Posts Tagged ‘history’

Getting Away with Murder: Under Trump, the Buck Stops Nowhere

Posted: July 22, 2026 in Uncategorized
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“If you kill Americans, if you threaten Americans anywhere on Earth, we will hunt you down without apology and without hesitation and we will kill you.”— Secretary of War Pete Hegseth

Having burned through billions of dollars and depleted critical munitions stockpiles, the Pentagon is running out of money.

Our money.

According to the Washington Post, the Pentagon is facing an urgent budget shortfall caused largely by the Iran war, with some critical funding accounts expected to run dry within weeks. Training, maintenance and other military priorities are reportedly being squeezed as the government struggles to sustain Trump’s escalating conflict.

Once again, the government is looking to the American people for a taxpayer-funded bailout—this time to the tune of $67 billion.

Nor is the $67 billion emergency infusion the end of it.

Trump’s fiscal year 2027 budget calls for an unprecedented $1.5 trillion in national-defense spending—a staggering increase that would pour still more money into a military apparatus that cannot account honestly for the costs of its current war, maintain its existing priorities, or keep from returning to taxpayers for another bailout.

The problem is not simply how much the war machine consumes. It is how little accountability accompanies that spending.

The government can launch a war, exhaust military resources, conceal its full costs, and return to Congress for billions more without anyone responsible being required to admit error, change course, or answer for the lives lost.

That is becoming a familiar pattern under Donald Trump.

He makes the decisions—others absorb the consequences.

He launches the war—the troops make the sacrifices, and taxpayers inherit the bill.

The Iran war is not merely another example of government waste, although the cost is already staggering. The war has already cost an estimated $80 to $100 billion, not counting its long-term economic impact, future veteran expenses, or the cost of repairing damaged military bases. Analysts estimate that the broader toll on American households could eventually reach as much as $1,000 per household.

Yet the true cost cannot be measured in dollars alone.

American service members are dying in a war Trump started without meaningful congressional authorization, without a credible plan for ending it, and without an honest accounting of what it will cost.

The Pentagon is draining resources from training, maintenance and weapons programs to keep the conflict going. Congress is being asked to supply billions more. And the American people—already struggling under the weight of debt, inflation and economic uncertainty—are expected to pay without question.

This is government without accountability.

It is also the Trump business model applied to government: take the risks, claim the credit, transfer the losses and leave someone else to clean up the wreckage.

Trump has spent a lifetime marketing himself as a brilliant businessman, yet his record is littered with bankruptcies, defaults, failed ventures and losses shifted onto others.

In private business, a failed venture can be abandoned and its consequences transferred.

A president’s failures are not so easily contained, yet Trump continues to govern as though America were merely another disposable business venture.

And when Trump’s own decisions cost American lives, deplete military stockpiles and burn through billions of taxpayer dollars, the bill never finds its way to him.

It finds its way to us.

Yet the contrast between those who make these decisions and those forced to live with them could hardly be more stark.

While American service members are being returned home in flag-draped coffins, Trump moves from golf courses to galas to grand spectacles.

While the Pentagon scrambles to find the money and munitions, Trump lavishes attention on the trappings of power, from gilded alterations to the people’s house to extravagant ceremonial projects.

While ordinary Americans struggle with inflation, instability and the cascading costs of his policies, Trump presides over the pageantry of the presidency seemingly untouched by the consequences.

And while the American people are told to sacrifice, Trump’s family continues converting access to presidential power into extraordinary private wealth.

Trump reported more than $1.4 billion in income from his family’s cryptocurrency ventures in 2025, while Reuters calculated that the family added at least $2.3 billion to its fortune through its principal crypto businesses after Trump returned to the presidency.

The problem is not merely one of appearances.

It is that Trump remains conspicuously insulated from the human and financial consequences of his own decisions.

That insulation from consequence is matched by a swaggering display of bluster and bravado that passes for leadership within the Trump administration.

Take Pete Hegseth, the self-styled “Secretary of War,” who speaks less like a civilian entrusted with the grave responsibility of war and peace than a character delivering an action-movie threat.

“If you kill Americans, we will hunt you down,” Hegseth warned.

The Trump administration has embraced that threat as a statement of national resolve: anyone who kills an American will be hunted down and made to pay.

Unless, of course, the Americans are killed by their own government.

Unless they are service members sent to die in a preemptive war the president started without constitutional authority and cannot seem to end.

Unless they are shot by immigration agents or police officers conditioned to treat fear, resistance and the mere presence of a weapon as a license to kill.

Unless they die in government custody.

Unless they become casualties of public-health safeguards weakened by mass firings, budget cuts, political interference and administrative incompetence.

In those cases, no one is hunted down, no one in power is made to pay, and no one is held responsible.

This is the double standard that passes for justice in the American Police State.

Yet this culture of official impunity did not begin with Donald Trump.

For decades, presidents of both parties have expanded executive power, surrendered constitutional checks, protected government agents from meaningful accountability and conditioned the public to accept official violence as the unavoidable price of security.

Trump inherited that machinery.

He has also embraced its deadliest powers, accelerated its abuses and made the elimination of accountability a governing principle.

The Iran war is merely the latest—and most visible—example.

American service members are dying in a war that is not making America safer, no matter what Trump insists to the contrary.

Seventeen American service members have reportedly been killed in the war, while more than 400 have been injured. Rather than treating those deaths as evidence of the terrible costs and strategic failures of his war, Trump has used them to justify further escalation, warning that Iran will “pay many times over” for every American life lost.

This is how endless wars become unending.

Every American death becomes a reason to continue the war that caused it. Every retaliation generates another retaliation. Every escalation becomes the excuse for another escalation. Every failure is rebranded as a reason to stay the course.

The president starts the war. The military carries it out. American service members die in it. And the public is told that questioning the wisdom or legality of the conflict is tantamount to betraying the troops.

This is not a strategy for peace.

It is a self-perpetuating cycle of death, vengeance and political evasion.

Trump’s response to the mounting casualties has not been restraint, transparency or a serious accounting of how the country became trapped in another Middle Eastern war.

It has been more threats, more bombs, more chest-beating and more demands that the American people fall in line—and not even a glimmer of ownership for the mistakes that landed us here.

Meanwhile, the dead become justification for still more death.

The failures become justification for still more money.

And those who made the decisions remain insulated from the consequences.

Yet the Iran war is only one front in the government’s longstanding war on accountability.

The same culture of impunity that shields presidents from responsibility for unconstitutional wars also protects government agents from meaningful scrutiny when raids, detentions and uses of force result in injury or death.

Nowhere is that more visible than in the Trump administration’s increasingly militarized approach to immigration enforcement.

Federal immigration agents carry out raids in masks, tactical gear and unmarked vehicles. They detain people at homes, workplaces, traffic stops and routine immigration appointments. Record numbers of people are being arrested and warehoused in detention centers, many of them with no criminal history.

The Trump administration calls this law enforcement.

But law enforcement without transparency, restraint or accountability quickly becomes something far more dangerous.

In recent weeks, ICE agents have fatally shot men in Texas and Maine, prompting senators to demand body cameras, visible identification, clearer use-of-force rules and greater transparency about who is being entrusted with the power to kill.

Both men were reportedly shot in their vehicles. Neither was the intended target of the enforcement action. Neither encounter was captured on an officer’s body camera.

A temporary pause in ICE traffic stops reportedly lasted only one day before the White House intervened and ordered the operations resumed.

That is the Trump administration’s idea of accountability: pause briefly, manage the fallout, and then allow the machinery to continue operating as before.

There is no meaningful independent review.

