Posts Tagged ‘authoritarianism’

Trump Is Making America Constitutionally Literate—By Violating the Constitution

Posted: May 14, 2025 in Uncategorized
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“Donald Trump ran on a platform of relentless, thoroughgoing rejection of the Constitution itself, and its underlying principle of democratic self-government and individual rights. True, he never endorsed quartering of troops in private homes in time of peace, but aside from that there is hardly a provision of the Bill of Rights or later amendments he did not explicitly promise to override, from First Amendment freedom of the press and of religion to Fourth Amendment freedom from ‘unreasonable searches and seizures’ to Sixth Amendment right to counsel to Fourteenth Amendment birthright citizenship and Equal Protection and Fifteenth Amendment voting rights.”—Garrett Epps, law professor

If Donald Trump is remembered for anything, it may be his unintentional role in reviving public interest in the U.S. Constitution.

Indeed, few modern political figures have done more to prompt spontaneous national discussions about the Bill of Rights and constitutional limits on government power—if only because Trump tramples on them so frequently.

Through his routine disregard for due process, free speech, separation of powers, and the rule of law, President Trump has become a walking civics lesson.

From the First and Fourth Amendments to the Emoluments Clause, the Constitution has never had such regular airtime.

Ironically, this might be Trump’s greatest legacy: forcing Americans to learn what the Constitution actually says—by violating it.

Unfortunately, Trump himself remains constitutionally illiterate.

Days after issuing an executive order that openly hints at martial law, Trump made a mockery of his oath of office by confessing his complete ignorance about the Constitution on national television. When asked if he needs to uphold the Constitution of the United States as president, Trump replied, “I don’t know.”

This is the same man who appointed himself Chair of America’s 250th anniversary celebration but seems entirely unaware of what that history represents. Asked what the Declaration of Independence means, Trump called it a “declaration of unity and love.”

In reality, it’s a fiery breakup letter—a revolutionary indictment of unchecked executive power.

If Trump had been king in 1776, Jefferson might have named him in the first paragraph.

To be clear, Donald Trump is not the first president to stretch, sidestep, or outright violate constitutional limits—Democrats and Republicans alike have done so. But Trump is singular in the sheer scope, frequency, and brazenness with which he has stress-tested every clause, amendment, and founding principle of the U.S. Constitution.

His presidency has become a full-frontal assault on the rule of law.

The good news is that Trump’s constitutional ignorance has turned millions of Americans into more alert and informed citizens. In fighting off Trump’s excesses, the nation has reawakened to the rights and principles that many had taken for granted.

Consider some of the constitutional principles that Trump can be credited with bringing into the spotlight unintentionally during his time in office.

First Amendment (free speech, press, religion, protest and assembly): Trump’s repeated confrontations with the First Amendment have transformed free expression into a battleground, making it impossible to ignore the protections it guarantees. From branding the press as “the enemy of the people” and threatening to revoke media licenses to blacklisting law firms, threatening universities with funding cuts for not complying with the government’s ideological agenda, and detaining foreign students for their political views, Trump has treated constitutional protections not as guarantees, but as obstacles. Deportations and detentions based solely on political speech have shown the fragility of these freedoms when power goes unchecked. Even when Trump claims to be championing religious freedom for Christians, he skates close to violating the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, which prohibits the government from favoring one religion over another.

Second Amendment (right to bear arms): Although often portrayed as a defender of the Second Amendment, Trump has shown an inconsistent and, at times, authoritarian approach to gun rights. He has publicly suggested confiscating firearms from individuals deemed dangerous—without prior due process—summed up in his infamous 2018 statement: “Take the guns first, go through due process second.” This disregard for constitutional procedure alarmed even staunch Second Amendment advocates. At the same time, Trump has encouraged the militarization of domestic police forces, blurring the line between civilian law enforcement and standing armies—a contradiction that cuts against the very spirit of the amendment, which was rooted in distrust of centralized power and standing militaries.

Fourth Amendment (protection against unreasonable searches and seizures): Under Trump, the Fourth Amendment’s shield against unreasonable searches and seizures has likewise become a focal point of concern. His expansion of no-knock raids, endorsement of sweeping surveillance tactics, sanctioning of police brutality and greater immunity for police misconduct, and the use of masked, plainclothes federal agents to seize demonstrators off the streets have revived conversations about privacy, unlawful searches, and the right to be secure in one’s person and property. Executive orders have embedded DHS agents in local policing. All of this under the guise of “law and order”—but without lawful justification.

