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.
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.
Some years chip away at freedom. Others tear the mask off.
2025 was the year the government stopped pretending it was constrained by the Constitution—when executive power expanded openly and unapologetically, surveillance became ambient, dissent became dangerous, and the machinery of militarized government embedded itself into daily life.
Under Trump 2.0, the erosion of civil liberties gave way to something more brazen: the dismantling of constitutional government itself.
What made 2025 different was not any single abuse of power, but the relentless accumulation of them. The losses mounted week by week, crisis by crisis, executive order by executive order, until exhaustion itself became a political condition.
Outrage no longer led to accountability; it simply rolled into the next emergency.
What follows is not a list of grievances or a catalogue of partisan disputes. It is a record of the year freedom lost its guardrails—and of a nation torn apart from within by the very individuals and institutions entrusted with preventing such tyranny.
Donald J. Trump entered his second term promising revenge, retribution, and sweeping transformation. In that regard, he has been utterly successful.
Where he has failed—spectacularly—is in honoring his oath of office to protect and defend the Constitution. He has failed to represent all of the people, opting instead to serve only those interests that inflate his ego and advance his personal and financial ambitions. He has failed to unite the country behind any shared civic vision, choosing instead to deepen divisions through rhetoric and policies that inflame hatred, entrench discrimination, and normalize cruelty. Racism was emboldened, bigotry encouraged, misogyny amplified, and corruption reframed as governance. Authoritarian instincts were no longer masked; they were embraced.
From the outset, Trump treated the Constitution not as a governing framework but as an obstacle—something to be maneuvered around, ignored, or rewritten by executive fiat. Indeed, he signed more executive orders in his first month than any other president had signed in their first 100 days.
The warning signs appeared immediately.
Within days of his inauguration, the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights disappeared from the White House website. While the administration later insisted the documents would be restored, the timing and symbolism were impossible to ignore—especially as executive orders poured out at a pace designed to bypass the very rule of law those documents exist to preserve.
Almost immediately thereafter, Trump declared two national states of emergency, announced his intention to disregard the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship, established new federal agencies without congressional authorization, and pushed for an expansion of the death penalty.
Constitutional boundaries were not merely tested; they were treated as optional.
At the same time, the presidential pardon—intended as a tool of mercy—was transformed into a currency of loyalty. Political allies and insiders were shielded from accountability, signaling that allegiance to the president now mattered more than fidelity to the law.
Economic governance followed the same pattern. Trump unilaterally launched tariff wars against longstanding trade partners, seizing Congress’s power of the purse and throwing already fragile markets into turmoil.
Constitutional process was no longer a prerequisite for national policy; presidential will was sufficient.
Immigration enforcement soon revealed just how far the rule of law had eroded. Despite campaign promises to target violent offenders, Immigration and Customs Enforcement expanded dragnet-style raids that swept up undocumented immigrants with no criminal history. In a calculated effort to evade judicial review and human rights obligations, detainees were secretly flown out of the country to foreign prisons beyond the reach of U.S. courts. Kilmar Garcia, a Maryland man with deep family and community ties, became the public face of the government’s approach to immigration that treated due process as expendable and exile as administrative convenience.
As public opposition mounted, the government’s response was not restraint but force. The National Guard was deployed first to Washington, D.C., and then increasingly to states across the country, under the pretext of addressing crime and unrest. Civil liberties organizations warned that the line between civilian law enforcement and military occupation was rapidly disappearing.
Abroad, constitutional limits collapsed just as readily.
The United States, favoring Israel, carried out preemptive military strikes against Iranian nuclear sites without congressional authorization. Drone strikes escalated in Yemen. Civilian boats were targeted under the banner of counterterrorism and drug interdiction. Trump openly threatened land invasions of Venezuela.
The Founders’ fear of a standing army turned inward—and war powers exercised without consent—was no longer theoretical. It had become standard operating procedure.
Domestic tragedy did nothing to slow this consolidation of power. Crisis after crisis was folded into an ever-expanding rationale for centralized control, rather than prompting accountability, restraint, or reflection.
By midyear, even the machinery of government itself was being dismantled. Under the banner of “efficiency,” the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) began shuttering agencies and hacking away at public services. In practice, the initiative cost taxpayers more than it saved, hollowed out institutional expertise, and left Americans with fewer protections and fewer remedies.
The government became less capable of serving the public—and more capable of policing it.
At the same time, the surveillance state reached a new level of sophistication and reach. Government agencies consolidated financial records, biometric identifiers, communications metadata, travel histories, and online behavior into centralized intelligence systems, often facilitated by private contractors such as Palantir. Artificial intelligence tools generated risk scores and predictive profiles, flagging individuals not for crimes committed, but for behaviors, associations, and speech deemed suspicious.
The presumption of innocence gave way to the logic of pre-crime.
Courts increasingly refused to intervene. Again and again, constitutional challenges were dismissed on procedural grounds, with judges ruling that Americans lacked “standing” to challenge secret surveillance systems precisely because the government refused to disclose how those systems worked. Rights that cannot be challenged are rights in name only.
