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.
Ari Savitzky, Cecillia D. Wang, Evelyn Danforth-Scott, and others at the ACLU advanced the arguments in the Bost v. Illinois State Board of Electionsamicus 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots… His public life is an endless series of evasions and false pretences. He is willing to embrace any issue, however idiotic, that will get him votes, and he is willing to sacrifice any principle, however sound, that will lose them for him… He may be, on the one hand, a cross-roads idler striving to get into the State Legislature … or he may be, on the other, the President of the United States.”—H. L. Mencken
Trump has repeatedly framed himself as a victim of corruption while weaponizing the machinery of government for personal, political, and financial gain. He rails against censorship while threatening journalists, blacklisting law firms, and punishing dissenters. He decries political persecution while using federal power to retaliate against critics and whistleblowers, condemning ‘rigged systems’ even as he stacks courts, rewrites rules, and demands loyalty over law.
Nowhere is this hypocrisy more evident than in Trump’s “Stop the Steal” campaign—a slogan that metastasized into a violent assault on democratic norms and culminated in a riot when Trump’s supporters forced their way into the U.S. Capitol to stop Congress from certifying the electoral votes in an election Trump lost.
Five years after January 6, we find ourselves navigating a strange and dangerous new reality:
A president who claims to defend American sovereignty while exploiting public office to extract resources, favors, and concessions for private and political gain.
A president who champions “law and order” while selectively enforcing the law—rewarding loyalty, punishing opposition, and dismantling checks on executive power.
Stop the steal, indeed.
Trump’s second term has become a painful lesson in what it looks like when a government of the people, by the people, and for the people is stolen out from under them—and replaced by a government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich.
This is not governance.
It is projection weaponized, retaliation normalized, and Orwellian doublespeak elevated to official policy.
This pattern of projection becomes most dangerous when it targets the democratic process itself.
Trump’s obsession with election fraud masks a quieter, more consequential theft: the deliberate manipulation of the electoral system.
While endlessly warning that elections are “rigged,” Donald Trump and his allies have worked aggressively to redraw voting districts, restructure election rules, and manipulate the electoral map ahead of the 2026 midterms—not to reflect the will of the people, but to predetermine outcomes.
This is not election security. It is election control.
By reshaping districts and rewriting rules while crying fraud, Trump accuses others of stealing elections while quietly rigging the system himself.
In a striking escalation of this pattern, Trump has even floated the idea of canceling future elections—suggesting that the 2026 midterms might not need to be held, then quickly backpedaling by framing the comments as rhetorical or directed at political opponents.
Even when cloaked in bravado, sarcasm, or faux humor, the effect is the same: undermining public confidence in free and fair elections while signaling that democratic rules are negotiable when they obstruct the pursuit of power. If elections can be dismissed whenever outcomes are inconvenient, the very premise of self-government collapses.
When projection can no longer justify control, it serves another purpose: deflection.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Trump’s repeated invocations of the Jeffrey Epstein files.
Trump has loudly and insistently suggested—often without evidence—that his political enemies are implicated in Epstein’s crimes, while portraying himself as untouched by the scandal. Yet Trump remains one of Epstein’s most documented, long-standing associates, appearing repeatedly in photographs, flight records, and contemporaneous accounts over many years.
The result is not accountability, but misdirection: a calculated effort to shift attention away from the president’s own condition by casting doubt on an opponent’s, depriving voters of consistent standards for evaluating those entrusted with immense power.
Projection does not stop at home.
While posturing as an isolationist intent on “ending endless wars,” Trump has embraced the role of global enforcer and expansionist. He polices other nations, threatens intervention, and wields economic and military power to coerce compliance, all while insisting that America must retreat from international responsibility. He condemns foreign governments for repression while excusing—or replicating—those same abuses at home. And now he has seemingly embraced a “Donroe Doctrine” vision of seizing control of much of the western hemisphere.
At the same time, Trump styles himself a “peace president” even as his administration has carried out military strikes that killed civilians abroad and expanded the reach of the American military industrial complex.
In this way, peace becomes a slogan emptied of meaning, while violence is rebranded as strength.
This, too, is projection: claiming moral authority while betraying moral obligation; invoking faith while hollowing it out; declaring peace while sowing destruction.
Perhaps no slogan better captures Trump’s reliance on projection than his long-running promise to “drain the swamp.”
Trump rose to power by portraying Washington as a cesspool of corruption—claiming he alone could cleanse government of self-dealing elites and entrenched interests. Yet once in office, he did not drain the swamp; he moved into it, expanded it, and placed himself at its epicenter. Lobbyists, donors, political loyalists, and corporate insiders flourished, while public office became a vehicle for enrichment and favoritism.
What Trump labeled corruption in others became standard practice in his own administration.
The rhetoric of reform masked the transformation of government into a pay-to-play enterprise where access, immunity, and influence were rewards for loyalty.
“Drain the swamp” was never a promise of reform: it was a warning about who would control it.
All of this points to a single conclusion: the greatest theft of the Trump era was not a stolen election, but the systematic dismantling of the constitutional republic itself.
Over the past year alone, the administration has rewritten the rules of governance—discarding constitutional guardrails whenever they interfered with power, profit, or political revenge.
Rights were stolen by eroding First Amendment protections and criminalizing dissent.
Due process was stolen through detention without trial and punishment based on speech.
Representative government was stolen by sidelining Congress and ruling by executive fiat.
Public resources were stolen through pay-to-play politics and corporate favoritism.
Accountability was stolen by shielding allies while weaponizing law enforcement against critics.
One by one, the pillars of constitutional government were stripped for parts.
The courts were transformed from checks on power into ideological enforcement mechanisms.
Checks and balances were treated as obstacles rather than obligations.
Loyalty to the president replaced loyalty to the Constitution.
Trump stole our rights by eroding First Amendment protections, chilling protest, and criminalizing dissent under the guise of “national security” and “law and order.” Speech became suspect. Assembly became dangerous. Political opposition was recast as extremism. The freedoms meant to protect a free people were reframed as threats to government authority.
Trump stole due process through indefinite detention, speech-based targeting, and punishment without trial. Individuals were detained, surveilled, or punished not for crimes committed, but for ideas expressed, associations maintained, or beliefs held. Guilt was assumed. Legal protections were delayed, denied, or discarded.
Trump stole representative government by concentrating power in the executive branch and treating constitutional limits as inconveniences rather than obligations. Agencies were weaponized. Civil servants were purged. Loyalty to the president replaced loyalty to the Constitution. Government ceased to function as a public trust and instead became an instrument of control.
Trump stole public resources through pay-to-play politics, corporate favoritism, and self-serving deals that enriched political insiders at public expense. Taxpayer dollars, government contracts, regulatory favors, and public lands were leveraged not for the common good, but for private profit and political advantage.
Trump stole accountability by shielding allies from prosecution, issuing selective pardons, and turning law enforcement into a tool of political enforcement. Friends were protected. Critics were punished. The rule of law—meant to apply equally to all—became conditional, transactional, and partisan.
This was not mismanagement. It was not incompetence. It was not chaos.
It was theft—methodical, deliberate, and ideological.
John W. Whitehead, Constitutional Attorney 