There is no public accounting of what went wrong.

There is no assurance that deadly force will be treated as a last resort rather than an acceptable consequence of aggressive enforcement.

Instead, the government investigates itself, controls the evidence, shapes the official narrative, and moves on.

The government kills. The government investigates. The government absolves itself.

This is not unique to immigration enforcement.

The same pattern has defined policing in America for decades.

Police officers are trained to perceive threats everywhere and to treat their subjective fear as more important than the objective constitutional rights of the people they serve.

Reach for your wallet and you may be shot. Hold a cellphone and you may be shot. Fail to obey confusing or contradictory commands quickly enough and you may be shot.

Possess a firearm—even lawfully—and the government may argue that the exercise of your Second Amendment rights made you sufficiently dangerous to kill. Then the legal system steps in to prevent a jury from ever weighing what happened.

Qualified immunity, judicial deference and doctrines that elevate “officer safety” above almost every competing constitutional consideration have helped create a system in which government agents can use deadly force and avoid meaningful scrutiny afterward.

Trump did not create this system.

Police militarization, qualified immunity, aggressive federal enforcement and institutional self-protection were firmly entrenched long before he returned to office.

What Trump has done is intensify those tendencies, remove restraints, reward aggression and treat demands for accountability as attacks on law enforcement itself.

The result is a system in which the greater the government’s power, the smaller the consequences for its abuse.

The police state does not have to pull a trigger to put lives at risk.

It can also endanger the public by weakening the safeguards designed to prevent avoidable harm.

Public-health agencies, food inspectors, disease-surveillance programs, medical researchers and drug-safety personnel exist because failures in these areas can have deadly consequences.

When those protections are weakened, risks increase. When expertise is driven out, warnings are missed. When oversight disappears, preventable crises become more likely.

The Trump administration’s mass firings, funding cuts and political interference have hollowed out critical public-health and food-safety agencies.

The Food and Drug Administration reportedly lost thousands of employees in 2025 and hundreds more in 2026. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food Safety and Inspection Service and other agencies responsible for protecting the public have also undergone substantial staffing reductions. Foreign food-facility inspections have fallen to historic lows following layoffs and budget cuts, even as the American food supply becomes more global, complex and difficult to monitor. Programs that track and respond to emerging disease threats have also been scaled back.

These are not abstract bureaucratic changes.

They determine whether contaminated food and unsafe drugs are identified before people are harmed, whether emerging diseases are contained before they spread, and whether qualified experts are available before a manageable threat becomes a national crisis.

No government can eliminate every danger or prevent every death, but when an administration knowingly strips away safeguards, disregards expert warnings and replaces competence with loyalty, it cannot pretend that the resulting harm has nothing to do with its decisions.

Accountability requires recognizing that policy choices have foreseeable consequences—and asking who ordered the cuts, ignored the warnings, benefited from dismantling oversight and will answer when the public is harmed.

Yet when those consequences arrive, no one in power accepts responsibility. The victims and their families are left to absorb the consequences, while the officials who made the decisions retreat behind bureaucracy, immunity and plausible deniability.

The same machinery of official impunity operates across administrations and agencies.

What distinguishes Trump is the speed with which his administration has dismantled remaining safeguards, dismissed expertise and treated accountability as an obstacle to power.

The pattern is the same whether the harm occurs on a battlefield, during an immigration raid, in a police encounter or through the failure of an institution charged with protecting the public.

Those with power make the decisions. Those without power bear the consequences.

This is how official impunity becomes a system of government.

Presidents claim immunity. Congress surrenders its constitutional responsibilities. Military officials classify their mistakes. Federal agencies investigate themselves. Police officers invoke qualified immunity. Prosecutors protect government agents. Courts keep juries from weighing the evidence. Corporations profit from government contracts. Officials leave public service for lucrative private-sector positions with the very industries they once oversaw.

Taxpayers pay every settlement, bailout, reconstruction cost and replenishment bill.

The names and political parties change. The machinery of impunity remains.

What distinguishes Trump is not that he created this machinery but the brazenness with which he uses it. He treats oversight as obstruction, criticism as disloyalty, constitutional restraints as inconveniences, and public office as a vehicle for private power and profit.

Under Trump, the buck stops nowhere.

Every consequence is transferred to someone else.

No one in power pays a personal price. No one admits fault. No one resigns. No one is prosecuted. No one is held accountable.

Instead, the public is told to move on. The policies continue. The machinery rolls forward.

This is how temporary abuses become permanent powers.

It is how republics become empires. It is how elected public servants become rulers who answer to no one. And it is how a government learns that it can inflict enormous harm without ever being required to pay a price.

Trump and Hegseth insist that anyone who kills an American will be hunted down and made to pay.

Yet who demands accountability when the decisions that cost American lives originate in the White House?

Who answers for the service members sent to die in an unconstitutional war launched without meaningful public debate or congressional authorization? Who answers for those who die during immigration raids, police encounters or government detention? Who answers when those in power enrich themselves while everyone else is left to bear the danger, instability and cost?

In the American Police State, the answer is almost always the same: Those in power are protected. Those without power bear the consequences.

The government operates above the law. Those who wield power become untouchable. Those who suffer are treated as disposable. Justice becomes whatever the government says it is.

And the machinery of government moves on without accountability.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, that is how the American Police State gets away with murder.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/ywxy2vez

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. 

Dissent Is Not Disloyalty: The Right and Duty to Criticize the Government

Posted: July 8, 2026 in Uncategorized
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“Since when have we Americans been expected to bow submissively to authority and speak with awe and reverence to those who represent us? The constitutional theory is that we the people are the sovereigns, the state and federal officials only our agents. We who have the final word can speak softly or angrily. We can seek to challenge and annoy, as we need not stay docile and quiet.”—Justice William O. Douglas, dissenting in Colten v. Kentucky (1972)

President Trump has no problem criticizing, condemning, insulting, demonizing and threatening those who refuse to fall in line.

He has branded political opponents “communists,” denounced critics as anti-American, lashed out at NATO allies, threatened to cut off trade with Spain, and referred to Iran’s leaders as “scum” amid the ongoing war.

In Trump’s America, the president is free to call other nations bad actors, label his opponents dangerous, and treat disagreement as betrayal.

But dare to criticize Trump, his administration, ICE, the police state, the war machine, the surveillance state, or the government’s steady assault on the Constitution, and you may find yourself treated as the threat.

This is the hypocrisy of the moment: those in power claim an unlimited right to criticize everyone else, while increasingly denying the people the right to criticize them.

Criticize the government, question the police state, object to ICE raids, oppose war, challenge corruption, reject propaganda, refuse to salute the party line, or insist that public officials obey the Constitution, and you may find yourself accused of being anti-American, extremist, subversive, ungrateful, communist, terrorist-adjacent or worse.

This is how free speech dies: not all at once, but by redefining dissent as disloyalty.

Yet the First Amendment was not written to mandate flattery and applause for those in power. It was written to safeguard the right of the people to criticize, condemn, expose, challenge and resist government abuses without fear of being investigated, surveilled, threatened, prosecuted or treated like enemies of the state.

The American Revolution itself began as an act of criticism.

The Declaration of Independence was a bill of complaints against a government that had abused its power, violated the rights of the people, used the military to intimidate civilians, obstructed justice, imposed unjust burdens, and treated resistance as rebellion.

By today’s standards, the Founders would likely be labeled extremists, agitators, radicals, anti-government dissidents and threats to national security.

What was once rebellion against tyranny is now being recast as a warning sign of extremism.