Fifth & Fourteenth Amendments (due process and equal protection): Perhaps nowhere has Trump’s disregard been more dangerous than in his approach to due process and equal protection under the law. The Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments guarantee that neither citizens nor non-citizens can be deprived of liberty without fair procedures. Yet Trump’s Administration has repeatedly floated or enacted policies that sidestep due process, from the suggestion that he could suspend habeas corpus to the indefinite detention of individuals without trial, and openly questioned whether non-citizens deserve any constitutional protections at all. His immigration policies targeting lawful visa holders for dissent have pushed these rights to the edge of collapse. When asked if non-citizens deserve due process, Trump said, “I don’t know.” That chilling admission sums up his approach to the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments: treat them as optional.

Sixth (right to a fair and speedy trial) and Eighth Amendments (protection against cruel and unusual punishment): Even the Sixth and Eighth Amendments have found new urgency. Trump has promoted indefinite pretrial detention for protesters and immigrants alike, while presiding over family separations, inhumane detention centers, and support for enhanced interrogation techniques. Trump has also doubled down on his administration’s commitment to carrying out more executions, including a push to impose the death penalty for crimes other than murder. What once seemed like settled moral and legal territory is now back up for debate.

Tenth Amendment (states’ rights): The Tenth Amendment, which preserves state sovereignty against federal overreach, has been tested by Trump’s threats to defund sanctuary cities, override state public health measures, and interfere in local policing and elections. His efforts to federalize domestic law enforcement have exposed the limits of decentralized power in the face of executive ambition.

Fourteenth Amendment (birthright citizenship): No clause has been more aggressively misunderstood by Trump than the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. His push to strip citizenship from children born on U.S. soil to immigrant parents (birthright citizenship) ignores over a century of legal precedent affirming that citizenship cannot be denied by executive whim.

Article I, Section 8 (commerce and tariffs): Trump’s use of tariff authority provides another example of executive power run amok. Although the Constitution assigns Congress the power to regulate commerce with foreign nations, Trump has imposed sweeping tariffs on allies and used them as political leverage. These actions not only undermine the constitutional balance between the branches but also weaponize trade policy for political ends.

Article I, Section 9 (Emoluments Clause): Trump’s disregard for the Emoluments Clause—a safeguard against presidential profiteering—brought this obscure constitutional provision back into the public eye. By continuing to profit from his private businesses while in office, including his newly launched crypto companies, hosting foreign dignitaries at Trump-branded properties, and his reported willingness to accept extravagant gifts, such as a $400 million luxury plane from the Qatari government, he 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.

Article I, Section 9 (power of the purse): Trump has also trampled on Congress’s exclusive power over federal spending, attempting to redirect funds by executive fiat rather than operating within Congress’ approved budgetary plan. Within the first months of his second term, Trump empowered Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to unilaterally slash government spending by reducing the federal workforce and dismantling whole programs. He has also threatened to withhold federal aid from states, cities, and universities deemed insufficiently loyal. These efforts to bypass congressional appropriations not only violate the Constitution’s clear separation of powers but set a dangerous precedent for future administrations to govern by fiscal coercion.

Article II (executive powers): At the heart of Trump’s governance is a dangerous misreading of Article II, which vests executive power in the president, to justify executive overreach and the concept of an all-powerful unitary executive. He has repeatedly claimed “total authority” over state matters, wielded executive orders like royal decrees in order to bypass Congress, and sought to bend the Department of Justice to his personal and political will. Trump’s use of executive orders—both in his first term and now again in 2025—reflects a belief in unchecked presidential power. He has declared “total authority,” fired independent watchdogs, pardoned political allies, and weaponized the DOJ. Such behavior undermines the balance of powers laid out by the framers.

Separation of Powers / Checks and Balances: This has also meant a sustained attack on the separation of powers. Trump has defied congressional subpoenas, pardoned loyalists implicated in wrongdoing, and threatened to jail political enemies. In doing so, he has tested—and often breached—the guardrails that prevent any one branch from overpowering the others.

Historical Emergency Powers and Legal Precedents: Beyond these standard constitutional provisions, Trump has also breathed new life into archaic emergency powers—tools that most Americans associate with authoritarian regimes, not a constitutional republic. His rhetoric and executive orders have invoked the Alien Enemies Act to justify rounding up, detaining and deporting undocumented immigrants without due process. He has also threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy troops domestically in order to deal with civil unrest, raising the specter of martial law cloaked in patriotic language.

