“Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freedom of speech.”—Benjamin Franklin

Everything this nation once stood for is being turned on its head.

We are being asked—no, told—to believe that the greatest threat to America today is not government overreach, endless war, corruption, surveillance, or the steady erosion of constitutional rights.

No, the real threat, it seems, is speech.

Dangerous speech. Hateful speech. Critical speech. Speech that dares to challenge power.

In the wake of the reported assassination attempt on President Trump, the Trump administration has wasted no time advancing a dangerous narrative: that criticism of the president—especially criticism labeling him authoritarian or fascist—is not just wrong, but responsible for violence.

The implication is as chilling as it is unconstitutional: if you criticize the government too harshly, you may be to blame for what happens next.

Taken to its logical conclusion, the government’s argument is this: criticism fuels anger, and anger leads to violence against the Trump administration.

Which means the solution, in the government’s eyes, is simple: silence the criticism—but only when it is leveled at the Trump administration.

When White House officials suggest that calling a president a fascist may constitute libel or slander, they are not merely defending reputations—they are laying the groundwork for criminalizing dissent.

This is how it begins.

This is how republics become regimes.

First, criticism is labeled dangerous. Then it is labeled harmful. Then it is labeled illegal. And before long, it is gone.

Beware of those who want to monitor, muzzle, catalogue and censor speech—especially when the justification is “safety.” Because every time the government claims it must limit freedom to protect the public, what it is really doing is expanding its own power.

The irony is almost too glaring to ignore.

By the standards now being floated by those in power, America’s founders themselves would be considered extremists.

Seditionists. Radicals. Domestic threats.

Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Marquis De Lafayette, and John Adams would certainly have been placed on an anti-government watch list for suggesting that Americans should not only take up arms but be prepared to protect their liberties and defend themselves against the government should it violate their rights.

“What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance. Let them take arms,” declared Jefferson. He also concluded that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

Observed Franklin: “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!”

“It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from its government,” insisted Paine.

“When the government violates the people’s rights,” Lafayette warned, “insurrection is, for the people and for each portion of the people, the most sacred of the rights and the most indispensable of duties.”

Adams cautioned, “A settled plan to deprive the people of all the benefits, blessings and ends of the contract, to subvert the fundamentals of the constitution, to deprive them of all share in making and executing laws, will justify a revolution.”

And who could forget Patrick Henry with his ultimatum: “Give me liberty or give me death!”

By today’s standards, these are not the words of patriots.

They are the words of people who would be surveilled, flagged, censored—and likely arrested.

Had the government of their day succeeded in suppressing their “dangerous speech,” there would have been no Revolution. No Declaration of Independence. No Constitution. No Bill of Rights.

You see, the right to criticize the government is not a side issue.

It is the foundation of a free society. And yet, that foundation is already cracking.

Conduct your own experiment in how much dissent is tolerated: stand on a street corner—or in a courtroom, at a city council meeting, or on a university campus—and try denouncing the government using the founders’ rhetoric.

You won’t last long.

At best, you’ll be dismissed. At worst, you’ll be labeled a threat.

So much for a nation built on dissent.

That principle of free speech is supposed to be non-negotiable. Increasingly, it is treated as optional. Which is precisely why it is under attack.

Anti-government speech has become a four-letter word.

More and more, any speech that challenges authority—exposes corruption, questions policy, or calls out abuses of power—is being recast as dangerous, extremist, or even violent.

The categories keep expanding: Hate speech. Misinformation. Disinformation. Conspiratorial speech. Radical speech. Anti-government speech.

Different labels, same goal: control the narrative.

What has changed is not the tactic—it’s the target.

Under the previous administration, “dangerous speech” meant election denial, COVID dissent, and those who challenged official narratives about public health and national security.

Now, under the Trump administration, “dangerous speech” means media outlets that report unfavorably on the government, comedians who mock those in power, and citizens who dare to call authoritarianism by its name.

The script keeps flipping depending on who is in power, but the ending never changes: censorship.

If the government can control speech, it can control thought. And if it can control thought, it can control you.

As comedian Lenny Bruce once observed, “If you can’t say ‘F@#k,’ you can’t say, ‘F@#k the government.’”

Bruce understood what those in power have always known: language is power. That’s why he was prosecuted.

That’s why dissenters are always targeted first.

And that’s why the government’s growing obsession with policing speech should alarm every American—regardless of political affiliation.

