicians, powerful business executives, foreign presidents, a well-known Prime Minister, and other world leaders.”

That alone should have been enough to trigger full transparency.

Instead, nearly 30 years after the first complaints against Epstein were filed, the full truth remains obscured.

Why are documents still partially sealed? Why do redactions remain? Why are investigations declared “closed” while unanswered questions linger?

Epstein may have conveniently died in a jail cell six weeks after his arrest on federal sex trafficking charges, but the machinery that empowered and protected him is still very much intact and it continues to work overtime to shield the global power elite, silence victims, and erase accountability.

And that is the real scandal.

Because this was never simply about Epstein. It was about the system that made Epstein possible.

The Epstein files should have been a moral bright line—an issue so morally reprehensible and widely condemned as to cut through partisan politics.

Instead, it has become part of the three-ring circus that is governance in America today.

The political noise. The wag-the-dog distractions. The slow-walking of the files’ release. The what-aboutisms.

This was never about one president.

It was never about one political party.

And yet, at this present moment, it is one president and one party that appear to be resisting full transparency.

Donald Trump was at one time socially connected to Epstein. Bill Clinton was, too. Both men were shielded, in different ways and at different times, by a partisan system willing to look the other way when politically convenient.

The same voices who denounced Clinton for sexual impropriety often fell silent in the face of Trump’s own history. Likewise, some who defended Clinton had no hesitation in condemning Trump.

The principle was never the point. Power was.

And that is why this cannot be dismissed as partisan score-settling.

This is not a minor incident involving minor players, nor can it be confined to one political party or one political era.

This is about the darkness at the heart of the American police state: a system built to shield the powerful from justice.

Epstein did not sidestep accountability because he was clever. He sidestepped accountability because he was protected.

Power protects power.

Epstein was aided, abetted and protected by a cross-section of political, corporate and societal classes here in the United States and abroad. He cultivated relationships across politics, finance, academia, entertainment, and global power circles. His social network spanned parties, ideologies, and continents.

Trump’s name alone reportedly appears more than 38,000 times. Numerous top officials connected to the Trump administration have also appeared in the Epstein files, including Elon Musk, Steve Bannon, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

While mere association is not tantamount to guilt, these associations speak volumes about how power operates according to its own rules.

As Rep. Thomas Massie warned Attorney General Pam Bondi, who has been at the forefront of the Trump administration’s effort to slow-walk the release of the Epstein files: “This is bigger than Watergate. This goes over four administrations. You don’t have to go back to Biden. Let’s go back to Obama. Let’s go back to George Bush. This cover-up spans decades, and you are responsible for this portion of it.”

If it looks like a cover-up, smells like a cover-up, and appears to benefit the same entrenched interests, we have every right—indeed, a civic and moral duty—to demand greater transparency.

Nothing illustrates how the power elite protects its own more clearly than Epstein’s 2008 plea agreement.

Almost two decades ago, when Epstein was first charged with molesting, raping and trafficking underage girls, he was gifted a secret plea deal.

According to the Palm Beach Post, that sweetheart deal, arranged by then-U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta, led to 15 more years of abuse by Epstein.

The Justice Department estimates that Epstein victimized at least 1,000 women and children. Over 100 survivors of Epstein’s sexual abuse have come forward so far.

Yet the plea deal allowed Epstein to evade federal charges and serve what amounted to a privileged sentence. For the first 13 months, he was allowed to “work” at home six days a week before returning to a private wing of the Palm Beach County jail to sleep. Later, under house arrest, he was allowed to travel extensively, including to his private island.

Acosta, the U.S. attorney who enabled that arrangement—which, in turn, shielded Epstein’s associates from federal exposure—was later nominated by Trump and served as his Labor Secretary.

This is how corruption by the power elite flourishes: not through secrecy alone but through get-out-of-jail cards that tacitly sanction immoral, illegal and corrupt bad behavior by the ruling classes.

As the Associated Press pointed out, “The arrest of the billionaire financier on child sex trafficking charges is raising questions about how much his high-powered associates knew about the hedge fund manager’s interactions with underage girls, and whether they turned a blind eye to potentially illegal conduct.”

The rot goes deep, and the Epstein case is only the most visible symptom of a much larger disease.

For years, the Epstein case has stood as a grotesque emblem of the depravity within the global power elite: a sex trafficking ring operated not only for Epstein’s personal pleasure but also for that of his friends and business associates—billionaires, politicians, and celebrities.

According to The Washington Post, “several of the young women…say they were offered to the rich and famous as sex partners at Epstein’s parties.”

Once again, fact and fiction mirror each other.

Popular culture has long hinted at what polite society refuses to confront.

Almost 30 years ago—three years after the first complaint against Epstein was filed—Stanley Kubrick’s final film Eyes Wide Shut provided viewing audiences with a sordid glimpse of an elite sexual underworld insulated from consequence: a secret sex society that indulged the basest urges of its affluent members while preying on vulnerable young women.

Kubrick suggested these secret societies flourish because the public chooses not to see what’s right in front of them, content to navigate life in denial about the ugly, obvious truths in our midst.

The Epstein case suggests he was not wrong.

Sex slaves. Sex trafficking. Secret societies. Powerful elites. Government corruption. Judicial cover-ups.

It is not so different from the real world, where powerful men, insulated from accountability, indulge their base urges.

As The Guardian reports, “By the mid-2000s, Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse of teen girls was routine. From 2002 to 2005 alone, the late financier victimized ‘dozens’ of underage teens by luring them into sex acts for payment under the auspices of massage work, some as young as 14.”

If Epstein exposed the rot at the top, the broader landscape of child sex trafficking reveals how deep and systemic that rot truly runs.

The numbers alone are staggering.

Child sex trafficking—the buying and selling of women, young girls and boys for sex, some as young as 9 years old—has become big business in America. It is one of the fastest growing criminal operations and the second most-lucrative commodity traded illegally after drugs and guns.

Adults purchase children for sex at least 2.5 million times a year in the United States.

It’s not just young girls who are vulnerable to these predators, either. Boys account for over a third of victims in the U.S. sex industry.

Who buys a child for sex?

Otherwise ordinary men from all walks of life. “They could be your co-worker, doctor, pastor or spouse,” writes journalist Tim Swarens, who spent more than a year investigating the sex trade in America.