What became unmistakably clear in 2025 was that presidential misconduct is no longer treated as an aberration, but as an occupational hazard the system has learned to tolerate. Once in office, presidents are functionally insulated from meaningful accountability—shielded by partisan loyalty, procedural delay, and judicial deference.
The message could not be clearer: the higher the office, the lower the likelihood of consequences. This is not a failure of any single investigation or prosecutor. It is a structural failure that has trained executive power to act with impunity, confident that the law will bend, stall, or look away.
Due process eroded accordingly.
Habeas corpus—the oldest safeguard of liberty—lost meaning as Americans were detained first and forced to justify their innocence later. Political speech itself was increasingly treated as a public-safety risk.
Incarceration, meanwhile, became national infrastructure. The administration advanced a $170 billion expansion of the prison system, including new megafacilities such as “Alligator Alcatraz.” Predictive policing systems fed people into the system at the front end, while bureaucratic cruelty defined life inside it.
Justice became mechanical, impersonal, and deliberately unforgiving.
Federalism collapsed in parallel. Local police forces were federalized in practice if not in name. National Guard units were commandeered. Federal enforcement authority expanded into states and cities once shielded from centralized power. The balance between local self-governance and federal authority—one of the Constitution’s most important safeguards—was steadily erased.
Oversight mechanisms fared no better. Inspectors General were sidelined. Congressional subpoenas were ignored. Whistleblowers were punished rather than protected. Transparency collapsed as Freedom of Information Act requests were delayed, denied, or buried. Routine documents were classified. Internal communications vanished.
A government that hides everything cannot be trusted with anything.
Much of this power was exercised indirectly. Core government functions—surveillance, incarceration, border enforcement, data analysis—were outsourced to private corporations immune from constitutional constraints. This corporate shadow state allowed the government to violate rights by proxy, then disclaim responsibility by insisting the Constitution did not apply.
By year’s end, even the machinery of democracy itself showed visible strain. Extreme gerrymandering, voter-roll purges, selective enforcement of election laws, and the targeting of political opponents weakened the people’s ability to choose their representatives.
The Constitution guarantees every state a republican form of government. In 2025, that promise rang hollow.
None of this happened overnight. That is the point.
The damage was cumulative, calculated, and exhausting by design. The goal was not merely to expand power, but as I make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, to normalize its abuse, to wear the public down until resistance felt futile.
2025 showed us what unchecked power looks like when it no longer feels the need to pretend.
The question for 2026 is not whether this trajectory will continue, but whether the American people will reassert the constitutional limits that make freedom possible—before those limits disappear entirely.
WASHINGTON, DC — In a ruling that leaves thousands of military servicemembers and their families without meaningful recourse when the government’s negligence causes harm, the U.S. Supreme Court has declined to reconsider a 1950 judicial doctrine that prevents military personnel from suing the federal government for non-combat injuries deemed “incident to service,” even when a civilian in the same situation could bring a claim.
For decades, the Feres doctrine has drawn criticism across the ideological spectrum for its expansive and often devastating consequences. Courts have interpreted “incident to service” so broadly that it now bars claims arising from medical malpractice, car accidents, and even sexual assault by another servicemember—harms far removed from the battlefield. The Rutherford Institute and the Constitutional Accountability Center had filed an amicus brief in Beck v. United States, urging the Court to overturn Feres because it contradicts the text and purpose of the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA) and denies military families the same legal protections afforded to civilians.
“No American should be denied the right to hold the government accountable for negligence and harm merely because they wear a military uniform,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “The Constitution does not permit a two-tiered system of justice—one for civilians and a lesser one for those who serve—and neither should we.”
Staff Sergeant Cameron Beck was living and working at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, serving on active duty in the Wing Cybersecurity Office. One afternoon, he drove home for lunch with his wife and seven-year-old son. As he traveled along a Base road, a civilian federal employee—driving a government-owned van while distracted by her cell phone—struck and killed him. She later pleaded guilty to operating her vehicle in a careless and imprudent manner and admitted the crash was “100 percent” her fault.
Beck’s widow and son filed a wrongful-death lawsuit under the FTCA, the law that allows individuals to sue the federal government for negligence of its employees. But because Beck happened to be on Base, on active duty, and subject to recall—even though he was riding home during off-duty hours and was not engaged in a military activity—the lower courts dismissed the case under the Feres doctrine. Therefore, the government could not be held liable, and the family was left with no meaningful path to justice.
While the family received some limited benefits from the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Defense, Justice Thomas (who dissented from the Court’s decision in this case) has pointed out that these benefits often amount to only a fraction of what a civilian family could obtain in court. Yet, Feres bars lawsuits by servicemembers when a civilian would be allowed to sue based on the same acts by the same federal employee. The amicus brief in Beckwarned that the Feres doctrine has drifted so far from its original purpose that it now bars even the most straightforward negligence claims—such as the careless operation of a government vehicle by a civilian employee that results in the death of a servicemember not engaged in any military activity.