In routinely violating the Constitution and crossing legal lines that were once unthinkable, Trump—who appears to have no real understanding of or regard for the Constitution—is forcing Americans to confront what the Constitution truly protects, and what it doesn’t.

So where does that leave us?

Thomas Jefferson recognized that a citizenry educated on “their rights, interests, and duties” is the only real assurance that freedom will survive. As Jefferson wrote in 1820: “I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of our society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.”

Still, what good is a knowledgeable citizenry if their elected officials are woefully ignorant about the Constitution or willfully disregard their sworn duty to uphold and protect it?

Jefferson again has the answer: “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.”

For starters, anyone taking public office, from the president on down, should have a working knowledge of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and should be held accountable for upholding their precepts.

One way to ensure this? Require government leaders to take a course on the Constitution—and pass a thorough examination—before being allowed to take office. And if they violate their contractual obligations to uphold and defend the Constitution, vote them out—throw them out—or impeach them.

“We the people” have the power, but we must use it, or we’ll lose it.

Trump may have contributed to this revival in constitutional awareness, but as we warn in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, the challenge isn’t just knowing our rights—it’s defending them, before they’re gone for good.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/454khw2x

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

Sleepwalking into Tyranny: How Power is Silently Being Seized

Posted: February 5, 2025 in Uncategorized
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“This is what militaries do during coups: you capture the major targets, with government buildings high on the list, and you take over communications and other systems.”—Ruth Ben-Ghiat, historian on fascism and authoritarian leaders

How something is done is just as important as why something is done.

To suggest that the ends justify the means is to launch oneself down a moral, ethical and legal rabbit hole that leaves us in a totalitarian bind.

We are already halfway down that road.

Whatever the justifications for discarding, even temporarily, the constitutional framework and protocols that have long served as the foundations for our republic (national security, an economic crisis, terrorists at the border, a global pandemic, etc.), none of them are worth the price we are being asked to pay—the rule of law—for what is amounting to a hostile takeover of the U.S. government by an oligarchic elite.

This is no longer a conversation about stolen elections, insurrections, or even the Deep State.

This has become a lesson in how quickly things can fall apart.

This is what all those years of partisan double standards and constitutional undermining and legislative sell-outs and judicial betrayals add up to: a coup by oligarchic forces intent on a hostile takeover.

The government’s past efforts to sidestep the rule of law pale in comparison to what is unfolding right now, which is nothing less than the complete dismantling of every last foundational principle for a representative government that answers to “we the people.”

This shock-and-awe blitz campaign of daily seizures, raids and overreaching executive orders is a deliberate attempt to keep us distracted and diverted while the government is remade in the image of an autocracy, one in which privacy, due process, the rule of law, free speech, and equality will all be contingent on whether you are worthy of the privilege of rights.

I have long insisted on the need to recalibrate the government, but this is not how one goes about it.

The issue is not whether the actions being taken by the Trump Administration are right or wrong—although there are many that are egregiously wrong and some that are long overdue—but whether the Executive Branch has the power to unilaterally override the Constitution.

If we allow this imperial coup to move forward without pushback or protest, we will be just as culpable as those signing the death warrant for our freedoms.

Power corrupts.

And absolute power corrupts absolutely.

However, it takes a culture of entitlement and a nation of compliant, willfully ignorant, politically divided citizens to provide the foundations of tyranny.

For too long now, America has played politics with its principles and allowed the president and his colleagues to act in violation of the rule of law.

“We the people” are paying the price for it now.

Since the early days of our republic, we have operated under the principle that no one is above the law.

As Thomas Paine observed in Common Sense, “In America, the law is king. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.”

Several years later, John Adams, seeking to reinforce this important principle, declared in the Massachusetts Constitution that they were seeking to establish “a government of laws and not of men.”

The history of our nation over the past 200-plus years has been the history of a people engaged in a constant struggle to maintain that tenuous balance between the rule of law—in our case, the United States Constitution—and the government leaders entrusted with protecting it, upholding it and abiding by it.

At various junctures, when that necessary balance has been thrown off by overreaching government bodies or overly ambitious individuals, we have found ourselves faced with a crisis of constitutional proportions.

Each time, we have taken the painful steps needed to restore our constitutional equilibrium.

That was then, this is now, and for too long now, we have failed to recognize and rectify the danger in allowing a single individual to declare himself the exception to the rule of law and assume the role of judge, jury, and executioner.

For all intents and purposes, we have become a nation ruled not by laws but by men, and fallible, imperfect men, at that.