That is the police state’s playbook for discrediting dissent: start with finger-pointing and name-calling, then turn criticism into subversion, dissent into danger, and those who demand accountability into enemies of the state.

On cue, President Trump and his allies have increasingly wrapped political opposition in the language of extremism, communism, terrorism and anti-Americanism.

We have seen this movie before. It was called McCarthyism.

Then, as now, the charge of “communism” was less about ideology than control: a smear used to discredit critics, frighten citizens, ruin reputations, trigger investigations, justify blacklists and make government power appear patriotic.

The accusation did not have to be true. It only had to be useful.

In the Trump administration’s telling, criticism of the country is evidence of ideological rot, radicalism or disloyalty. The message is unmistakable: love America or leave it; praise it or be punished; comply or be watched, surveilled and targeted.

That is not patriotism. That is tyranny dressed up in red, white and blue.

This campaign against dissent is not limited to protests, political speeches or social media posts. It extends to the past itself.

Consider the administration’s war on historical memory.

The Trump administration has now accused the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History of pushing “extreme political activism.” In a 162-page report, the White House has attacked the museum for presenting aspects of American history that do not conform to the administration’s preferred ideology.

The Smithsonian’s offense, apparently, is that it has failed to sufficiently sanitize its depiction of American history by removing references to slavery, exploitation, Native displacement, civil rights struggles, labor unrest, police abuses, government lies, war crimes and the long, hard fight to make the words “We the People” mean something more than political decoration.

This is not about history. It is about whitewashing history.

A government that gets to dictate how the past is remembered will soon dictate how the present may be discussed. A government that insists museums must celebrate America rather than tell the truth about America is not defending patriotism. It is manufacturing propaganda.

In an Orwellian throwback to 1984’s requirement that “you must love Big Brother. It is not enough to obey him: you must love him,” the Trump administration has proposed installing signs at every entrance to the Smithsonian’s exhibits that read, “Warning: the exhibits in this museum were prepared by people who don’t want you to love your country.”

History is not supposed to be a Hallmark card. It is supposed to be a warning.

That same demand for state-mandated devotion—the insistence that to love America one must flatter it, sanitize it and never demand better of it—was on display in the backlash to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s 250th anniversary remarks invoking the promises of the Declaration of Independence.

Whatever one thinks of Mamdani’s politics, the reaction to his speech was telling. Critics blasted the speech as ungrateful, divisive and hostile to American values, and Mamdani was denounced as anti-American for daring to suggest that America’s greatness lies not in pretending that its promises have already been fulfilled but in demanding that they be fulfilled for all.

Yet that is precisely what the Declaration of Independence was about.

The Declaration was a protest document. It did not flatter the king. It accused him. It did not praise the empire. It indicted it. It did not say, “Everything is fine.” It said the government had become destructive of the rights it existed to secure.

That is the American tradition.

Not government-approved history. Not obedience to presidents, police, generals, bureaucrats or political parties.

The American tradition is dissent. The American tradition is resistance to tyranny.

The American tradition is the right—and the duty—to criticize the government.

This is why the First Amendment stands first as a chain placed around the neck of government power: Freedom of speech. Freedom of the press. Freedom of religion. Freedom of assembly. The right to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

These are not separate freedoms. Together, they protect the ability of the people to speak, gather, organize, investigate, expose, protest and demand accountability from those who govern in their name.

Without the right to criticize the government, every other right becomes conditional.

Once the government is allowed to decide which criticism is patriotic and which criticism is dangerous, the Bill of Rights becomes a permission slip. Rights once guaranteed become privileges reserved for those who flatter power, obey orders and keep their grievances to themselves.

Once criticism is treated as extremism, constitutional rights become privileges reserved for the compliant.

This is why the government’s increasing tendency to equate dissent with danger should alarm every American, regardless of party.

We have already seen what this looks like.

Americans who criticize ICE online, write angry emails to government officials, document raids, protest enforcement actions, or speak out against official misconduct increasingly risk visits, warnings, subpoenas, surveillance or investigations by the government’s secret police.

The government does not need to jail everyone in order to silence a population. It only needs to make examples of a few.

A knock on the door. A warning from agents. A subpoena. A phone call from law enforcement. A file opened. A name entered into a database. A social media post flagged. A protest monitored. A journalist questioned. A nonprofit investigated. A student visa threatened. A donor list scrutinized. A museum audited. A professor disciplined. A mayor denounced as anti-American. A citizen taught to think twice before speaking again.

This is how a free people are trained to censor themselves.

Let us be clear: violence and true threats can and should be investigated. No one has a constitutional right to assault, threaten, stalk, bomb, kill or terrorize.

But criticism is not violence. Anger is not terrorism. Dissent is not extremism. Opposition is not treason. Petitioning the government for redress of grievances is not a crime. It is the essence of citizenship.

Yet every administration, sooner or later, discovers the convenience of labeling its critics as threats.

John Adams used the Sedition Act to punish critics of the federal government. Woodrow Wilson used the Espionage and Sedition Acts to prosecute antiwar speech. Richard Nixon kept enemies lists. George W. Bush gave us the Patriot Act, warrantless surveillance, watchlists and the language of “with us or against us.” Barack Obama targeted whistleblowers. Joe Biden’s administration leaned on agencies and platforms in the name of combatting misinformation and domestic extremism. Donald Trump has taken all of that machinery and openly aimed it at political enemies, protesters, immigrants, journalists, universities, museums, law firms and anyone else who refuses to bow.

Do not make the mistake of thinking this is merely a Trump problem.

Trump is not the disease. He is the symptom.

The disease is power.

The disease is a government that believes it may define truth, patriotism, extremism, history, loyalty and acceptable opinion. The disease is a police state that has learned to speak in the language of safety, order, border security, anti-terrorism, anti-communism, anti-radicalism, public health, national unity and American greatness.

The disease is the dangerous idea that government exists to be obeyed rather than restrained.

The Founders knew better.

They did not trust government. They bound it down.

They did not assume that rulers would be virtuous. They divided power, checked power, limited power and gave the people the tools to expose and resist power.

They understood that the greatest threat to liberty would not come from citizens criticizing the government. It would come from government officials who believed themselves entitled to silence criticism.

That is why the right to criticize government cannot be treated as a partisan indulgence.

No matter which party holds power, the people must be free to criticize the government.

When Republicans are in power, Democrats must be free to criticize the government. When Democrats are in power, Republicans must be free to criticize the government.

When police, ICE, the military, the courts, Congress or the president abuse their authority, citizens must be free to say so—loudly, publicly and without fear of being branded enemies of the state.

This is not incitement. This is accountability.

A government that cannot tolerate criticism does not deserve power. A president who treats dissent as disloyalty has betrayed his oath of office. A nation that punishes its truth-tellers has lost sight of its principles.

And a people who self-censor because they are afraid to criticize their government are no longer free.

This is the great danger of the moment.

We are being told that to love America, we must stop seeing what has been done in America’s name. We must stop talking about the bodies, the prisons, the raids, the wars, the surveillance, the corruption, the cages, the lies, the poverty, the brutality, the stolen land, the stolen labor, the broken treaties, the broken families, the broken promises and the broken Constitution.

We are being told that patriotism requires amnesia.

That is a lie.

Real patriotism is not worship of government. Real patriotism is not loyalty to a president. Real patriotism is not blind obedience to police. Real patriotism is not a flag big enough to cover up injustice.

Real patriotism is the willingness to tell the truth about your country because you believe it can and must be better.

Those who criticize America are often the only ones still taking America seriously.