Miriam Becker-Cohen, Brianne J. Gorod, Elizabeth B. Wydra, and Nargis Aslami with the Constitutional Accountability Center advanced the arguments in the Beck amicus brief.
The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties organization, defends individuals whose constitutional rights have been threatened or violated and educates the public on a wide spectrum of issues affecting their freedoms.
Every military servicemember’s oath is a pledge to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
It is not an oath to a politician. It is not an oath to a party. And it is not an oath to the police state.
Yet what happens when those same men and women are being told—by their own government—that obedience to power and loyalty to a political leader come before allegiance to the Constitution they swore to uphold?
That question isn’t hypothetical.
It is the moral line now being tested in real time, and it goes to the heart of what kind of country we are: do we live in a constitutional republic governed by the rule of law, or in a militarized police state where “legality” is whatever the person with the most power and the biggest army say it is?
The answer becomes painfully clear when you look at what our troops are being ordered to do—and what “we the people” are tacitly allowing them to be ordered to do—in the so-called name of national security.
Members of the military are now being deployed domestically to police their fellow American citizens in ways that trample the spirit, if not the letter, of the Posse Comitatus Act.
It’s legally dubious enough that the military is being used to enforce immigration crackdowns and police protests in American cities. But now they’re being tasked with killing civilians far from any declared battlefield in the absence of an imminent threat—all while being told that questioning the legality of those missions is itself a form of disloyalty.
So, which is it: obedience to the Constitution or the Commander-in-Chief?
According to multiple accounts, after an initial “lethal, kinetic” strike disabled the vessel and killed nine men on board, a second strike was carried out to kill two survivors clinging to the wreckage—an alleged “double tap strike” that legal experts warn could constitute murder or a war crime if the survivors no longer posed a threat.
In all, the boat was reportedly hit four times: twice to kill the eleven occupants on board and twice more to sink the boat.
Even the Pentagon’s manual on the law of war says combatants who are “wounded, sick, or shipwrecked” no longer pose a threat and should not be attacked.
Some Republicans who have, until now, turned a blind eye to the Trump administration’s most egregious offenses against the Constitution appear reluctant to let this one slide.
Not surprisingly, the Trump administration has done an about-face.
Hegseth—who bragged about watching the September 2 strike live—now claims he wasn’t in the room when the second strike happened.
Suddenly, the White House—which had been gleefully chest-thumping over its power to kill extrajudicially—is signaling its willingness to scapegoat subordinates in the chain of command.
Clearly, it’s a lesson learned too late: when you’re dealing with power-hungry authoritarians, loyalty is no guarantee of protection. It’s always the men and women who carry out the unlawful orders—not the ones who give them—who end up paying the price.
Here’s the problem, though. While the media fixates on who will bear the blame for ordering the double-tap strike, the government war machine is moving forward, full steam ahead.
The Sept. 2 boat strike was part of a broader Trump administration campaign of maritime attacks that has already killed at least 80 people at sea, all without a formal declaration of war or due process—evidence of who they were or what they had done—to warrant an extrajudicial execution.
This is yet another of Trump’s everywhere, endless wars—this time at sea—sold as toughness on “narco-terrorists” at a moment when his poll numbers are slipping, economic promises have failed to manifest, and new Epstein-related revelations continue to surface.
When presidents manufacture new fronts in a forever war whenever they need a distraction, we should all beware.
The Trump administration has tried to frame this preemptive maritime war on suspected “narco-terrorists” as a “non-international armed conflict” with designated terrorist organizations.
Yet what it amounts to is an undeclared war, launched in international waters, without just cause and without congressional authorization.
The legal landscape is not murky—it is clear.
Most of the public debate has revolved around those technical legalities—what kind of conflict this is, which statutes apply, which court might have jurisdiction—yet what is really at stake is whether we are training a generation of American troops to believe that loyalty to a leader can excuse disobedience to, or even override, the Constitution.
Three bodies of law converge here: the Constitution’s allocation of war powers, the international law of armed conflict, and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
First, there has been no declaration of war by Congress. Under the Constitution, only Congress can declare war. The president cannot start wars based solely on his own authority.
Second, the law of armed conflict and the law of the sea forbid killing shipwrecked survivors who pose no immediate threat.
A command to “kill everybody” is precisely the kind of order these guardrails were written to forbid.
The rationale that “I was just following orders” is not a defense to war crimes. That is the core lesson of the Nuremberg Trials and the modern law of armed conflict.
Of course, the police state wants mindless automatons who obey unquestioningly.
Arendt, a Holocaust survivor, denounced Eichmann, a senior officer who organized Hitler’s death camps, for being a bureaucrat who unquestioningly carried out orders that were immoral, inhumane and evil. This, Arendt concluded, was the banality of evil, the ability to engage in wrongdoing or turn a blind eye to it, without taking any responsibility for your actions or inactions.