Ordinary men, yes. But then there are the so-called extraordinary men—like Epstein and his associates—with wealth, connections, and protection who are allowed to operate according to their own rules.

Power does not create perversion, but it does insulate the powerful.

These men skate free of accountability because the criminal justice system panders to the powerful, the wealthy and the elite.

For years, investigative journalists and survivors have documented how blackmail, intelligence agency ties, and financial leverage helped shield elite sexual predators—not just from prosecution, but from public scrutiny.

For every Epstein who is—finally—called to account for his illegal sexual exploits after years of being given a free pass by those in power, there are hundreds (perhaps thousands) more in the halls of power and wealth whose predation continues unabated.

While Epstein’s alleged crimes are heinous enough on their own, he is part of a larger narrative of how a culture of entitlement becomes a cesspool and a breeding ground for despots and predators.

Nor is this culture of impunity confined to billionaires and political elites.

Across the country, law enforcement officers have been caught running sex trafficking rings, abusing women and girls in their custody, or exploiting their badge to coerce sex.

From Louisiana to Ohio to New York, officers have been arrested for trafficking underage girls, assaulting vulnerable women, and raping detainees—often shielded by unions, prosecutors, or a blue wall of silence.

This isn’t a few bad apples. It is a culture of impunity baked into the system.

This is how the system works, protecting the untouchables—not because they’re innocent, but because the system has made them immune.

And this is why this case was never just about one man.

As Piotr Smolar writes for Le Monde, “Epstein was the most striking face of a two-tier system of justice, one that provided a privileged path for the powerful.”

We see this pattern everywhere.

A cop shoots an unarmed citizen and walks free. A president sidesteps constitutional limits. An agency spies on its citizens. A financier negotiates immunity.

Abuse of power—and the ambition-fueled hypocrisy and deliberate disregard for misconduct that make those abuses possible—works the same whether you’re talking about sex crimes, government corruption, or the rule of law.

Sexual predators aren’t the only threat.

For every prominent name who eventually gets called out for his sexual misbehavior, there are hundreds—thousands—of others in the American police state who are getting away with murder—in many cases, literally—simply because they can.

And as history repeatedly demonstrates, power corrupts.

Worse, as 19th-century historian Lord Acton concluded, absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Give any one person—or government agency—too much power and allow them to believe that they are entitled, untouchable and will not be held accountable for their actions, and those powers will be abused.

History proves it. The present moment confirms it.

We can agree to disagree about many things, but the sex trafficking and abuse of children is one issue where there should be absolutely no dissembling, no wiggle room, and no immunity.

America should have zero tolerance for child sex trafficking.

So when President Trump insists that there’s nothing more to discuss or investigate so we should just move on, our collective, unequivocal answer should be an absolute refusal to move on, be distracted or engage in what-aboutisms.

At some point, moral outrage must give way to moral clarity.

The Trump administration’s cover-up is unacceptable. The selective redactions of non-victims’ names and faces are unacceptable. The removal of files by biased administration operatives is unacceptable.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, a constitutional republic cannot survive a protected class.

If the Epstein files force us to think and act differently about anything, let it be this: the rule of law cannot be a one-sided weapon used against the powerless. It must require that the powerful be held just as accountable for their abuses as anyone else.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/3cec2zrj

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

John W. Whitehead’s weekly commentaries are available for publication to newspapers and web publications at no charge. 

Wrong Place. Wrong Time. Your Phone Just Made You a Suspect.

Posted: February 6, 2026 in Uncategorized
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WASHINGTON, DC — If you carried a cell phone past the wrong street corner at the wrong moment, police could already have your movements, your digital trail, and your identity—without ever suspecting you of a crime. That is the reality of geofence warrants, a powerful surveillance tool whose use by police is now being challenged before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Warning that geofence warrants constitute digital fishing expeditions that force millions of innocent Americans to prove they’re not suspects, The Rutherford Institute is urging the Supreme Court to hold that geofence warrants are unconstitutional general warrants—an abuse of power the Founders sought to prohibit through the Fourth Amendment. Historically, general warrants gave government agents sweeping authority to search wherever they pleased, without probable cause or particularized suspicion limited to particular individuals, locations, or materials. As Institute attorneys warn in an amicus brief in Wells v. Texas, geofence warrants revive that same abuse in digital form, allowing the government to rummage through the location histories of untold numbers of innocent people in the hope that someone, somewhere, might be connected to a crime.

“Geofence warrants turn the Fourth Amendment on its head. If the government can track where we go, who we associate with, and when we were present—without probable cause—then no one’s movements are truly private,” 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 the Constitution still places meaningful limits on government surveillance in the digital age.”

When police have no suspect but assume—correctly—that nearly everyone carries a cell phone, geofence warrants allow them to compel technology companies to turn over location data for every device within a defined area and time period, regardless of suspicion. Police can then narrow that data through successive requests—tracking movements, reviewing account information, and ultimately identifying individuals—until a suspect emerges. Geofence warrants have been used by law enforcement since at least 2016.

In Wells v. Texas, Texas police obtained a geofence warrant directing Google to identify devices located near the scene of a crime during a specific time window. Through successive data requests, police ultimately identified a cell phone associated with the defendant as being in the area, leading to a conviction. In a divided decision, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals upheld the geofence warrant as constitutional. Two judges went further, asserting that no warrant was required at all because cell phone users lack a reasonable expectation of privacy in information they “voluntarily” share with third parties such as Google. That reasoning directly conflicts with a ruling in another case from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which held that geofence warrants are general warrants categorically prohibited by the Fourth Amendment.

In asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review the case, The Rutherford Institute warns that geofence warrants pose a grave and growing threat to the privacy of all Americans. By normalizing suspicionless surveillance, these warrants establish a dangerous precedent in which vast numbers of innocent people must surrender their privacy simply for existing in public space with a smartphone in their pocket.

Ethan H. Townsend and Maura R. Cremin of McDermott Will & Schulte 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.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/8hhk7yvp

Locked Down. Rounded Up. Warehoused. The Rise of America’s Concentration Camps

Posted: February 4, 2026 in Uncategorized
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“No doubt concentration camps were a means, a menace used to keep order.”—Albert Speer, Nuremberg Trials

In 2021, amid a global pandemic, warnings that the federal government might repurpose warehouses into detention facilities on American soil were dismissed as speculative, alarmist, even conspiratorial.

Five years later, what was speculation is a blueprint for locking up whomever the government chooses to target.