The abolitionists were called agitators. The suffragists were called radicals. The labor organizers were called subversives. The civil rights marchers were called outside agitators and communists. The antiwar protesters were called traitors. The whistleblowers were called criminals. The journalists were called enemies of the people. The immigrants demanding dignity are called invaders. The citizens filming police are called threats. The protesters opposing ICE are called extremists. The historians telling the truth are called activists.

The pattern never changes. Power always has a vocabulary for discrediting those who challenge it. Yet history has repeatedly vindicated the critics.

America did not become freer because citizens kept quiet. America became freer because citizens made themselves impossible to ignore. They marched. They wrote. They spoke. They published. They exposed. They resisted. They refused to comply with unjust laws. They demanded amendments. They challenged police. They sued officials. They filled jails. They confronted presidents. They forced the country to look in the mirror.

That is not anti-American. That is how America survives.

The irony is that the loudest defenders of “American greatness” are often the most eager to criminalize the very conduct that made America possible.

They celebrate 1776 while condemning the spirit of 1776. They praise the Founders while fearing the people. They quote the Declaration while attacking those who petition for redress of grievances. They wrap themselves in the flag while trampling the freedoms for which the flag is supposed to stand. They call themselves patriots while demanding servility.

They insist that America is exceptional while treating the Constitution as optional.

They want citizens who salute, not citizens who think. They want history without victims, rights without resistance, liberty without dissent, and patriotism without conscience.

That is not freedom. That is authoritarianism with fireworks.

In such a climate, silence is surrender.

When the government claims the power to decide what history may be taught, what speech may be tolerated, what criticism may be investigated, what protest may be monitored, what viewpoint may be flagged, and what truths may be spoken, the people have a duty to push back.

We must insist that the First Amendment protects the speech government hates most. We must insist that criticizing ICE is not a crime. We must insist that criticizing the president is not treason. We must insist that criticizing police is not extremism. We must insist that criticizing America’s failures is not anti-American. We must insist that history belongs to the people, not to politicians. We must insist that no president, no agency, no party and no bureaucrat gets to decide what patriotism requires.

We must insist that the Constitution means what it says.

After all, the government works for us—not the other way around. The moment Americans forget that, the experiment in self-government is over.

So criticize the government.

Criticize it loudly. Criticize it relentlessly.

Criticize it when it spies, lies, censors, raids, detains, prosecutes, propagandizes, militarizes, profiteers and abuses.

Criticize it when it rewrites history, calls truth anti-American, mistakes obedience for patriotism, and forgets that “We the People” are the masters and the government is the servant.

That is the duty of a free people.

As I make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the police state does not need everyone to agree with it. It only needs enough people to fear disagreeing with it.

We do not owe the government our silence.

We owe the Constitution our vigilance.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/297c8cwy

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. 

Trump Breaks It, We Pay for It: The Cost of Cleaning Up the Deep State’s Mess

Posted: June 16, 2026 in Uncategorized
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The American taxpayer has become the cleanup crew for the American Police State.

We pay for the constitutional violations.

We pay for the wars.

We pay for the lawsuits, the settlements, the cover-ups, the damage control, the reconstruction, the overreach, the incompetence and the corruption.

And when government officials are finally called to account for their misconduct, we pay for that, too.

That is the dirty little secret of government accountability in America: even when the government loses, the government does not really pay. “We the people” do.

This is not a problem invented by Donald Trump.

For decades, politicians, police officers, prosecutors, prison officials, federal agents and bureaucrats of both parties have violated rights, exceeded their authority, misused public power and left taxpayers to pick up the tab.

The wrongdoers rarely pay personally. They get to keep their pensions, promotions, pardons, security details and speaking fees. The government agencies involved in misconduct rarely suffer lasting consequences. The victims get a check drawn on taxpayer funds.

And the tax-paying populace gets to pay for the settlements, the legal fees, the court costs, the reconstruction costs and the long-term damage to trust in government.

The message is coming across loud and clear: the government can violate our rights in every way possible—using resources that we are forced to provide—and then it can turn right around and make us pay to clean up its many messes and right its many wrongs.

This is the Art of the Steal.

Trump, having taken to government corruption like a duck to water, has made ripping off the taxpayers the cornerstone of his governing philosophy.

For a man who has spent a lifetime grifting, it is the ultimate grift.

During his second term in office, Trump has established a track record of forcing the public to subsidize the consequences of his own recklessness: rewarding allies, funding unconstitutional crackdowns, rebuilding what he tears down, bankrolling vanity projects, and attempting to buy his way out of crises he helped create.

Start with Iran.

Trump’s war with Iran is a case study in the Art of the Doublecross.

Candidate Trump sold himself as the antidote to endless war. He promised strength without entanglement, peace through power, no new wars, no more nation-building, no more wasting American lives and treasure on conflicts that do not serve the American people.

Then came the Epstein Files.

Suddenly, the man who promised no new wars needed a War of Distraction.

Now, after dragging the country into a preemptive, unprovoked war with Iran that Congress never authorized—a war that has rattled global markets, driven up energy prices, depleted military resources, risked regional escalation, and inflicted real economic pain on Americans already struggling to afford groceries, gas, insurance and debt payments—Trump needs help fixing the crisis he helped create.

Whatever the final terms of any so-called peace arrangement—assuming such a thing is actually forthcoming—taxpayers will bear the cost. Trump has announced, teased and promised breakthroughs before, only for the details to shift, the terms to unravel, or the supposed deal to become another bargaining chip in an endless cycle of threats, deadlines and reversals.

Rest assured, the price of Trump’s war will not be limited to missiles fired and ships deployed. It will include lives lost, military resources depleted, global markets rattled, energy prices spiked, alliances strained, enemies emboldened, and diplomatic concessions made to end a conflict that diplomacy might have prevented in the first place.

Even if U.S. taxpayers do not directly write the check for a reported $300 billion reconstruction framework, the absurdity remains: Trump starts the war, others negotiate the cleanup, and the American people are left paying the political, economic and constitutional costs.

They are also paying through the dangerous precedent that empowers an imperial president to start a war based on instinct, impulse or political convenience, without constitutional accountability.

That is no small thing.

The Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the power to declare war. That safeguard was not a procedural technicality. It was meant to prevent exactly this kind of unilateral adventurism: one man gambling with the lives, liberties and livelihoods of millions, then sending the invoice to the people.

The public pays while the politicians posture.

That is how government turns recklessness into public debt: first by provoking the crisis, then by charging the people for the cleanup, then by pretending the cleanup is a triumph.

Yet not every government bill arrives in the mail.

Some arrive at the gas pump, the grocery store, the insurance premium, the interest rate, the shrinking paycheck, the empty Treasury, and the next generation’s debt.

Others arrive later, in the form of lawsuits, settlements, damages, broken families, shattered communities and rights that must be clawed back in and out of court after the damage has already been done.

Iran is only the most explosive example.

We are seeing this destruction play out on almost every front: wars, raids, tariffs, deportations, political payouts, lawsuits, pardons, institutional wreckage and vanity projects.

Every unconstitutional executive order, retaliatory investigation, purge, firing, freeze, funding cutoff, loyalty test and administrative abuse produces another round of emergency litigation, government lawyers, court costs, injunctions, appeals and attorney fees.

Trump governs by breaking things. Taxpayers pay for the repair.

But some things cannot be repaired with money alone.

Who will pay to rebuild what Trump and the architects of the police state have destroyed of our constitutional republic?

As always, that burden will fall on the American people.

Trust, once shattered, is not so easily restored.

Institutions, once vandalized, do not repair themselves.

Constitutional limits, once treated as optional, become harder to restore with every violation.