Coincidentally, the same year that Arendt’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil was published, Martin Luther King Jr. penned his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” in which he points out “that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal’ and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was ‘illegal.’ It was ‘illegal’ to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.”
In other words, there comes a time when law and order are in direct opposition to justice.
If the government can redefine “self-defense” to justify killing incapacitated survivors on a sinking boat, then it can justify killing anyone—at home or abroad, in uniform or out of it.
No matter how the White House spins it, however, these are crimes and those involved—from Hegseth on down—could find themselves in legal jeopardy and should be held accountable.
The pressure on the military is mounting.
The Orders Project, a nonpartisan initiative that helps connect servicemembers with outside legal counsel, reports a spike in calls from military personnel concerned that they could be asked to carry out an illegal order or pressured to take part in missions that violate their training in the laws of war.
Given Hegseth’s much-publicized approach to waging war without constraints—he has openly derided the military’s Judge Advocate General corps and championed a more “unshackled” approach to lethal force—these concerns are reasonable.
For re-stating what every recruit is taught in basic training, these lawmakers have been accused by President Trump of “sedition” and branded as “traitors” who should be arrested and punished by death. The FBI has reportedly opened an investigation. Hegseth has even threatened to recall one of the lawmakers—Senator Mark Kelly, a retired Navy captain—to active duty in order to court-martial him for his remarks.
The message from the top could not be clearer: allegiance to the Constitution is a crime.
Every person like myself who has served in uniform has experienced the tension between following orders and honoring that oath. Discipline requires obedience, but a constitutional republic requires lawful obedience.
That is why the oath matters.
It is not an oath to a man, a party, or a policy agenda. It is an oath to a charter of law: the Constitution.
That principle is not antiquated. It is the foundation of American civil-military relations. Remove it, and what remains is not a republic but a personality cult with weapons.
The danger becomes even clearer when you examine the rhetoric now shaping national policy.
According to U.S. prosecutors, Hernández—quoted as saying he wanted to “shove the drugs right up the noses of the gringos by flooding the United States with cocaine”—took bribes from drug traffickers and had the country’s armed forces protect a cocaine laboratory and shipments to the U.S.
Yet conscripting the military to do the dirty work of the police state—and then throwing them under the bus for doing so—takes us into even darker territory.
The U.S. government’s weaponization of the armed forces for political power is a betrayal of the Constitution, but it is also a betrayal of the very men and women who swore to give their lives for it.
And once a government shows a willingness to break faith with its defenders, it will break faith with anyone.
A government that can discard its military service members can discard its whistleblowers and truth-tellers who expose corruption.
A government that can discard its military service members can discard its journalists, judges, and watchdogs in the press and the courts who insist on transparency and limits to power.
A government that can discard its military service members can discard its political opponents and dissidents, its religious and racial minorities, its immigrants and asylum seekers, its small business owners and workers who organize, its parents and community members who speak up locally, and any citizen who dares to say “no” when the state demands “yes.”
This betrayal of those who swore an oath to the Constitution is not an accident—it is a warning.
Today is Giving Tuesday—a day when people across the country choose to support the causes that matter most. And this year, the stakes for freedom could not be higher.
Everywhere we turn, the government is expanding its power:
· Surveillance programs are monitoring ordinary Americans.
· Executive orders are being used to bypass constitutional limits.
· Police powers are growing more militarized and unchecked.
· Dissenters are being censored, silenced, and punished.
· The Bill of Rights is treated as optional—especially when inconvenient.
The Constitution cannot defend itself—and defending it has nothing to do with politics.
At a time where every issue is twisted into a partisan wedge, The Rutherford Institute remains committed to something far more enduring: the rule of law, the Bill of Rights, and the fundamental liberties that belong to all Americans—no matter who holds power.
We don’t play politics. We don’t take sides. We stand on the side of the Constitution.
The Constitution needs people who are willing to stand up. People who refuse to surrender their freedoms quietly. People who say “no” to the steady erosion of their rights.
The Constitution draws a clear line between the rule of law and the rule of power. The Rutherford Institute is working to hold that line.
· Hold officials accountable for violating the rule of law
· Speak truth to power without fear or favor
Our work has never been more critical. In recent months, The Rutherford Institute has:
· Fought warrantless digital surveillance in cases challenging geofence searches and mass data sweeps.
· Defended students, journalists, and activists targeted for their protected speech.
· Challenged the use of excessive police force and militarized tactics in situations where the Fourth Amendment was ignored.
· Opposed executive actions that bypass constitutional safeguards and expand unchecked government power.
Every one of these battles depends on supporters who believe the Constitution still matters.
Thanks to a $250,000 Matching Gift Challenge Grant, Giving Tuesday contributions will go twice as far in helping The Rutherford Institute hold the constitutional line against government overreach.
“It’s not personal, Sonny. It’s strictly business.”—Michael Corleone, The Godfather
Pay-to-play schemes. Protection rackets. Extortion. Corruption. Self-enrichment. Graft. Grift. Brutality. Roaming bands of thugs smashing car windows and terrorizing communities. Immunity for criminal behavior coupled with prosecutions of whistleblowers.