According to investigative reports, the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement are actively purchasing warehouses, factories and industrial buildings across the country for use as detention centers—often with little public notice, minimal oversight, and virtually no accountability.

This is no longer a warning.

It is a five-alarm fire.

With the Trump administration moving forward with plans to rapidly acquire warehouses for what could become a nationwide mass detention network, it’s no longer a question of whether the government will expand mass detention to lock up Americans for defying its mandates but when.

This is how it begins.

The government already has the means, the muscle and the motivation. It has spent decades building a vast archipelago of prisons, detention centers, and emergency facilities capable of imprisoning large numbers of people.

Almost 70,000 people are currently being held by ICE. With $45 billion burning a hole in its budget, the Department of Homeland Security is spending big on its concentration camps in order to hold more people, for longer periods, with fewer constraints.

While the Trump administration insists that it is only targeting the “worst of the worst”—murderers, rapists, gang members, pedophiles and terrorists—most of those being rounded up have no criminal record. Being undocumented is a civil violation, not a crime.

This is where we have to tread cautiously, because authoritarian regimes love to play Orwellian word games, and the current administration is no exception.

Case in point: DHS Secretary Kristi Noem claims that every single individual arrested or detained has committed a crime, but being charged with or even suspected of a crime is very different from being convicted of a crime.

When the Secretary of Homeland Security equates an arrest with a crime, she isn’t just playing word games—she is effectively nullifying the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments’ guarantee of due process and the presumption of innocence.

If the bar for being arrested is merely committing a crime, we’d all be locked up.

It may come to that eventually.

Given the over-criminalization of the American legal code, which contains over 5,000 federal criminal statutes and hundreds of thousands of regulations—translation: every single American unknowingly commits at least three crimes a day—every American can be rendered a “criminal” at the government’s whim.

When you have a government in the business of rounding people up in order to fill warehouses and play to the optics of being tough on crime, it won’t just be undocumented immigrants getting rounded up.

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, political theorist Hannah Arendt warned that concentration camps were not built primarily for criminals. They were built to imprison the innocent—people rendered “criminal” by the state simply for who they were or what they believed.

These camps functioned as laboratories for total domination, where guilt was irrelevant and innocence offered no protection. Individuals were stripped of rights, reduced to categories, and rendered expendable.

That is the danger we are facing now: rightlessness in an age of rights.

When detention quotas replace due process, when people are locked up not for what they have done but for who the government decides they are, the machinery of authoritarianism is already in motion.

Reports of ICE smashing car windows, grabbing people off the streets, and detaining American citizens despite proof of legal status offer a preview of what lies ahead.

We’re not supposed to live in a “papers, please” society, and yet under Trump’s leadership, America is rapidly becoming one.

History has a name for what happens when governments abandon due process and begin locking people up for who they are rather than what they have done.

The next step is always logistical. Once the decision is made to detain people en masse, the state must find places to hold them—out of sight, out of reach, and outside the law.

That is where the warehouses come in.

Make no mistake: these are concentration camps in their earliest form, rebranded and revived for a new age.

“We need to get better at treating this like a business,” ICE director Todd M. Lyons said of deportations. “Like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.”

This language has been used before.

Concentration camps were not initially designed as extermination centers. They were built to intimidate, isolate, and neutralize those deemed undesirable—political dissidents, religious minorities, social outcasts, and anyone perceived as a threat to the regime.

As the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum explains, “The term concentration camp refers to a camp in which people are detained or confined, usually under harsh conditions and without regard to legal norms of arrest and imprisonment that are acceptable in a constitutional democracy.”

That is the point.

This is not about immigration.

It is about what happens when any government claims the power to decide who belongs, who poses a threat, and who can be disappeared for the sake of order.

The legal framework already exists.

Under the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the President and the military are authorized to detain individuals—including U.S. citizens—without access to family, legal counsel, or the courts if the government labels them terrorists.

That label can now be applied so interchangeably with the terms anti-government and extremist that it doesn’t take much to be considered a terrorist anymore.

The Department of Homeland Security, for example, broadly defines extremists as individuals and groups that are “mainly antigovernment,” reject federal authority, or question the legitimacy of government power. Military veterans have been flagged as potential extremist threats simply for being disgruntled or disillusioned. Ordinary Americans exercising their constitutional rights—speaking freely, protesting, criticizing the government, owning firearms, or demanding warrants—can find themselves on a government watch list.

As a New York Times editorial once warned, you may be viewed as an anti-government extremist (a.k.a. domestic terrorist) if you are afraid that the government is plotting to confiscate your firearms, believe the economy is about to collapse, suspect the government will soon declare martial law, or display too many political bumper stickers on your car.

According to the FBI, espousing conspiracy theories or holding views that are contrary to the government’s can also qualify someone as a domestic terrorism concern.

This is what happens when you put the power to determine who is a potential danger in the hands of government agencies, courts, and police, but also give those agencies sweeping authority to detain individuals and lock them up for perceived wrongs without due process.

It is a system begging to be abused. And it has happened here before.

In the 1940s, Japanese-Americans were rounded up and imprisoned in concentration camps based solely on their ancestry. The Supreme Court upheld the policy in Korematsu v. United States (1944), concluding that national security concerns outweighed individual liberty.

Courts have a habit of recognizing injustice only after the fact, and the government has a tendency to sidestep the rule of law when it suits its purposes. As Justice Scalia once warned, “In times of war, the laws fall silent.”

The groundwork has been laid.

The infrastructure for domestic concentration camps has existed for decades.

FEMA—the Federal Emergency Management Agency—has long been tasked with emergency planning that includes large-scale detention capabilities.

Created by executive order in the 1970s, FEMA’s mandate expanded quietly. By the 1980s, it was involved in classified military-type training exercises carried out in conjunction with the Department of Defense. Code named Rex-84, federal agencies, including the CIA and the Secret Service, were trained on how to respond to domestic unrest and carry out mass round-ups.

FEMA’s role in planning for domestic internment and mass detention is well-documented.

Now if you’re going to have internment camps on American soil, someone has to build them— or repurpose existing structures to serve that function—and then staff them—and eventually fill them.

In 2006, the government awarded a Halliburton subsidiary a $385 million contract to build American detention facilities for use during “emergencies,” including mass immigration, “natural disasters,” or to support the rapid development of new programs in the event of other emergencies.

That rationale has now been updated for a new era.