And then there are the vanity projects, where the symbolism becomes almost too obvious to miss.

Trump’s so-called “beautification” projects—gaudy, expensive and self-serving—speak volumes about his disastrous approach to governing.

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, a public landmark that has served as the backdrop for historic moments from Marian Anderson’s 1939 concert to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, has become a veritable swamp of slime after Trump, without meaningful oversight and at a grossly marked-up expense, decided by fiat to “fix” it and use it and the Lincoln Memorial as the backdrop for a UFC fight weigh-in.

The Reflecting Pool fiasco is the Trump presidency in miniature: gaudy, expensive, performative and already covered in algae.

The demolished East Wing is now the architectural scar behind a ballooning White House ballroom project whose costs keep shifting upward, now estimated at $600 million with more than half of it paid for by taxpayers—despite Trump’s insistence it would all be privately funded.

Then came June 14, when the White House—transformed from the people’s house into a gilded stage set for one man’s ego—had its South Lawn turned into a literal arena for a UFC spectacle.

“Take care of this house,” the song from the Leonard Bernstein/Alan Jay Lerner musical 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue warns.

“Take care of this house
Keep it from harm
If bandits break in
Sound the alarm…
Be careful at night
Check all the doors
If someone makes off with a dream
The dream will be yours.”

That warning was not about wallpaper, furniture or ceremonial rooms.

It was about stewardship. It was about vigilance. It was about recognizing that the house belongs not to the occupant, but to the people whose dreams, sacrifices and constitutional inheritance it is supposed to shelter.

Trump’s transformation of the White House is a visual reminder of what he has done to the presidency itself: taken what belongs to the people, stripped it for parts, gilded what remained, and presented the wreckage as grandeur.

It is embarrassing. It is grotesque. It is a national humiliation.

This is what the American experiment in self-government has been reduced to: a constitutional republic dressed up like a casino, a people’s house converted into a stage set, a presidency refashioned as a brand extension, and taxpayers forced to underwrite the spectacle.

The founders never assumed the experiment would survive on autopilot.

They knew self-government was fragile. They knew republics decay when citizens become spectators, when public servants become rulers, when law becomes optional for the powerful, and when the people are made to finance their own subjugation.

That is why the spectacle matters.

The gilding of the people’s house is not just a question of bad taste or bloated expense. It is constitutional graffiti: a ruler’s signature scrawled across the people’s house.

It is a warning sign: a government that has forgotten the difference between public trust and private entitlement, between stewardship and ownership, between serving the people and ruling over them.

There is something obscene about gilding the people’s house while the people are being asked to pay for wars they did not approve, tariffs they were told foreigners would pay, raids carried out in their name, deportation schemes that endanger human lives, unconstitutional orders struck down by the courts, and settlements for abuses committed by government agents.

That is the real cost of cleaning up Trump’s messes.

It is not merely the $1.776 billion slush fund, the tariff refunds, the deportation flights, the ICE raids, the Reflecting Pool, the East Wing, the Iran war, the courtroom defenses, the settlements or the gilded pageantry.

It is the conversion of citizenship into servitude.

It is the expectation that the people will pay for their own surveillance, their own intimidation, their own impoverishment, their own silencing, their own manipulation, and their own loss of power.

It is taxation for domination.

It is government by mess, followed by government by invoice.

It is the rewriting of the American Dream from a dream of opportunity for all to a dream of entitlement for a select, privileged few.

The American Revolution was fought, in part, against a government that forced people to finance their own subjugation.

That warning still applies.

When Americans are made to pay for undeclared wars, unlawful tariffs, militarized raids, political payouts, constitutional violations, palace renovations and the settlements that follow government abuse, they are not merely being overcharged.

They are being ruled.

And ruled people always pay.

A free people do not pay tribute to rulers.

They bind them down. They hold them accountable.

And, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, they refuse to be made accomplices in their own subjugation.

It is time to clean house.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/33m6ssa6

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. 

We the Victims: Who Pays When the Government Weaponizes Its Power?

Posted: May 21, 2026 in Uncategorized
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“I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody.”—Donald Trump

One way or another, the American taxpayers always get screwed by politicians eager to spend our hard-earned dollars on programs and projects that do little to improve our lives, safeguard our freedoms, or secure our future.

Donald Trump—the billionaire trust-fund baby/reality TV showman who transformed himself into a populist champion of working-class Americans—has proven to be no different, and in many ways worse, than the politicians who came before him.

Trump has given new meaning to government corruption, graft, grift, profiteering, self-dealing and pay-to-play politics.

From the proposed White House ballroom and its taxpayer-backed security upgrades, to the high-dollar UFC spectacle planned for the White House lawn, to pardons that function less like mercy than loyalty rewards, to government access increasingly conditioned on political obedience, Trump has turned the presidency into a private rewards program for himself, his donors, his allies and his enforcers.

Every new abuse is wrapped in the language of patriotism, security or justice. Every bill lands, sooner or later, on the backs of the American people.

Thus, rather than draining the swamp, Trump has shown himself to be the veritable swamp monster, mired in the muck and determined to keep it that way.

Trump’s latest grift? A taxpayer-funded slush fund, dressed up as justice, purportedly to compensate those who claim they were targeted by the “weaponization” of the Biden Justice Department and Democrats.

As part of the same settlement, the government also reportedly agreed to bar the IRS from auditing Trump, his family, the Trump Organization and related entities over tax filings and claims predating the agreement—a breathtaking act of self-protection disguised as legal closure that helps shield the president and his empire from the very kind of government scrutiny ordinary Americans are expected to endure without complaint.

Taken together, the payout fund and the audit shield expose the real purpose of this so-called anti-weaponization crusade: not to end weaponized government, but to decide who gets protected by it, who gets paid by it, and who gets crushed by it

Read between the lines of the deliberately vague information provided about this “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” which will be seeded with $1.776 billion in taxpayer funds, and it starts to look suspiciously like a fund to reimburse those convicted, investigated or politically inconvenienced for crossing legal lines in service to Trump’s agenda.

If it looks like corruption—and it smells like corruption—there’s a good chance it’s corruption.

Donald K. Sherman, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, wasn’t mincing words when he described it as “one of the single most corrupt acts in American history.”

At best, this is an outrageous misuse of taxpayer money. At worst, it is yet another perverted form of Trump’s presidential pardons, which have overwhelmingly benefited political loyalists, donors, grifters, extremists, and individuals either convicted of crimes in pursuit of Trump’s ambitions or useful to advancing those ambitions in the future—or both.

The message is unmistakable: commit crimes that benefit those in power, and those in power will absolve you, reimburse you, excuse you, or reward you.

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.

But who will compensate “we the people” for the damage done when the government weaponizes its powers against us?

Who will compensate the people surveilled without warrants, raided without cause, censored for their views, bankrupted by fines and fees, brutalized by militarized police, jailed without due process, dragged through the courts, disappeared into detention centers, or treated as enemies of the state for exercising their constitutional rights?

Who will compensate the victims of a police state that has been weaponized by Republicans and Democrats alike?

That is the real question.

The Trump administration claims this fund is about redressing government weaponization.

Yet at the very same time, it is weaponizing the government against the citizenry: against protesters, immigrants, law firms, judges, journalists, universities, critics, whistleblowers, and anyone else who stands in the way of executive power.

This is what it means to weaponize the government.

When the government turns its power against its own people—through surveillance, retaliation, censorship, and intimidation—it ceases to serve the public and instead becomes a weapon of oppression.