This is how a crime syndicate operates—not a constitutional republic.
What we are witnessing today is the steady transformation of the federal government—especially the executive branch—into a criminalized system of power in which justice is weaponized, law is selectively enforced, and crime becomes a form of political currency.
While the American police state has long marched in lockstep with the old truism that power corrupts—and absolute power corrupts absolutely—the Trump administration has ceased even the pretense of being bound by the Constitution.
Rather than abiding by the rule of law, this administration operates as if there are two separate legal systems: one for themselves and their cronies, and one for everyone else.
The corruption is off the charts, the conflicts of interest are in your face, and the brazenness is staggering.
Journalist David D. Kirkpatrick calculates that Donald Trump and his immediate family have made more than $3.4 billion from his time in the White House, including more than $2.3 billion from various cryptocurrency ventures alone.
In May 2025, Trump was accused of selling access to accumulate personal wealth when he hosted a private event for 220 crypto investors who had bought into his meme coin. News reports estimate that buyers spent about $148 million in total on the coin and associated perks, with some spending $1.8 million to attend.
The average American can’t get any kind of access to our elected representatives, but the wealthy can buy their way through the door.
Measured against this reality, Thomas Jefferson’s warning to bind government down “by the chains of the Constitution” sounds almost quaint.
How do you use the Constitution to guard against government misconduct when the government has effectively rendered the Constitution null and void?
It has become increasingly difficult to pretend that we are still dealing with a functioning republic.
What we have instead is a government that behaves like a criminal enterprise: rewarding loyalty, punishing dissent, monetizing public service, and enriching itself through favors, loopholes, and outright graft.
Consider the pay-to-play culture that now permeates the highest levels of power.
The Foreign Gifts and Decoration Act bars the president and federal officials from accepting gifts worth more than $480 from foreign governments (unless they’re accepted on behalf of the United States—meaning they would then belong to the American people—or purchased by the official). Yet congressional investigators have already documented more than a hundred foreign gifts to Trump and his family that went unreported for months in violation of disclosure rules.
The publicly-reported gifts being showered upon President Trump by foreign governments and politically connected foreign corporations include: a gold crown, a Rolex desk clock and a one-kilogram personalized gold bar worth $130,000, and a $400 million luxury Boeing 747.
These are not tokens of diplomacy; they are currency—investments in influence, access, and favorable policy.
As Richard Painter, a former chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, explains, “It’s unconstitutional in the United States for the president or anyone else in a position of power to receive anything of value from a foreign government. That is unconstitutional. But if the gift is from a foreign corporation or a private interest, it’s not technically prohibited under the emoluments clause of the Constitution. But it’s still a very, very dangerous precedent to set that foreign interests can give gifts to the president and then get a concession on tariffs or anything else.”
In many cases, these gifts went unreported to the State Department, only coming to light through House investigations and watchdog reports—concealed from the public and from Congress until after the fact.
That secrecy was not accidental. It was strategic.
Federal contracts, regulatory decisions, and diplomatic overtures increasingly appear correlated with the interests of those giving the gifts. A growing number of domestic and foreign business interests appear to be receiving preferential treatment from agencies whose regulatory decisions align suspiciously with Trump’s personal business deals advancing behind the scenes.
And then there are more obvious pay-to-play schemes like the White House Ballroom, a projected 90,000-square-foot monstrosity funded by tech and defense giants such as Apple, Google, Palantir and Lockheed Martin—corporate donors who now help underwrite the president’s vanity project even as their regulatory and contracting interests sit squarely in his hands.
This quid pro quo governance—private profit in exchange for public policy—does not resemble republican self-government. It resembles a protection racket, where the powerful exchange favors not for the public good but for personal gain—and access and immunity are available for purchase by those willing to pay.
Meanwhile, ordinary Americans are told that the system is blind, impartial, and committed to the “rule of law.”
Nothing could be further from the truth.
According to a bombshell investigation by the New York Times, career attorneys inside the Department of Justice spent the first ten months of Trump’s second term documenting—often in real time—how the justice system was being hijacked to serve political priorities rather than legal ones.
Federal lawyers told the Times that they were instructed to drop cases for political reasons, to hunt for evidence to justify flimsy investigations, and to defend executive actions they believed had no legal basis or were plainly unlawful. They also detailed the work they were told to abandon—cases involving terrorism plots, corruption, and white-collar fraud—because those investigations did not serve the administration’s political priorities.
As Dena Robinson, a former Justice Department lawyer for the Civil Rights Division, remarked on Pam Bondi’s transformation of the department into a political tool, “One thing that stuck out to me was her insistence that we served at the pleasure of the president and that we were enforcing the president’s priorities. We swore an oath to uphold the Constitution.”
Prosecution for enemies, immunity for allies, and indifference toward actual crime: this is the Trump administration’s modus operandi.