We allowed Bush to overstep. We allowed Obama to overstep. We allowed Trump to overstep. We allowed Biden to overstep.

These power grabs by the Trump Administration, aided and abetted by Elon Musk, are more than an overstep, however.

All of us are in danger.

Those cheering the erection of migrant camps at Guantanamo, take heed: you could be next.

It’s no longer a question of whether the government will lock up Americans for defying its mandates but when.

Partisan politics have no place in what is unfolding now.

This is what we know: the government has the means, the muscle and the motivation to detain individuals who resist its orders and do not comply with its mandates in a vast array of prisons, detention centers, and concentration camps paid for with taxpayer dollars.

It’s just a matter of time.

It no longer matters what the hot-button issue might be (vaccine mandates, immigration, gun rights, abortion, same-sex marriage, healthcare, criticizing the government, protesting election results, etc.) or which party is wielding its power like a hammer.

The groundwork has already been laid.

Under the indefinite detention provision of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the President and the military can detain and imprison American citizens with no access to friends, family or the courts if the government believes them to be a terrorist.

So, it should come as no surprise that merely criticizing the government could get you labeled as a terrorist.

After all, it doesn’t take much to be considered a terrorist anymore, especially given that the government likes to use the words “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” interchangeably.

This is what happens when you not only put the power to determine who is a potential danger in the hands of government agencies, the courts and the police but also give those agencies liberal authority to lock individuals up for perceived wrongs.

It’s a system just begging to be abused by power-hungry bureaucrats desperate to retain their power at all costs.

It’s happened before.

As history shows, the U.S. government is not averse to locking up its own citizens for its own purposes.

One need only go back to the 1940s, when the federal government proclaimed that Japanese-Americans, labeled potential dissidents, could be put in concentration (a.k.a. internment) camps based only upon their ethnic origin, to see the lengths the federal government will go to in order to maintain “order” in the homeland.

The U.S. Supreme Court validated the detention program in Korematsu v. US (1944), concluding that the government’s need to ensure the safety of the country trumped personal liberties.

Although that Korematsu decision was never formally overturned, Chief Justice Roberts opined in Trump v. Hawaii (2018) that “the forcible relocation of U. S. citizens to concentration camps, solely and explicitly on the basis of race, is objectively unlawful and outside the scope of Presidential authority.”

Roberts’ statements provide little assurance of safety in light of the government’s tendency to sidestep the rule of law when it suits its purposes. Pointing out that such blatantly illegal detentions could happen again—with the blessing of the courts—Justice Scalia once warned, “In times of war, the laws fall silent.”

We seem to be coming full circle on many fronts.

Consider that two decades ago we were debating whether non-citizens—for example, so-called enemy combatants being held at Guantanamo Bay and Muslim-Americans rounded up in the wake of 9/11—were entitled to protections under the Constitution, specifically as they relate to indefinite detention.

Americans weren’t overly concerned about the rights of non-citizens then, nor do they seem all that concerned now. And yet in the near future we could well be the ones in the unenviable position of being targeted for indefinite detention by our own government.

Similarly, most Americans weren’t unduly concerned when the U.S. Supreme Court gave Arizona police officers the green light to stop, search and question anyone—ostensibly those fitting a particular racial profile—they suspect might be an illegal immigrant. More than a decade later, the cops largely have carte blanche authority to stop any individual, citizen and non-citizen alike, they suspect might be doing something illegal.

As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it will only be a matter of time before those brainwashed into believing that they have nothing to worry about learn the hard way that in a police state, it doesn’t matter who you are or how righteous you claim to be, because eventually, you will be lumped in with everyone else and everything you do will be “wrong” and suspect.

Martin Niemöller learned that particular lesson the hard way.

A German military officer turned theologian, Niemöller was an early supporter of Hitler’s rise to power. It was only when Hitler threatened to attack the churches that Niemöller openly opposed the regime. For his efforts, Niemöller was arrested, charged with activities against the government, fined, detained, and eventually interned in the Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps from 1938 to 1945.

As Niemöller reportedly replied when asked by his cellmate why he ever supported the Nazi party:

“I find myself wondering about that too. I wonder about it as much as I regret it. Still, it is true that Hitler betrayed me… Hitler promised me on his word of honor, to protect the Church, and not to issue any anti-Church laws. He also agreed not to allow pogroms against the Jews… Hitler’s assurance satisfied me at the time…I am paying for that mistake now; and not me alone, but thousands of other persons like me.”

Source: https://tinyurl.com/mcta3fj3

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.