According to the Political Dictionary, “The term ‘weaponize’ refers to the strategic manipulation or transformation of information, institutions, or social issues into tools for gaining political advantage.” That can mean exploiting existing laws, turning neutral institutions into partisan weapons, using the bureaucracy to delegitimize opponents, or rallying a base by convincing them that oppression is justice.

Time and again, presidents and power-hungry politicians have stretched—or outright shattered—the limits of their authority, weaponizing government power through unjust laws, surveillance, censorship, detention, intimidation and suppression.

Each power grab is another way of turning government into a weapon.

John Adams used the Alien and Sedition Acts to prosecute journalists and political opponents.

Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, allowing the military to detain individuals without trial and suppressing Confederate sympathizers and political dissenters.

Under Woodrow Wilson, the Espionage and Sedition Acts were used to crack down on anti-war activists, socialists, and labor organizers, including Eugene V. Debs, who spoke out against World War I.

Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order that led to the internment of over 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II, based on suspicions of disloyalty, despite little to no evidence.

Richard Nixon harnessed the power of the FBI, CIA, and IRS, to harass, spy on and sabotage his political opponents and perceived enemies.

Spanning numerous presidential administrations, from FDR to Nixon, the FBI’s covert intelligence program COINTELPRO was used to infiltrate, discredit and disrupt civil rights leaders, anti-war activists, and other political dissidents.

In a bid to fight so-called disinformation, Biden pressured social media companies to censor and suppress individuals expressing views perceived as conspiratorial or extremist, especially as they related to COVID-19.

And then there’s Donald Trump, who is setting new records for how far he’s willing to go to retaliate against his perceived enemies and sidestep the rule of law.

Indeed, Ken Hughes, an investigative journalist who spent two decades listening to Richard Nixon’s Secret White House Tapes, has concluded that Nixon’s abuses of presidential power—which included weaponizing the government to sabotage Vietnam peace talks, manipulate the timing of withdrawal from Vietnam, and spring former Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa from prison in return for political support—pale beside Trump’s abuses.

Trump, who once vowed to end government overreach and the weaponization of the federal government, now openly uses its full force against his critics, dismantling democratic norms, consolidating power in ways that defy the Constitution, and directing an all-out weaponization of the federal government against his perceived enemies.

Those “enemies” now include anyone who dares to oppose him.

If Trump were merely a blowhard, that would be one thing.

Unfortunately, having populated his administration with individuals more loyal to him than to the Constitution, Trump has gotten drunk on power.

The danger is not Trump alone. The danger is Trump backed by enablers-to-abuse: the many minions within his administration and beyond who are eager to carry out unlawful orders, defy the courts, ignore Congress, trample rights, and butcher the Constitution in the name of putting America first.

If this keeps up, America—once held up as a bastion of freedom and economic opportunity—will be the last place anyone thinks of when they hear the words freedom, justice and equality.

Every action taken by the Trump administration in defiance of the rule of law—whether or not that action is dressed up as national security, law and order, border control, anti-corruption, or anti-weaponization—pushes us that much closer to the complete dismantling of our constitutional republic.

Don’t be so carried away by fear-inducing tales of rapists, foreign invaders, corruption, crime waves and political persecution that you let the government get away with murder: the painful execution of our rights.

That way lies tyranny.

You can see the pattern forming already.

When protesters are snatched up, arrested, prosecuted or surveilled for challenging government policy, that is government weaponized against dissent.

When immigrants are rounded up, chained, deported or detained without meaningful due process—without being properly identified, charged, heard, or allowed to challenge the government’s claims—that is government weaponized against due process.

When law firms are punished for the clients they represent, barred from federal buildings, stripped of security clearances, threatened with the loss of contracts, or pressured into providing hundreds of millions of dollars in legal services aligned with the administration’s priorities, that is government weaponized against the right to counsel.

When judges are derided, defied or threatened for ruling against the president’s agenda, that is government weaponized against the separation of powers.

When universities are threatened with funding cuts, investigations and ideological purges for failing to toe the government’s line, that is government weaponized against academic freedom and independent thought.

When journalists and critics are branded enemies, liars, radicals, criminals or traitors for questioning official narratives, that is government weaponized against the First Amendment.

When government websites, archives, agencies and public records are rewritten, scrubbed or politicized in order to reshape history, control memory, and enforce ideological obedience, that is government weaponized against truth.

When the president threatens other nations militarily, talks openly about seizing foreign lands, stirs up international tensions, rattles the war drums, and then claims wartime powers at home, that is government weaponized against peace, liberty and constitutional restraint.

Trump, adept at twisting facts and spinning lies, insists these end-runs around the rule of law are for our safety.

Don’t believe him. Words are cheap.

More importantly, don’t trust him. Bind him down with the chains of the Constitution.

The only real protection we have against tyranny is the rule of law, provided that the people and the system of government still hold the rule of law as inviolable.

That is our real power: the extent to which we hold fast to the Constitution and demand that the government and its agents do so, as well.

The moment that we relent in that commitment—the moment that we look the other way and let first a few encroachments slide, then ever more and more—is the moment the Constitution loses its power to protect us against tyranny.

That is what is unfolding right now.

This is the devil’s bargain that we are being asked to enter into with Trump: empty promises and a one-way street to a dictatorship in exchange for our freedoms.

Watch out.

When any politician claims to be saving you money by imposing tariffs that ramp up inflation and cutting government programs aimed at educating the masses, feeding the hungry, and helping the poor, disabled and elderly, all the while spending taxpayer money on his own lavish lifestyle and self-serving political programs, you’d better beware. Your hard-earned dollars will be next in line to be seized, spent and squandered.

When any politician suggests that you relinquish your freedoms—of speech, assembly, due process, association, etc.—in exchange for promises of greater security, you’d better beware. Your freedoms will be next on the chopping block.

When any politician persuades you to look the other way while innocent individuals are rounded up alongside suspected criminals just because they look a certain way, talk a certain way, worship a certain way, protest a certain way, or belong to a particular demographic, you’d better beware. Your right to due process will be next.

When any politician comes up with a vast array of reasons why he doesn’t need to obey court rulings—because they were issued verbally, because his power trumps that of the courts, because the courts are biased, because national security demands obedience, because the law ends at the border—you’d better beware. This shifty reasoning for breaking the law could be used against you next.

There can be no doubt about the nature of what is taking place right now.

This is government weaponized into war.

President Trump’s justification for defying the courts and doing whatever he wants in pursuit of his political agenda (arresting protesters, carrying out mass arrests and deportations, muzzling critics, seizing funds, dismantling agencies, usurping congressional powers) is that “this is war.”

Here’s the thing, though: Trump may be using the language of war to bypass the Constitution at every turn, but the only war being waged is a war against the Constitution, the rule of law and the American people.

Congress, which has the sole power to declare war under Article I, Section 8, Clause 11, has not declared war on the American people. And still Trump is using the emergency powers and wartime rhetoric of the presidency to sidestep accountability and due process.

In ruling after ruling, the courts, which have the judicial power to rein in overreach and misconduct, have pushed back against the Trump administration’s steady dismantling of constitutional limits. And still Trump is unilaterally hacking away at the very foundations of our system of government.

If the president refuses to be held accountable, insists his power is supreme, abuses the power of his office to wreak havoc and revenge, reduces our republic to rubble, tramples the Constitution, and disregards the rule of law, he is aligning himself with every despot, dictator and tyrant to have walked the earth.

We’ve been here before. We know how this story ends.

It takes time and effort and a willingness on the part of “we the people” to look beyond our differences and stand united in opposition to oppression, but when we do that, freedom prevails in the end.

This year will mark the 250th anniversary of the birth of this country, when America’s founders declared their independence from King George’s tyranny.