In case after case—from prosecutions tied to the politically-charged James Comey indictment, to challenges over Trump’s deployment of the National Guard, to lawsuits alleging the government is attempting to circumvent basic due process protections in immigration cases by shipping people to offshore detention facilities in third countries, often in partnership with private prison contractors, where legal safeguards are far weaker—courts have scolded federal lawyers for withholding records, mischaracterizing facts, or offering assertions that crumble under scrutiny.
When the government lies to the courts, it is not just lying to a judge but to the American people. We are the ultimate arbiters of justice. It is our rights that ultimately hang in the balance.
Unfortunately, the rot doesn’t stop there.
The presidential pardon—intended to be a mechanism for mercy—has become a political reward system.
The numbers speak volumes.
During Trump’s first term, he issued 238 pardons and commutations; less than a year into his second term, he has issued nearly 2,000 pardons, costing victims and taxpayers more than $1.3 billion.
According to The Marshall Project, among those pardoned by Trump, “One faced a four-year prison sentence in a $675 million fraud case for marketing an electric truck that wasn’t drivable. Another tried to overthrow the government. A tax cheat avoided prison and $4.4 million in restitution after his mom donated $1 million to the president.” Another pardon recipient was facing “charges of child pornography and the sexual assault of a preadolescent girl.”
Whether Trump pardons Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted of conspiring with Jeffrey Epstein to sex traffic teenaged girls, remains to be seen. However, since Trump has taken office, Maxwell has enjoyed dramatic improvements in her prison life: a transfer to a minimum-security federal prison, custom meals delivered to her cell, snacks and refreshments provided during private meetings with family and friends—even special access to a puppy and unlimited toilet paper.
As ProPublicadetails, Trump’s pardons overwhelmingly benefit political loyalists, donors, grifters, extremists, and individuals either convicted of crimes in pursuit of Trump’s ambitions or who might help to advance those ambitions in the future—or both.
These are not miscarriages of justice being corrected; they are protection payments, signals to future operatives: do what we need you to do, and we will take care of you.
The message is unmistakable: Commit crimes that benefit those in power, and those in power will absolve you.
The double standard is staggering.
Critics, journalists, students, and whistleblowers face investigations, surveillance, and in some cases arrest for constitutionally protected activities—while those charged with committing actual crimes in support of the administration are shielded, absolved, or financially rewarded.
That is not the rule of law. That is the rule of power.
In a constitutional government, the pardon power is meant to temper justice with mercy.
In an unrestrained government, the pardon power becomes a mechanism for shielding insiders, silencing potential witnesses, rewarding political operatives, and signaling to future enforcers that their loyalty will be repaid.
Once justice is weaponized—once the government becomes both the ultimate lawmaker and the ultimate lawbreaker—once the president decides that his own power, not the Constitution, is the highest authority—the distinction between governance and criminality collapses.
A government that can ignore transparency laws will hide its misconduct.
A government that can lie to the courts will lie to its people.
A government that can criminalize political opposition can criminalize anyone.
A government that can pardon loyal criminals can persecute those who expose them.
This is not hypothetical. It is happening now.
Look at the surveillance state: millions of Americans monitored through AI-powered tools, data-mined by private intelligence contractors, and flagged by opaque algorithms—while the government shields its own communications, decisions, and financial entanglements behind secrecy laws and executive privilege.
Look at policing: violent, militarized crackdowns on immigrants, journalists, and protesters—even as the administration dismisses, excuses, or encourages lawlessness among vigilantes, paramilitary groups, and politically aligned street militias.
Look at foreign policy: threats to bomb Venezuela—transparent attempts to distract from falling polling numbers and the widening Epstein scandal—being framed as “national security” rather than what they are: geopolitical aggression with no constitutional or moral grounding. This isn’t defensive war; it is a land grab masquerading as patriotism, no different in principle from Putin’s overreach in Ukraine or Israel’s expansionist aims in Gaza, except that the United States has even less pretense of legitimate territorial claim.
Look at governance: executive orders increasingly treated as substitutes for legislation, bypassing Congress, the courts, and constitutional checks. The president no longer requests authority; he assumes it.
Look at transparency: the administration’s refusal to release the October jobs numbers—an unprecedented hiding of core economic data—under the pretext that the government shutdown made the figures unusable. Former Labor Department officials warn that the missing report comes just as private data are flashing recession-level job losses. When a government refuses to share basic economic indicators with the public, it is no longer governing. It is manipulating.
This is not constitutionalism. This is consolidation—an executive branch absorbing the functions of lawmaking, law enforcement, and legal interpretation into a single, unaccountable center of power.
This is not “law and order.” This is the government redefining order in its own image and using law to enforce its will.
The Founders warned us about this.
Yet here we are, watching a government that no longer even pretends to fear the Constitution. A government that openly cultivates a culture of impunity, where criminality is not a hindrance to power but an asset—evidence of loyalty, aggression, and willingness to “do what needs to be done.”