Today, DHS and ICE are buying up and converting warehouses, factories, and industrial spaces across the country into detention facilities. These buildings—designed for storage and logistics, not human beings—are being outfitted with fencing, surveillance systems, holding areas, and makeshift sleeping quarters. Many operate outside the standards that apply to traditional correctional facilities, with fewer inspections, limited oversight, and little public visibility.

The government insists these warehouse detention sites are necessary to handle prisoner overflow, respond to emergencies, and maintain flexibility.

History tells a different story.

What begins as temporary becomes permanent. What is justified as exceptional becomes routine. And what is done to non-citizens has an uncanny way of expanding—especially when dissent, protest, or noncompliance are rebranded as threats to national security.

Once again, the language of emergency is being used to normalize extraordinary abuses of power.

Now, detention camps require not only buildings but lists of potential detainees, and here, too, the government is prepared.

For decades, the government has acquired and maintained, without warrant or court order,  databases of individuals considered threats to national security. One such database—reportedly known as “Main Core”—contains millions of names and is intended for use during national emergencies to locate and detain perceived enemies of the state.

As Salon reports, this database, reportedly dubbed “Main Core,” is to be used by the Army and FEMA in times of national emergency or under martial law to locate and round up Americans seen as threats to national security.

In 2026, the static lists of the past have been replaced by “living” databases.

Fueled by agentic AI and mass data-scraping, the government’s surveillance architecture no longer relies on manual updates. These AI systems autonomously crawl social media, financial records, and geolocation data in real-time, creating high-accuracy “threat profiles” that are virtually impossible to escape.

Once you are flagged by an algorithm that operates without human oversight, you aren’t just a name on a list—you are a permanent node in a digital dragnet that follows you from your keyboard to the warehouse door.

This AI-driven dragnet is on the hunt using a specific, long-established ideological map. The technology has simply caught up to the government’s decades-old desire to categorize dissent as a national security threat.

Remember back in 2009, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released two reports, one on “Rightwing Extremism,” which broadly defines rightwing extremists as individuals and groups “that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely,” and one on “Leftwing Extremism,” which labeled environmental and animal rights activist groups as extremists.

Incredibly, both reports used the words terrorist and extremist interchangeably.

That same year, the DHS launched Operation Vigilant Eagle, which calls for surveillance of military veterans returning from Iraq, Afghanistan and other far-flung places, characterizing them as extremists and potential domestic terrorist threats because they may be “disgruntled, disillusioned or suffering from the psychological effects of war.”

These reports indicated that for the government, so-called extremism is not a partisan matter.

Anyone seen as opposing the government—whether they’re Left, Right or somewhere in between—is a target.

Which brings us to the inevitable conclusion: when the government claims the authority to broadly define who is a threat, uses taxpayer funds to erect a network of concentration camps across the country, and methodically builds databases identifying anyone seen as opposing the government as an extremist, the question is not if that power will be abused—but when and how often.

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 slippery slope.

If the price for fighting illegal immigration is the complete abdication of our constitutional republic, that price is too high.

The means do not justify the ends.

The police state’s solutions to our so-called problems pose the greatest threat to our freedoms.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/vhew4kzk

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

John W. Whitehead’s weekly commentaries are available for publication to newspapers and web publications at no charge. 

U.S. Supreme Court Opens Courthouse Doors for Political Candidates—But Not for Everyday Americans

Posted: January 27, 2026 in Uncategorized
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WASHINGTON, D.C. — In a decision that makes it easier for political candidates to challenge election-related harms while leaving ordinary Americans without similar recourse, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that candidates may challenge state laws governing the counting of votes in their own races but declined to base that on broader standing principles applicable for all citizens harmed by unlawful government action.

The Court’s ruling in Bost v. Illinois State Board of Elections revives a lawsuit brought by U.S. Rep. Michael Bost against Illinois election officials. The Rutherford Institute joined the American Civil Liberties Union, the League of Women Voters, and their Illinois affiliates in an amicus brief urging the Court to adopt a broader rule: that any individual—not just political candidates—has standing when forced to incur costs to counter or mitigate allegedly unlawful government action. While the majority of the Court declined to go that far, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, joined by Justice Elena Kagan, cited the coalition’s amicus brief as support in a concurring opinion. The concurrence reasoned that financial harm caused by government action can establish standing for a wide range of plaintiffs beyond political candidates, depending on the context.

“A Constitution that cannot be enforced in court is little more than a suggestion,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “This case underscores a growing problem in constitutional law: the fight for freedom doesn’t end at the courthouse steps—but too often today, that’s exactly where it’s being stopped.”

Under Illinois law, election officials may receive and count mail-in ballots for up to two weeks after Election Day, so long as the ballots are postmarked or certified by Election Day. Federal law, however, establishes a single “day of the election” for choosing members of Congress and appointing presidential electors: the Tuesday following the first Monday in November. Rep. Michael Bost sued the Illinois State Board of Elections, arguing that the extended state mail-in ballot receipt deadline unlawfully prolongs Election Day. Bost alleged that the extended process forces his campaign to remain operational—and incur additional expenses—after Election Day to monitor the counting of ballots.

Lower federal courts dismissed the lawsuit, concluding that Bost had raised only a generalized grievance about the government’s failure to follow the law. The Supreme Court reversed, explaining that vote-counting rules which undermine the integrity of the electoral process cause a loss of legitimacy that constitutes a concrete harm to a representative, and candidates have an interest in a fair pro­cess whether they win or lose. Thus, the majority expressly limited its ruling to political candidates challenging vote-counting rules, and declined to adopt a broader standing doctrine that would apply to any citizen harmed by unlawful government action.

The Court has dismissed significant cases for lack of standing, such as Murthy v. Missouri, in which plaintiffs challenged government-pressured censorship. Justice Samuel Alito has expressed concern that courts are using the doctrine of Article III standing as a means to avoid deciding “particularly contentious constitutional questions.” The Rutherford Institute called on the Supreme Court to use this case to prevent standing requirements from becoming a procedural shield that insulates government misconduct from meaningful review.

Ari Savitzky, Cecillia D. Wang, Evelyn Danforth-Scott, and others at the ACLU advanced the arguments in the Bost v. Illinois State Board of Elections 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.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/58z4e7xd

Homeowners Beware: ICE Claims Power to Enter Homes Without Judicial Warrants

Posted: January 22, 2026 in Uncategorized
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WASHINGTON, D.C. — One year after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to protect homeowners from warrantless searches by police based merely on a suspicion that a person on probation or parole resides on the premises, agents with Immigration and Customs Enforcement are now forcibly entering private homes without a judge’s warrant.