What’s just as important, however, is what came before that: the small steps of rebellion, resistance and outrage that said, “enough is enough.”

What we are now experiencing is not simply a partisan power struggle. It is the weaponization of the machinery of government for compliance and control.

The objective: obedience.

The strategy: destabilize the economy, polarize the populace, escalate racial and political tensions, intensify the use of violence, and then, when all hell breaks loose, clamp down on the nation for the good of the people and the security of the nation.

The outcome for this particular conflict is already foregone if we refuse to resist: the Deep State wins.

The Deep State wins by ensuring that we are censored, silenced, muzzled, gagged, zoned out, caged in and shut down.

It wins by monitoring our speech and activities for any sign of “extremist” activity.

It wins by ensuring that we are estranged from each other and kept at a distance from those who are supposed to represent us.

It wins by saddling us with taxation without representation and a government without the consent of the governed.

It wins by terminating the Constitution—or rewriting it until it no longer restrains those in power.

So where does that leave us?

“We” may have contributed to our downfall through our inaction and gullibility, but we are also the only hope for a free future.

After all, the Constitution begins with those three beautiful words, “We the people.”

Those three words were intended as a reminder to future generations that there is no government without us: our sheer numbers, our muscle, our economy, our physical presence in this land.

When we forget that—when we allow the “me” of a self-absorbed, narcissistic, politically polarizing culture to override our civic duties as citizens to collectively stand up to tyranny and make the government play by the rules of the Constitution—that is when tyranny rises and freedom falls.

Remember, there is power in numbers.

Not the kinds of numbers that Trump likes to spout about landslide victories and electoral mandates, but the most powerful numbers of all: the sheer, overwhelming mass of humanity that is “we the people” of these United States of America.

If there is any means left to us for thwarting the government in its relentless march towards outright dictatorship, it rests with us.

Ultimately, that’s what the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution is all about: it affirms that “we the people” have all the power, and what powers we do not explicitly give to the federal government or the states, we retain.

We may appoint government representatives to act in our stead, but we never relinquish that power altogether.

That’s where Trump and his Deep State handlers get it wrong. Speaking through him and his administration, they claim that this dismantling of the federal government is a bid to return power to local communities and state governments, but it’s not their government to dismantle, nor is it their power to return.

We are the government.

We are the power.

And it’s time “we the people” reminded the government and its henchmen of that important fact.

The power still lies with us.

We must resist every attempt to erode our freedoms, demand accountability, and uphold the Constitution before it’s too late.

It’s time to invalidate governmental laws, tactics and policies that are illegitimate, egregious or blatantly unconstitutional.

Nullify everything the government does that flies in the face of the Constitution.

Flood your representatives’ phone lines, inboxes and townhall meetings with your discontent.

Protest everything that tramples on the Constitution.

Stand up for your own rights, of course, but more importantly, stand up for the rights of those with whom you might disagree.

Defend freedom at all costs. Defend justice at all costs. Make no exceptions based on race, religion, creed, politics, immigration status, sexual orientation, etc.

Don’t play semantics. Don’t justify. Don’t politicize it.

If it carries even a whiff of tyranny, oppose it.

Demand that your representatives in government cut you a better deal, one that abides by the Constitution and doesn’t just attempt to sidestep it. That’s their job: make them do it.

And don’t let them distract you with slush funds, payouts, pardons and political theater disguised as justice.

If the government is going to compensate anyone for being victimized by weaponized power, then start with “we the people.”

Start with the Americans whose rights have been trampled by SWAT teams, surveillance dragnets, censorship regimes, secret watchlists, police brutality, asset forfeiture schemes, no-knock raids, indefinite detentions, politically motivated prosecutions, and every other tactic by which the police state has turned the Constitution into collateral damage.

Start with the people forced to pay for their own oppression.

Until then, this so-called Anti-Weaponization Fund is not justice.

It is hush money for the powerful, paid for by the powerless.

It is the weaponized government rewarding its own while leaving the rest of us to foot the bill.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, all freedoms hang together.

They fall together, as well.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/mdz5p9rw

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. 

Easier to Die, Harder to Vote: The Rigged Architecture of the Warfare State

Posted: May 1, 2026 in Uncategorized
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“The cost of war is too damn high
Not another nickel
Not another dime
We won’t pay for Trump’s war crimes.”
—Chanted by anti-war military veteran protesters in DC

Reports of food shortages on naval ships deployed to the Middle East.

Video footage of disabled military veterans—some in wheelchairs, others leaning on canes—being zip-tied and dragged out of the Capitol Rotunda for staging a peaceful, anti-war protest. Sixty-six veterans were arrested while conducting a flag-folding ceremony in recognition of the 13 military servicemembers who have died so far in Trump’s war with Iran.

A growing number of active-duty military service members asking how to end their service, become conscientious objectors, and refuse unlawful orders.

And a president openly threatening to commit war crimes by targeting civilian infrastructure in Iran—and floating preemptive strikes against Cuba.

This is where we are now.

Almost two months into Donald Trump’s disastrous, unauthorized war with Iran, the United States is in freefall.

The economy is struggling. Inflation and fuel prices are rising. America’s standing in the world is eroding by the day.

The war itself is spiraling—threats one day, concessions the next—as the Trump administration scrambles to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway that had remained stable until Trump recklessly pushed us into this disastrous war.

Meanwhile, the so-called “peace deal” being floated appears worse—for the U.S. and the world—than the nuclear agreement Trump tore up during his first term in a fit of ego and arrogance.

At home, the government is unraveling. Corruption is flourishing.

The constitutional guardrails are gone.

Leadership inside the White House is in disarray.

And Congress—rather than acting as a constitutional check—has chosen blind devotion, competing to outdo itself in displays of loyalty: proposing to carve Trump’s face into Mt. Rushmore, rename airports in his honor, create a “Trump Peace Prize,” declare his birthday a federal holiday, mint a $250 bill bearing his likeness, and even fund research into “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

This is not governance.

This is fealty.

And at the center of it all is a man who avoided military service during Vietnam through a series of deferments—four as a student, one for a conveniently diagnosed bone spur—now posturing as a wartime commander, strategist and dealmaker.

The reality tells a far different story about the man steering the nation into war.

Trump—fixated on securing his legacy with a ballroom and a triumphal arch—appears increasingly erratic, unfocused, and unfit for the job assigned to him.

As journalists Josh Dawsey and Annie Linskey report, “The president sometimes loses focus, spending time on the details of his plans for the White House ballroom… Advisers said he has multiple meetings a week on the topic and views himself as the general contractor.”

This is a man woefully unprepared to deal with the many catastrophes he brings about.

Reporting from the Wall Street Journal indicates that Trump, after learning that two American airmen were missing in Iran, “screamed at aides for hours,” obsessing over how it would impact his image, legacy and the midterm elections, “veering between belligerent and conciliatory approaches and grappling behind the scenes with just how badly things could go wrong.”

It only went downhill from there.

Concerned that Trump’s impatience would make things worse, aides kept the nation’s Commander-in-Chief out of the Situation Room, delivering updates at key moments.

Concerns about Trump’s ability to carry out his duties have grown so voluble that there are now competing efforts to either invoke the 25th amendment or compel him to resign in a last-ditch effort to contain the damage.

As William Becker observes:

“The Trump decade should be remembered as a period when a president commandeered every news cycle by creating fresh controversies. As his power crumbled, he escalated his outrages so that each one distracted national attention from the last. Many theorize that he even launched a war to divert persistent attention from the most sordid scandal in American history: the Epstein affair. His badly conceived attack has so far cost the lives of 15 U.S. soldiers, wounded 400, and killed or injured nearly 30,000 Iranians while pushing the world economy to the brink of recession and imposing economic costs on people around the world.”