A government like this does not serve the people—it rules them. It does not protect rights—it manages them. It does not uphold law—it deploys law as a weapon.
It is increasingly difficult to distinguish between the actions of the American government and those of a cartel—one that wears suits instead of masks, but engages in the same core behaviors: loyalty above legality, retaliation against critics, protection for insiders, secrecy, intimidation, and the monetization of public office.
This is how nations fall—not through foreign invasion but through internal corruption.
When the government becomes the greatest violator of rights, the people lose faith in justice.
When the government becomes the greatest source of disinformation, the people lose faith in truth.
When the government becomes the greatest beneficiary of criminality, the people lose faith in democracy itself.
Democracy becomes theater. Elections become rituals. Rights become privileges granted or revoked at the discretion of those in power.
The Constitution is not a self-enforcing document. It has no army, no treasury, no enforcement bureau of its own. It binds only those who agree to be bound by its edicts. When officials refuse to be bound, the Constitution becomes a relic—a symbol invoked rhetorically but ignored in practice.
The only way out is the way the Founders intended: by rebinding government down with the chains of the Constitution. But those chains must be enforced by “We the People.” They must be tightened around those who wield power.
Without constitutional chains, the president becomes an imperial dictator.
Without oversight, the justice system becomes a political weapon.
Without accountability, government becomes a self-serving, money-laundering enterprise masquerading as legitimate authority.
If America is to remain a free nation, those chains must be tightened—not loosened, ignored, or replaced with partisan loyalty.
The rule of law must apply to the powerful, not just the powerless.
The justice system must serve the public, not the president.
“Kleptocracy: a society whose leaders make themselves rich and powerful by stealing from the rest of the people.”—Cambridge Dictionary
America has been backsliding into kleptocratic territory for years now, but this may finally be it.
A kleptocracy is literally “rule by thieves.”
It is a form of government in which a network of ruling elites “steal public funds for their own private gain using public institutions.” As analyst Thomas Mayne explains, it’s “a system based on virtually unlimited grand corruption coupled with, in the words of American academic Andrew Wedeman, ‘near-total impunity for those authorized to loot by the thief-in-chief’—namely the head of state.”
One could fairly say that a kleptocracy was always going to be the end result of the oligarchy that was America.
The signs were visible long before now: power and wealth have been trading places for decades.
So now we find ourselves in this present moment where billionaires are running the show.
The optics are undeniable: while the country suffers through a government shutdown, with welfare programs shuttered and inflation, healthcare and basic cost-of-living expenses skyrocketing, the elite are living it up.
In the White House, President Trump is redecorating, transforming what had been known as “the people’s house” into a palace fit for an American king, complete with marbled bathrooms and a sprawling, gold-fitted ballroom. The rest of the administration, taking its cue from their leader, are jetting around at taxpayer expense for lavish vacations, sporting events—and decadent parties at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida retreat.
The responses to criticisms either deflect to how other administrations wasted money or, in the case of the ballroom, insist the project is privately funded—and therefore beyond reproach because taxpayers aren’t paying for it.
But money is never truly “private” once it purchases influence over public office. The moment a government accepts such funding, it becomes indebted to the funders rather than accountable to the people.
Case in point: the list of donors to Trump’s White House ballroom.
This is how you bring about a kleptocracy—one crooked buy-in at a time.
The constitutional question that follows is unavoidable: if presidents and agencies can do whatever they please simply because someone else foots the bill, what remains of constitutional, representative government?
Follow that rationale to its end and you find yourself in dangerous territory.
If a president can privately fund a ballroom, could he privately fund a battalion? If a cabinet agency can accept donations to expand its reach, could it sell policy favors to the highest bidder?
If every public act can be recast as a private transaction, then the public no longer governs—it merely observes.
That is why the defense of demolishing and reconstructing the White House ballroom—an undertaking never authorized by Congress—on the grounds that no public funds will be used does not pass constitutional muster.
This safeguard was designed not as a bureaucratic formality but as the chief restraint on executive abuse—the people’s means of holding the presidency to account.
Once presidents can raise private money to do what the people’s representatives refuse to fund, that weapon is disarmed.
What follows is the slow unraveling of constitutional restraint, replaced by the notion that money—not law—sets the limits of power. The same mechanism that once protected the people from tyranny now becomes the means of financing it.
What was meant as a safeguard becomes a loophole—a backdoor to unchecked power.
The logic is as seductive as it is corrupting: if private dollars cover the cost, the Constitution doesn’t apply.
By that reasoning, a president could wage war, build prisons, or launch surveillance programs—all without congressional authorization—so long as a billionaire or corporate sponsor signs the check.
That’s not democracy. It’s privatized despotism.
This is how republics fall: not only through coups and crises, but through the quiet substitution of private interests for public authority.
What begins as a gift ends as a purchase. What begins as a renovation ends as a revolution in how power operates.
We have already seen this creeping privatization at every level of government: private contractors running prisons and wars, corporate donors dictating policy priorities, and surveillance and censorship outsourced to tech firms.