According to reporting by the Associated Press, ICE officers are being instructed that they may use force to enter a residence based solely on an administrative arrest warrant tied to a final order of removal—despite prior guidelines and legal precedent holding that such warrants do not authorize entry into a private home absent consent or exigent circumstances.

“This is not law enforcement. It’s a home-invasion policy,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “The Fourth Amendment does not disappear at the doorstep simply because the government labels a piece of paper an ‘administrative warrant.’ Judicial oversight is not optional. It is the Constitution’s first line of defense against tyranny.”

The Rutherford Institute warned one year ago that the Supreme Court’s refusal to intervene in Bailey v. Arkansas set the nation on a slippery slope toward a society in which police may invade homes based on nothing more than a hunch. That warning now carries graver weight in light of ICE’s newly revealed internal memo authorizing officers to forcibly enter private residences without judicial approval—a sweeping assertion of power that directly collides with the Fourth Amendment’s core protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. Disturbingly, these warrantless raids are not confined to non-citizens. In a widely reported incident, ICE agents forced open the door to the Minnesota home of ChongLy Thao, a U.S. citizen, dragged him outside in his underwear, and detained him without a judicial warrant—despite his repeated assertions of citizenship. The incident underscores the real-world consequences of treating administrative authority as a substitute for constitutional safeguards. Unlike judicial warrants issued by neutral judges upon a showing of probable cause, ICE administrative warrants are signed internally by immigration officials—allowing the same agency to act as lawmaker, judge, and enforcer. Civil liberties advocates warn that this concentration of power invites precisely the kind of warrantless, militarized home raids the Fourth Amendment was written to prevent.

For years, The Rutherford Institute has documented the steady erosion of Fourth Amendment protections through no-knock raids, militarized policing, and “Constitution-free” enforcement tactics—often targeting the most vulnerable communities first. ICE’s new guidance represents a dangerous escalation of that trend. “This memo doesn’t just threaten immigrants. It normalizes the idea that armed government agents may force their way into a home without judicial approval. Once that line is crossed, no one’s privacy is secure—not even citizens,” Whitehead said. “The government is once again testing how much lawlessness the public will tolerate. History shows that when agencies are allowed to ignore the Fourth Amendment in the name of expediency, abuse follows—and freedom is the casualty.”

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.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/mryprccm

Nullify the Police State: The People’s Veto to Rein in a Lawless Government

Posted: January 21, 2026 in Uncategorized
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“The people have the power… We are the government.”—John Lennon

We are living through a period of open lawlessness at the highest levels of government.

Executive orders are issued to sidestep Congress. Federal law enforcement is deployed as a tool of retaliation. Protest is criminalized. Surveillance expands. Due process becomes optional. Courts are packed, ignored, or bypassed. Entire communities are terrorized under the guise of “law and order.”

None of this is accidental. And none of it is temporary.

At a time when executive orders are used to punish dissent, federal agencies are weaponized against political opponents, protesters are met with militarized force, immigration enforcement is used as terror theater, and constitutional limits are treated as inconveniences rather than restraints, one fact has become impossible to ignore: politics won’t fix a system that is broken beyond repair.

Elections have failed to check the police state.

Courts increasingly defer to it.

And a year into Trump’s second term, what began as campaign rhetoric has hardened into administrative policy; what was once framed as a national emergency has become routine authoritarianism.

Executive power has expanded, accountability has contracted, and constitutional limits have been tested—and ignored—by the Trump administration with increasing confidence.

This is no longer a warning about what might happen. It is a record of what has already occurred.

This same authoritarian mindset has not remained confined to domestic policy. It has predictably expanded outward, revealing itself just as clearly in foreign affairs.

Trump’s renewed saber-rattling over Greenland—treating another nation’s territory as if it were a corporate asset to be acquired or controlled—reveals how deeply this distortion of power has taken hold.

It is the language of ownership, not governance; of command, not consent.

A president is not a monarch, a CEO, or a landlord over the republic. He is an employee—hired by “we the people,” bound by a written contract called the Constitution, and subject to limits he did not write and cannot rewrite.

When that employee ignores his limits, only one check remains: the people themselves.

John Lennon’s reminder that “the people have the power” has never been more relevant—or more dangerous to those in power.

That power has a name: nullification.

It is the authority of ordinary citizens and local communities to refuse cooperation with unjust laws, illegitimate prosecutions, and unconstitutional government action.

In an era of open executive defiance and punitive governance, nullification is no longer optional—it is a civic necessity.

How else do you balance the scales of justice at a time when Americans are being tasered, tear-gassed, pepper-sprayed, hit with batons, shot with rubber bullets and real bullets, blasted with sound cannons, detained in cages and kennels, and arrested and jailed for challenging the government’s excesses, abuses and power-grabs?

No matter who sits in the White House, a shadow government continues to call the shots behind the scenes.

Relying on the courts to restore justice has exposed a growing fracture within the judiciary itself.

On one side are lower courts, which have often served as a first line of defense against the Trump administration’s constitutional overreaches and abuses of power. On the other is the U.S. Supreme Court, which appears increasingly preoccupied with preserving order and insulating government agents from accountability rather than upholding the rights enshrined in the Constitution.

With each ruling handed down by the Supreme Court, it becomes harder to deny that we are living in an age of hollow justice—one in which the government is routinely granted a free pass to sidestep the rule of law, shielding the powerful from accountability rather than restraining them.

Even so, justice matters.

It matters whether you’re a rancher protesting a federal land grab by the Bureau of Land Management, a Native American defending sacred land and water from oil pipelines, a college student demonstrating against U.S. complicity in foreign wars, a trucker protesting government mandates, a Black American marching against the routine killing of unarmed citizens by police, or a protester standing witness in the face of ICE raids that terrorize communities.

They may be different causes, but it’s the same police state response over and over again: militarized force, mass arrests, surveillance, and prosecution.

Unfortunately, protests and populist movements haven’t done much to push back against an authoritarian regime that is deaf to our cries, dumb to our troubles, blind to our needs, and accountable to no one.

