Archive for April, 2026

Unfit to Govern: We Need a 25th Amendment for the American Police State

Posted: April 15, 2026 in Uncategorized
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“In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”— Friedrich Nietzsche

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

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

Another imagined a Trump-branded hotel on the Moon.

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

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

Blasphemous. Profane. Threatening. Self-aggrandizing.

These posts are not anomalies.

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

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

Consider the trajectory.

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

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

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

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

This is not normal.

Nor is it merely rhetorical excess.

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

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

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

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

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

Literally.

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

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

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

This is not serious governance. This is spectacle.

This is not rational.

This is not presidential.

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

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

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

As the New York Times reports:

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is not branding.

It is the architecture of a cult of personality.

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

As always, history points the way.

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

The parallels are difficult to ignore.

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

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

But such power does not exist in a vacuum.

It is enabled.

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

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

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

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

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

This is a constitutional crisis.

And the Constitution provides a remedy.

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

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

Section 4 is explicit:

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

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

Yet as Gaby Hinsliff concludes in The Guardian:

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

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

History suggests this is not unusual.

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

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

This was never supposed to be about politics.

It was never supposed to be about ideology.

It is about constitutional capability.

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

But there is no filter for this level of dysfunction.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Surveillance is expanding.

Policing is becoming more militarized.

Power is becoming more centralized and less accountable.

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

No mechanism to declare it unfit.

No procedure to remove it.

Or is there?

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

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

That principle still stands.

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

Not chaos, but constitutional resistance.

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

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

Source: https://tinyurl.com/3msmnbt9

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.

America Last: War Abroad, Tyranny at Home—and the Theft of a Nation

Posted: April 8, 2026 in Uncategorized
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“We’re fighting wars, we can’t take care of … daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things… We have to take care of one thing: military protection.”—President Donald J. Trump

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

Every bomb dropped abroad is a bill sent home.

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

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

This is not national defense.

This is organized theft.

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

This is not America First.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The president’s fiscal priorities include:

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

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

This is how empires fall.

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

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

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

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

War is no longer a last resort.

It has become a business model.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The danger is not theoretical.

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

But what happens when that unchecked power is placed in the hands of someone who appears increasingly erratic and unmoored from reality?

In recent weeks, Trump has issued profanity-laced threats on social media targeting civilian infrastructure in Iran—actions that would constitute war crimes under international law.

On Easter Sunday, when Christians the world over were celebrating the hope and resurrection of Jesus Christ, Trump shared a profanity-laden post to his Truth Social account, threatening to target civilian infrastructure in Iran—war crimes under the Geneva Convention. “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

He has used public appearances to rant about political enemies, threaten foreign nations, and boast about military actions with little regard for accuracy or consequence.

In front of an audience of children gathered for the White House’s annual Easter Egg Roll, Trump ranted about Biden’s autopen, expounded on the war in Iran, referred to Kamala Harris as a “low IQ person,” described the Biden administration as not knowing “what the hell they were doing,” and once again threatened to obliterate Iran’s power plants and bridges, which constitute a war crime.

He has suggested he could start charging “tolls” on global shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, claimed victory in the war with Iran even while American forces and Middle Eastern allies continue to come under fire, and floated fantastical political ambitions untethered from constitutional limits, including the idea that he could quickly learn Spanish in order to run for president of Venezuela and win.

This pattern of behavior—reckless, inflammatory, and detached from reality—has prompted a growing number of voices, across the political spectrum, to question whether the president should be removed from office under the 25th Amendment.

Not surprisingly, the very same individuals who loudly called to invoke the 25th Amendment against Joe Biden have fallen silent in the face of Trump’s increasingly erratic behavior.

The standard, it seems, is not constitutional—it is political.

Which brings us back to the war in Iran—a costly, dangerous, and deeply suspect conflict that raises more questions than answers and provides a conveniently timed distraction from Trump’s presence within the Epstein files.

Despite President Trump and Pete Hegseath’s incessant claims of lethality and success, victory is not a foregone conclusion.

And the price we are paying is high indeed, in treasure and life.

Credible concerns point to the fact that key details about the true cost of this war—which “we the people” are entitled to know—are being withheld from the public.

An investigative report by The Intercept suggests that “U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM, which oversees military operations in the Middle East, appears to be engaged in what a defense official called a ‘casualty cover-up,’ offering The Intercept low-ball and outdated figures and failing to provide clarifications on military deaths and injuries.”

Far from providing a true accounting of the human and financial burden to be borne by the American people, the Trump administration has apparently continued to stonewall and slow-walk information about the numbers of troops injured and killed, and the number of U.S. bases attacked. Indeed, U.S. troops throughout the Middle East have reportedly been forced to abandon their bases and retreat to hotels and office buildings, which are ill-equipped to provide defensive cover.

Even the administration’s account of a dramatic rescue mission of a downed weapons system officer—one involving massive resources and the destruction of U.S. aircraft—is coming under scrutiny, with some suggesting it may have been something far more ambitious and far less successful than advertised.

Although Trump has insisted that he directed the military to send in more than 150 aircraft—including 64 fighter jets, four bombers, 48 refuelers, 13 rescue aircraft and 26 intelligence and jamming aircraft, hundreds of troops, munitions, and multiple aircraft (two of which were reportedly destroyed by U.S. forces to avoid them falling into enemy hands) to rescue this one airman, there is a growing groundswell of voices suggesting that the administration’s rescue mission was, in fact, a failed ground invasion to seize Iran’s enriched uranium—a prospect Trump has teased for weeks.

As Financial Review concluded, “Trump’s daring special ops rescue comes at a hefty price. Some 100 special operations forces were involved in the high-stakes mission while several multimillion-dollar US aircraft were destroyed to secure the airman.”

Which begs the question: can we trust the U.S. government to tell us the truth?

Can we trust a government that has historically engaged in cover-ups—medical, military, political, and environmental?

Can we trust a government that treats its citizens as data points to be tracked, monitored, and manipulated?

Can we trust a government that wages wars for profit, jails its own people for profit, and shields those in power from accountability?

This is a government that lies, cheats, steals, spies, kills, and overreaches its authority at almost every turn.

It treats human beings as expendable—resources to be used, controlled, and discarded.

It is not guided by morality, restraint, or constitutional principle.

It is power unbound—corrupt, unaccountable, and increasingly indifferent to the freedoms it was meant to protect.

This is a government that wages wars for profit and turns a blind eye while its agents abuse their power.

And increasingly, the wars being waged are not just overseas.

Those wars are also here at home.

Through mass surveillance programs that track every movement and communication. Through militarized policing and the deployment of National Guard units against civilian populations. Through federal agencies empowered to detain, deport, and disappear individuals with little regard for due process. Through policies that attempt to redefine who is entitled to the protections of citizenship—and who can be stripped of them.

This is what it looks like when the machinery of war—built for foreign battlefields—is turned inward.

This is what it looks like when “we the people” become the enemy.

And in this moment, we find ourselves brought full circle.

Nearly 250 years after the American colonists rose up against a distant ruler for waging war against his own people—through standing armies, arbitrary rule, and the stripping away of rights—we are once again confronting a government that views its citizens not as sovereign individuals, but as subjects to be controlled.

As I make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the government was never meant to be trusted. It was meant to be restrained by the chains of the Constitution.

The greatest threat to freedom is not a foreign enemy.

The greatest threat to freedom is a government that no longer fears, values or serves its people.

Don’t fall for the lie.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/4z57c7nw

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. 

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.

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