Now the presidency itself is for sale—brick by brick, ballroom by ballroom.
The Founders feared monarchs; they never imagined CEOs with armies or presidents who could raise war chests independent of Congress. Yet that is exactly where we are headed: toward a government financed by private power and answerable only to it.
When public power can be bought, sold, or sponsored, the Constitution becomes nothing more than a branding tool—and when a nation mistakes private funding for public legitimacy, it ceases to be a republic at all.
The power of the purse was meant to be the people’s last line of defense against tyranny.
In the architecture of the Constitution, Congress alone was entrusted with the ability to raise and spend money—not because the Founders trusted legislators more than presidents, but because they feared concentrated power. They understood that whoever controls the purse ultimately controls the government itself.
Without that restraint, the president could accumulate funds, build armies, and buy loyalty at will, consolidating power beyond constitutional limits—what Madison called “the very definition of tyranny.”
When presidents or agencies can act outside congressional appropriations by appealing to private donors, super PACs, or corporate “partners,” they dissolve the constitutional boundary between public office and private gain.
Decisions that once required debate and oversight now happen behind closed doors, in boardrooms and donor suites. The result is a shadow government financed by privilege instead of the people.
The privatization of power isn’t theoretical—it is happening in plain sight.
This is what a pay-to-play police state looks like: private actors deputized to do the government’s bidding, free from constitutional safeguards, answerable only to the wallet that funds them.
Once the machinery of enforcement can be financed, directed, or rewarded through private channels, the rule of law gives way to the rule of money. Government ceases to function as a neutral arbiter and becomes a contractor for hire, wielding the badge, the gun, and the gavel on behalf of whoever can afford its services.
These arrangements substitute profit for principle and contract for Constitution, blurring the line between the state and its sponsors: private donors finance political events in public buildings, corporate partners shape executive policy, and billionaires underwrite the very forces—military, law enforcement, surveillance—that keep the rest of the population in check.
A police state funded by private wealth is even more dangerous than one funded by public taxes, because it answers to no electorate, no oversight committee, no constitutional restraint. Its accountability points upward—to financiers—not outward to the people it governs.
Under such a system, justice becomes transactional. Enforcement becomes selective. Rights become negotiable.
What began as the privatization of services metastasizes into the privatization of sovereignty: the executive branch no longer merely executes the law—it markets it. The idea of constitutional limits erodes the moment the state claims exemption by calling its actions “privately financed.”
And so, when a president boasts that he could raise his own army—through donors, contractors or loyalists—he is not being metaphorical. He is articulating the next logical stage of a government that has already sold itself to the highest bidders.
The Founders warned that liberty would perish when the instruments of power could be bought or sold. We are watching that prophecy unfold in real time.
In the pay-to-play police state, money doesn’t just talk—it arrests, surveils, and kills.
The fight to restore constitutional government begins where it was first betrayed: not merely with who pays, but with who decides.
If Congress no longer controls the nation’s spending—and if presidents, agencies, and corporations can bypass public consent by courting private benefactors—then the people no longer control their government.
That is not democracy; that is debt servitude to power.
The Founders knew that taxation and representation rise and fall together—and representation means more than writing a check. It means the power to set priorities, to attach conditions, to withhold funds, and to say no.
A government funded independently of its citizens will inevitably rule independently of them; it will spend without oversight, act without restraint, and enforce without accountability. That is why Madison stressed that “the power over the purse … is the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the people’s representatives against executive encroachments.”
The inverse is also true: once the president depends on private money, the people become dependent on the will of those who pay the president.
In other words, an oligarchy—and when that oligarchy turns government itself into a vehicle for enrichment, a kleptocracy.
To reclaim the republic, the people must reclaim ownership of both the purse and the plan—the money that funds the government and the mandates governing how those funds are used.
That requires drawing a hard constitutional line between public office and private enrichment; restoring congressional authority over every dollar spent in the name of the American people; and dismantling the system of shadow funding—super PACs, donor networks, corporate partnerships, and “public-private collaborations”—that now serve as pipelines for corruption disguised as efficiency. It also requires the sunlight of disclosure for any outside contribution touching government action, and strict prohibitions on off-budget schemes that treat private cash as a license to ignore the law.
Most of all, it requires remembering that citizenship is a public trust, not a private transaction.
We need more than the right to pay for our government—we need the right to say how those payments are used, and the power to refuse when they are misused or abused.
The moment we accept the notion that government may do whatever it wants so long as someone else pays for it, we have already sold the republic.
As we make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the restoration of liberty will not come from new donors, new deals, or new rulers—it will come from a renewed insistence that power in America flows only from one source: We the People.
Our forebears fought a revolution to end taxation without representation. We may yet have to fight another—this time, against representation without appropriation, where officials claim the right to govern without the duty to answer to those they are supposed to represent.
Remember, they are the servants. We the People are supposed to be the masters.
John W. Whitehead, Constitutional Attorney 