Regardless of ideology or grievance, the government’s modus operandi remains the same: shut down protests using all means available, prosecute First Amendment activities to the fullest extent of the law, criminalize dissent, label dissidents as extremists or terrorists, and surveil the population in order to crush resistance before it can take root.

If protests are met with force, elections are rendered performative, courts defer to power, and legislatures refuse to act, then any remaining means of thwarting the government’s relentless march toward outright dictatorship cannot lie within the system itself.

It must lie with the people—specifically, with the power of juries and local communities to refuse cooperation with illegitimate laws, abusive prosecutions, and unconstitutional government actions.

Nullification works.

Just as a President may veto an act of Congress, the American juror possesses the “People’s Veto”—the power to refuse enforcement of a law or prosecution that offends the conscience of the Constitution.

When a former Department of Justice employee threw a sandwich at an ICE agent, the Trump administration sent 20 officers in riot gear to his home to arrest him, then attempted to have a grand jury send him to jail for eight years on charges of a felony assault on a federal agent. The grand jury refused.

That refusal was not lawlessness. It was conscience.

As law professor Ilya Somin explains, jury nullification is the practice by which a jury refuses to convict someone accused of a crime if they believe the “law in question is unjust or the punishment is excessive.” According to former federal prosecutor Paul Butler, the doctrine of jury nullification is “premised on the idea that ordinary citizens, not government officials, should have the final say as to whether a person should be punished.”

In a world of “rampant overcriminalization,” where the average American unknowingly breaks multiple laws every day, jury nullification serves as “a check on runaway authoritarian criminalization and the increasing network of confusing laws that are passed with neither the approval nor oftentimes even the knowledge of the citizenry.”

Indeed, Butler believes so strongly in the power of nullification to balance the scales between the power of the prosecutor and the power of the people that he advises: “If you are ever on a jury in a marijuana case, I recommend that you vote ‘not guilty’—even if you think the defendant actually smoked pot, or sold it to another consenting adult. As a juror, you have this power under the Bill of Rights; if you exercise it, you become part of a proud tradition of American jurors who helped make our laws fairer.”

In other words, it is “we the people”—not politicians, not prosecutors, not judges, not corporate interests—who can and should be determining what laws are just, what activities are criminal and who can be jailed for what crimes.

This is why nullification matters now more than ever—not just because injustice is being imposed from below, but because accountability is being erased from above.

Trump’s willingness to use the presidential pardon power not as a safeguard against injustice but as a tool to erase it reveals a dangerous inversion of constitutional authority.

Pardons issued to political allies and ideological foot soldiers function as a form of nullification from above—executive erasure of legal consequence.

Jury nullification, by contrast, operates from below, as the people’s last remaining check on government abuse.

Writing for New York magazine, Elie Honig, a former federal and state prosecutor, rightly points out:

“Trump presently faces little meaningful opposition to his agenda, and to his excesses. The Executive Branch has largely been purged of objectors (or even some who faithfully do their jobs). The Republican-controlled House and Senate provide no friction, while Democrats flail helplessly. And the Supreme Court generally (though not always) has gone Trump’s way on executive power. One of the few remaining checks comes from the most humble of sources – the everyday civilians who get that dreaded notice in the mail and wind up serving on grand juries and trial juries. Other than voting, it’s the most basic, populist exercise of American democracy.”

The punishment should fit the crime, but the law itself should also reflect the will and conscience of the people—not the profit-driven priorities of a corporate-government elite that sees nothing wrong with locking someone away for life over a nonviolent offense.

Unsurprisingly, the powers-that-be do not want the public to know it has this power.

The government prefers a citizenry ignorant of its rights.

Indeed, the Supreme Court ruled as far back as 1895 that jurors need not be informed of their right to nullify—a telling admission of how threatening this power truly is.

Those who attempt to educate jurors about nullification have faced intimidation’ and prosecution. Yet courts have also recognized that discussing jury nullification in the abstract is protected speech under the First Amendment, reinforcing the idea that public debate about the justice system is not only lawful, but essential.

Jury nullification has deep roots in American history. It was championed by figures such as John Adams and John Hancock and used repeatedly to resist laws that were unjust, immoral, or out of step with fundamental liberties—from colonial resistance to British rule to modern opposition to draconian drug laws.

At a time when government officials accused of wrongdoing are routinely granted leniency, while ordinary citizens are prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, jury nullification stands as a powerful reminder that “we the people” are the government.

For too long, we have allowed our so-called representatives to call the shots. It is time to restore the citizenry to its rightful place in the republic.

To reclaim our power, we must change the rules and restore “we the people” as the masters, not the servants, in the power dynamic.

The government has perfected a divide-and-conquer strategy that exploits political, racial, economic, and cultural divisions. Surveillance, extremism reports, militarized policing, fusion centers, domestic intelligence databases, and the transformation of local police into extensions of the military have created an atmosphere of fear, suspicion, and distrust.

What too many Americans fail to realize is that, in the eyes of an unaccountable state, distinctions between left and right, protester and bystander, loyalist and dissenter eventually collapse.

When the crackdown comes—and it is coming—it will not matter who you voted for, which protest you supported, or whether you spoke out or stayed silent. When the machinery of repression turns inward, everyone becomes a potential target.

The government is not afraid of civil unrest. It anticipates it. It prepares for it.

The protests in Ferguson, Baltimore, Baton Rouge, and Standing Rock—where militarized police turned American towns into war zones and caged demonstrators like animals—were dress rehearsals.

They were training exercises for a future in which widespread dissent is met with overwhelming force.

Case in point: what’s unfolding in Minneapolis right now—a pattern that has repeated itself across the country whenever dissent threatens power.

The objective is compliance. The strategy is destabilization followed by control.

Knowing this, the question is no longer whether the police state can be reasoned with, voted out, or restrained from within.

The question is how ordinary people reclaim power in a system designed to deny it.

You change the rules.

You engage in disciplined, nonviolent resistance that disrupts unjust systems without surrendering moral authority. You practice civil disobedience and militant nonviolence, as Martin Luther King Jr. did through sit-ins, boycotts, and mass protest. You build grassroots power locally—thinking nationally, but acting locally.

And above all, you refuse to comply with laws, prosecutions, and policies that are illegitimate, egregious, or unconstitutional.

Nullify injustice.

Nullify unjust court cases. Nullify unjust laws. Nullify executive overreach.