Against this messy backdrop of ineptitude, arrogance, greed, corruption and a Constitution in crisis, consider this: the government is making it easier to send our nation’s young people to war—and harder for the citizenry to have a say in it.

At the same time that the Trump administration is expanding its war machine abroad, it is moving to automate military draft registration at home—making it easier than ever to conscript young men to fight and die in wars they did not choose.

Under a provision tucked into the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, all men between the ages of 18 and 25 will be automatically registered for the draft within 30 days of turning 18.

There was never anything voluntary about the draft.

Established in 1917 during World War I, suspended in 1975, and reinstated in 1980, the draft requires men—citizens and immigrants alike—to register under penalty of $250,000 and jail time of up to five years.

Register—or face the consequences.

Now even the illusion of choice is being stripped away—and the system itself is about to become far more powerful.

Although 46 states and territories already implement some form of automatic registration, how the federal government plans to automate the process is unclear. But it will almost certainly rely on the integration and cross-referencing of vast amounts of personal data across government agencies.

In other words, a database.

A potentially powerful one.

And in the wrong hands, a weaponized one.

Beware anytime the government insists it’s making things more “convenient” or “efficient.”

More often than not, “efficiency” is a Trojan Horse used to mask the government’s ongoing power grabs and assaults on our freedoms as something benevolent and in our best interests.

The government has never had our best interests at heart.

Nor has it ever been in the business of making life easier for its citizens.

It is in the business of control.

In the modern surveillance state, that control starts with data.

Once control is built on data, it doesn’t stay in government hands alone.

Enter Palantir Technologies—one of the government’s largest defense contractors, with billions in military contracts and a long track record of data-driven surveillance.

Already linked to AI-assisted military targeting systems and the “kill lists” used by the Israeli military in Gaza, Palantir has been a driving force behind the push to automate the draft.

This is the future of modern warfare they are building.

Not just smarter wars but more efficient ones.

More expansive. More detached. More deadly.

And built with an army of people the government views as fully expendable.

Consider the hypocrisy at work.

The Trump administration has spent months demonizing immigrants—detaining them, deporting them, tearing apart families, and casting them as threats to national security.

And yet, when it comes time to fill the ranks of its endless wars, those same individuals—green card holders, refugees, asylum seekers, even undocumented men—suddenly become expendable assets.

Too dangerous to belong. Not too dangerous to die.

Increasingly, the same could be said of all of us.

We are all being viewed as potential threats by the government.

A government that views its people as expendable will always find ways to use them—whether as labor, as data points, or as cannon fodder.

And it will just as quickly look for ways to silence them.

While the government is making it easier for Americans to be conscripted and killed in war, it is simultaneously working to make it harder for us to have any say in the decisions that send our young men and women to war in the first place.

Rather than ensuring all American citizens access to the ballot box, the Trump administration has moved to restrict it—pushing measures that would tighten voter eligibility, limit mail-in voting, and centralize control over election systems.

Why not automate voter registration?

If efficiency were truly the goal, that would be the logical place to start.

As the Brennan Center for Justice explains, automatic voter registration flips the system from “opt-in” to “opt-out,” allowing eligible citizens who interact with government agencies to be registered automatically, with their information transmitted electronically to election officials. The result is higher participation, more accurate voter rolls, and a more efficient system overall.

In other words, the same kind of streamlined, data-driven infrastructure being used to prepare Americans for war could just as easily be used to strengthen democracy.

Which is precisely why it isn’t being prioritized.

Because this is not about efficiency.

It is about power.

The Constitution is clear on this point: authority over elections rests primarily with the states and Congress—not the president.

That is not a technicality.

It is a safeguard.

A deliberate check against the very kind of centralized control this administration is now attempting to assert.

This is not a new playbook.

It is an old one—one the Founders knew well, and warned against.

As the nation approaches the 250th anniversary of its founding, the parallels to the grievances listed in the Declaration of Independence are becoming impossible to ignore.

A government that wages war without meaningful consent of the governed.

A government that maintains standing armies and engages in foreign conflicts without accountability.

A government that obstructs the will of the people and undermines their ability to participate in the political process.

A government that treats its citizens not as participants in a republic, but as resources to be managed, tracked, and deployed.

This is not the system the Founders envisioned.

It is the system they rebelled against.

The American police state is making it easier to send you to war.

They’re making it harder for you to vote.

They are automating what kills us but complicating what empowers us: building databases to track us, systems to conscript us, and laws to silence us.

This is not about efficiency. This is not about national security.

We are living the reality I warned of in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries: a nation where the citizenry is the enemy and the state is the predator.

This is about control.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/2d256yac

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

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

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Instead, the swamp has been privatized.

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

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

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

This is how you bilk a nation.

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

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

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

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

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

This is not savvy business. This is graft.

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

Just consider the entries in this administration’s ledger.

Personal indulgence and vanity projects:

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

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

$28 million for an Amazon documentary on Melania Trump.

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

Policy decisions that generate revenue or leverage:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Public money redirected toward private allies and enforcement expansion:

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

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

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

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

Foreign entanglements and gifts:

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

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

These are not isolated expenditures. They reveal a pattern.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Increasingly, we appear to have both.

And this is where the danger becomes clear.

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

It spreads into the Justice Department.

It spreads into the courts.

It spreads into law enforcement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The average American waits. The wealthy pay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That secrecy was not accidental. It was strategic.

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

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

Unfortunately, the rot doesn’t stop there.

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

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

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

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

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

This is not mercy. It is a protection racket.

These are not miscarriages of justice being corrected; they are protection payments, signals to future operatives: do what we need you to do, and we will take care of you.

The resemblance to a cartel grows harder to ignore.

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

As the Editorial Board of the New York Times concluded:

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

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

A republic cannot survive when public office becomes private property.

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

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

We are witnessing the hollowing out of a constitutional republic.

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

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

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

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

It is time to drain the swamp.

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

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

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

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

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

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

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

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

“Geofence warrants turn the Fourth Amendment on its head. If the government can track where we go, who we associate with, and when we were present—without probable cause—then no one’s movements are truly private,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “This case is about whether the Constitution still places meaningful limits on government surveillance in the digital age.”

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

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

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

Ethan H. Townsend and Maura R. Cremin of McDermott Will & Schulte LLP advanced the arguments in the amicus brief.

The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties organization, defends individuals whose constitutional rights have been threatened or violated and educates the public on a wide spectrum of issues affecting their freedoms.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties organization, defends individuals whose constitutional rights have been threatened or violated and educates the public on a wide spectrum of issues affecting their freedoms.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elections have failed to check the police state.

Courts increasingly defer to it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That power has a name: nullification.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even so, justice matters.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nullification works.

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

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

That refusal was not lawlessness. It was conscience.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The government prefers a citizenry ignorant of its rights.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You change the rules.

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

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

Nullify injustice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

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

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

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

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

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

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

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

Paine’s warning was not theoretical.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ends do not justify the means.

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

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

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

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

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

These are not hypotheticals or worst-case projections.

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

It is the same sequence every despot follows.

First, power is centralized.

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

Next, accountability is dismantled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That transformation is almost complete.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We ignore them at our own peril.

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is how republics fall.

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

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

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

That normalization is the true danger.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That resistance has historic roots.

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

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

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

Bonhoeffer paid for that conviction with his life.

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

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

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

Source: https://tinyurl.com/u4s2vata

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

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

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

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

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