Justice in America is too often reserved for those who can afford to buy it. For everyone else, the system is riddled with failures: police misconduct, prosecutorial abuse, judicial bias, inadequate defense, and a legal code so vast and convoluted that innocence becomes almost irrelevant.

In a courtroom, the conscience of a jury manifesting as nullification may be the one advantage left to us in the face of government corruption.

Nullification is not lawlessness. It is lawful resistance and it may be our last remaining safeguard against tyranny.

It is ordinary people refusing to rubber-stamp injustice. It is the citizenry exercising the authority the Constitution entrusts to them when every other safeguard has failed.

What nullification represents is the power of the people to reject potentates and tyrants.

It is a reminder that no president owns this country—just as no president gets to purchase, annex, or command the world as if it were his personal domain.

For too long, we have been conditioned to believe that power flows downward—from politicians, courts, and enforcers to the people. The truth is the opposite. Power flows upward, but only when citizens are willing to claim it.

As I make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, “We the people” are the government.

And if those in power don’t like being reminded of that fact, they’re free to get another job.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/5bms434y

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

John W. Whitehead’s weekly commentaries are available for publication to newspapers and web publications at no charge. 

This Is What Tyranny Looks Like Now: No Crowns. No Coups. Just Unchecked Power.

Posted: January 13, 2026 in Uncategorized
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NYT: “Do you see any checks on your power on the world stage? Is there anything that could stop you if you wanted to?”

President Trump: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me, and that’s very good.”

In January 1776, Thomas Paine published Common Sense, a pamphlet that gave voice to the discontent of a nation struggling to free itself from a tyrannical ruler who believed power flowed from his own will rather than the consent of the governed.

Paine’s warning was not theoretical.

Two hundred and fifty years later, we find ourselves confronting the same dilemma—this time from inside the White House: can a people remain free if they place their faith in the virtue (or vice) of one man?

When asked by the New York Times what might restrain his power grabs, Donald Trump did not point to the Constitution, the courts, Congress, or the rule of law—as his oath of office and our constitutional republic require. He pointed to himself.

According to Trump, the only thing standing between America and unchecked power is his own morality.

Now America’s founders believed in faith and morality. As John Adams warned in 1798, “Avarice, Ambition and Revenge or Galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

Adams was not advocating for a theocracy. Rather, he was emphasizing that a government of liars, thugs, and thieves will not be bound by constitutional limits. It will treat them as inconveniences.

A constitutional government survives only when both the people and their leaders are willing to be bound by it.

If our freedoms depend on Donald Trump’s self-proclaimed morality, we are in dangerous territory.

Over the course of his nearly 80 years, Trump has been a serial adulterer, philanderer, liar, and convicted felon. He has cheated, stolen, lied, plundered, pillaged, and enriched himself at the expense of others. He is vengeful, petty, unforgiving, foul-mouthed, and crass. His associates include felons, rapists, pedophiles, drug traffickers, sex traffickers, and thieves. He disrespects the law, disregards human life, is ignorant of the Bible, illiterate about the Constitution, takes pleasure in others’ pain and misfortune, and is utterly lacking in mercy, forgiveness, or compassion.

Christian nationalists have tried to whitewash Trump’s behavior by wrapping religion in the national flag and urging Americans to submit to authoritarianism—an appeal that flies in the face of everything the founders risked their lives to establish.

That whitewashing effort matters, because it asks Americans to abandon the very safeguards the Founders put in place to protect them from men like Trump.

Trump speaks in a language of kings, strongmen, and would-be emperors advocating for personal rule over constitutional government. America’s founders rejected that logic, revolted against tyranny, and built for themselves a system of constitutional restraints—checks and balances, divided authority through a separation of powers, and an informed, vigilant populace.

“If men were angels, no government would be necessary,” James Madison argued in Federalist 51. Because men are not angels and because power corrupts, Thomas Jefferson concluded: “In questions of power then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”

All of their hard work is being undone. Not by accident, and not overnight.

The erosion follows a familiar pattern to any who have studied the rise of authoritarian regimes.

Trump and his army of enablers and enforcers may have co-opted the language of patriotism, but they are channeling the tactics of despots.

This is not about left versus right, or even about whether Trump is a savior or a villain. It is about the danger of concentrating unchecked power in any one individual, regardless of party or personality.

This should be a flashing red warning sign for any who truly care about freedom, regardless of partisan politics.

The ends do not justify the means.

Power that can be used “for the right reasons” today will be used for the wrong reasons tomorrow.

History shows that once the machinery of oppression is built—surveillance systems, militarized enforcement, emergency authorities—it does not care who operates the controls. The only question is who will be targeted next.

All presidents in recent years have contributed to the rise of the American police state with executive overreach, standing armies, militarized policing, war without consent, mass surveillance, and concentrated power.

But Trump 2.0 has done more to dismantle the nation’s constitutional guardrails than at any other time in history.

Rather than adhering to the script provided by America’s founders, it’s as if the Trump administration took the grievances leveled against King George III in the Declaration of Independence and adopted them as a governing playbook.

These are not hypotheticals or worst-case projections.

They are unfolding now through emergency declarations, warrantless raids, speech-based detentions, unaccountable surveillance, and military actions launched without consent or constitutional authority.

It is the same sequence every despot follows.

First, power is centralized.

  • Trump has ruled by executive decree rather than law, sidelining Congress through emergency declarations and unilateral orders.
  • He has obstructed laws necessary for the public good, refusing to enforce statutes that limit his authority.
  • He has conditioned governance on loyalty, withholding protection, relief, or aid from those who oppose him.

Next, accountability is dismantled.

  • Trump has obstructed the administration of justice, interfering with investigations and shielding allies from prosecution.
  • He has politicized the judiciary, rewarding loyalty over independence and attacking courts that resist him.
  • He has undermined due process, expanding detention, administrative punishment, and coercive enforcement.

Once law no longer restrains power, force takes its place.

  • Trump has deployed militarized federal agents among the civilian population without meaningful oversight.
  • He has blurred the line between civilian authority and military power, treating force as governance.
  • He has protected agents from accountability, excusing abuse, violence, and killing by law enforcement.

If this is how Trump intends to celebrate the country’s 250th birthday, by reenacting the abuses that drove Americans to revolt in 1776, someone might need to clue him in to the fact that it ends with Americans rejecting “absolute tyranny.”

With every passing day, the American police state with Trump at its helm gets more unhinged.

Once force replaces law at home, it is only a matter of time before it is unleashed abroad.

With Trump’s blessing, the military carried out strikes on Nigeria on Christmas Day.

Without congressional authorization, without constitutional authority, and without any grounding in international law, Trump directed U.S. forces to invade a foreign country, abduct its president and his wife—and then Trump declared himself the new head of Venezuela.

Consumed with visions of global conquest and military expansion, Trump has treated sovereignty as negotiable and international law as an inconvenience. He has threatened, coerced, or destabilized nations including Venezuela, Greenland, Cuba, Nigeria, Iran, and others—not through diplomacy or lawful process, but through dominance, spectacle, and unilateral force.

Trump’s push to boost the military budget to $1.5 trillion speaks less to national defense than to imperial ambition.

This is not leadership. It is lawlessness carried out by mercenaries and thugs on the government payroll.

Not content to wage war abroad, the government has systematically worked to transform America into a battlefield, setting its sights on the American people.

That transformation is almost complete.

In Minneapolis, a federal ICE agent shot and killed 37-year-old Renee Good in the head, while she was behind the wheel of her car. In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, the Trump administration rushed to paint Good as an agitator and domestic terrorist, justifying the cold-blooded assassination of an American citizen by a masked gunman as an act of self-defense.

Video footage, including from the ICE agent who can be heard remarking, “Fucking bitch,” reflects poorly on the government’s claims.

Rather than de-escalating a situation that they created, the Trump administration has continued to add fuel to the fire, deploying more militarized agents, more force, more intimidation.

ICE agents have been battering down doors, ramming into private homes, and carrying out warrantless militarized raids that treat constitutional protections as inconveniences and human beings as expendable obstacles.

This is the reality of Trump’s America: moral collapse, thuggery, violence, greed, and dehumanization.

Due process has become optional. Restraint has vanished. Violence has been normalized.

A government that recognizes no moral limits will recognize no legal limits.

And a nation that places its faith in the “morality” of unrestrained power will soon discover that morality—like liberty—cannot survive where law no longer rules.

Unchecked power does not protect its supporters—it eventually turns on them, too.

This is what happens when the rule of law gives way to rule by force.

Looming over all of this is a question that can no longer be ignored: who is pulling the strings?

Nothing about Trump’s behavior is rational or sane, even by his own standards: he’s bulldozing the White House, blitz-bombing boats, threatening to seize foreign lands by force, and plastering his name and face on every available surface.

As diabolical as these distractions are, they are a sideshow to keep us from seeing the long-term plans to lock down the country being put in place by an unaccountable shadow apparatus operating behind the scenes for whom the Constitution means nothing.

We ignore them at our own peril.

What we are witnessing is not merely presidential overreach, but the consolidation of power within an unaccountable executive-security apparatus—one that operates beyond meaningful public oversight and treats constitutional limits as obstacles rather than obligations.

A ruler who sees himself as indispensable soon comes to believe the law is expendable.

A government that elevates personal ambition over public accountability begins to treat constitutional restraints as obstacles rather than safeguards.

And a nation that confuses brute force with authority inevitably finds itself governed by fear rather than consent.

When a president surrounds himself with military parades, inflates defense budgets to obscene levels, deploys federal forces against the civilian population, and insists that his personal morality is the only safeguard against abuse, the republic is no longer drifting towards tyranny—it is sliding fast.

And when ego becomes policy, the results are predictable: perpetual war, endless surveillance, normalized violence, the criminalization of dissent, and a public conditioned to accept abuses in the name of security and patriotism.

This is how republics fall.

Not all at once. Not with a single coup or declaration. But gradually, through the steady erosion of norms, the hollowing out of institutions, and the quiet surrender of moral responsibility.

Paine warned that “a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.” That warning resonates with terrifying clarity today.

Americans are being trained to accept what would have once been unthinkable: law enforcement that kills without consequence, presidents who operate above the law, wars launched without consent, and power exercised without accountability.

That normalization is the true danger.

Which brings us to the question that Common Sense forced Americans to confront in 1776—and that we must confront again now: Are we a nation governed by laws, or by the will of a man?

If the answer is the latter, then no election, no court, no ritual invocation of patriotism can save us.

The founders did not risk everything to replace one tyrant with another. They did not reject monarchy only to embrace executive supremacy. They did not enshrine checks and balances so that future generations could shrug and hope that those in power would restrain themselves.

They understood that freedom requires moral courage, not blind loyalty; that resistance to tyranny is not treason, but duty; and that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance—not eternal trust.

But when the law itself is perverted for corrupt ends, the burden of resistance does not disappear. It shifts.

The founders also understood something else—something history has confirmed again and again: when government descends into lawlessness, people of conscience, faith and deep moral beliefs are tested. And they either rise to confront injustice, or become complicit in its abuses.

The Franklin Grahams of this world, who have exchanged moral authority for a seat at Trump’s table, would have us believe the lawful response is simply to comply with those in power.

But scripture does not command blind obedience to power. The same Bible invoked to demand submission also records prophets confronting kings, apostles defying unjust rulers, and Jesus himself executed for refusing to submit to an immoral state.

As Martin Luther King Jr. pointed out, “One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”

That resistance has historic roots.

During the years leading up to the American Revolution, it was the so-called Black Robed Regiment—a derisive term used by the British to describe colonial clergy—who spoke most forcefully against tyranny. From pulpits across the colonies, pastors preached sermons condemning unchecked power, defending liberty of conscience, and warning that obedience to unjust authority was itself a form of moral corruption.

Those ministers did not preach submission to power. They preached resistance to it.

In Nazi Germany, theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer watched as the church gradually surrendered its independence and aligned itself with state power. Bonhoeffer warned that when the church becomes silent in the face of evil—or worse, when it cloaks injustice in religious language—it ceases to be the church at all. Silence, he argued, was not neutrality; it was collaboration.

Bonhoeffer paid for that conviction with his life.

These pastors understood that the church’s role is not to sanctify empire, but to confront it.

The same themes running through Paine’s Common Sense and the later American Crisis are just as relevant now as they were 250 years ago: no ruler is above the law, no government is entitled to unchecked power, and no people remain free who surrender their conscience to the ambitions of the powerful.

And as I make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, history has already told us what happens next: when government becomes destructive of liberty, it is not only the right of the people to resist—it is their duty.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/u4s2vata

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

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