Here is where the hypocrisy becomes impossible to ignore.

When conservative commentator Charlie Kirk was assassinated, the Trump administration and its allies demanded consequences not just for the assassin but for anyone who dared to criticize Kirk.

Public figures were targeted. Jobs were threatened. Comedians were singled out. Among them: late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, who faced calls to be fired for voicing criticism of Kirk.

Now, the same playbook is being used again—this time against those who mock or criticize President Trump and his family.

The message is unmistakable: criticize the wrong people, and your livelihood may be next—not because you committed a crime, but because your words were treated as one.

The latest example: the Trump administration is once again targeting former FBI director James Comey—this time for posting a photo of seashells spelling out “8647,” a slang expression of opposition to Trump, the nation’s 47^th president.

A social media post. Treated like a threat.

This is how dissent is being redefined—not as a constitutional right but as a threat.

Yet while the government wrings its hands over so-called dangerous rhetoric, it continues to wield—and expand—its own machinery of violence.

Most recently, the Justice Department has signaled its intent to expand the use of the death penalty, including execution by firing squad.

Let that sink in.

Criticism is being treated as a threat to public safety, while the police state openly embraces more brutal forms of punishment.

This is the same government that claims speech must be curtailed to prevent violence, even as it institutionalizes violence as a matter of policy.

This is not about safety.

It is about control. Because once speech is treated as violence, it becomes easy to justify real violence by the government in response.

History makes one thing clear: governments do not fear violence nearly as much as they fear dissent. That is why the first target of any regime drifting toward authoritarianism is not the gun. It is the voice.

What we are witnessing now is the slow but steady normalization of censorship. A creeping acceptance that some ideas are too dangerous to be heard.

We’ve seen this before. As George Orwell warned, “In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

We are dangerously close to that point.

The First Amendment was not designed to protect polite speech.

It was designed to protect political speech—uncomfortable speech, provocative speech, dissenting speech, anti-government speech.

Speech that challenges power.

Because once that speech is gone, everything else goes with it.

And if we allow the government to decide which words are too dangerous to be spoken, it won’t be long before we discover that the most dangerous words of all are the ones that speak truth to power.

We are further down that road than most Americans realize.

This is the part of the story Americans should recognize.

First, the government tells you certain speech is dangerous. Then it tells you those who engage in it are dangerous. Then it tells you those people must be monitored, silenced, and, eventually, punished. And all the while, it wraps these measures in the language of safety, unity, and national security.

This is not new. It is as old as tyranny itself.

What we’re dealing with today is a government that wants to suppress dangerous words—words about its warring empire, words about its land grabs, words about its militarized police, words about its killing, its poisoning and its corruption—in order to keep its lies going.

What we are witnessing is a nation undergoing a nervous breakdown over this growing tension between our increasingly untenable reality and the lies being perpetrated by a government that has grown too power-hungry, egotistical, militaristic and disconnected from its revolutionary birthright.

As we warned in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the road to authoritarianism is paved with small compromises—especially when it comes to speech, dissent, and the willingness of the citizenry to push back.

And the only antidote is the truth.

If the government censors get their way, there will be no more First Amendment.

There will be no more Bill of Rights.

And there will be no more freedom in America as we have known it.

This is how freedom rises or falls.

The government’s tolerance for dissent is shrinking. And as that tolerance disappears, the danger is no longer theoretical.

Anti-government speech is becoming a liability.

Speech that exposes corruption, challenges authority, or questions official narratives is being flagged, monitored, and, in some cases, punished.

The list of “dangerous” speech keeps growing. The space for dissent keeps shrinking.

And for those who still believe in exercising their First Amendment rights, the risks are becoming harder to ignore.

With every passing day, the line between a free society and a controlled one is being erased—replaced by a system where speech is monitored, dissent is punished, and truth itself is treated as a threat.

And once that happens, freedom doesn’t just fade—it dies, one silenced voice at a time.

WC: 1789

“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 25^th 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.

WC: 1736

“In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”— Friedrich Nietzsche

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

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

Another imagined a Trump-branded hotel on the Moon.

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

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

Blasphemous. Profane. Threatening. Self-aggrandizing.

These posts are not anomalies.

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

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

Consider the trajectory.

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

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

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

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

This is not normal.

Nor is it merely rhetorical excess.

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

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

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

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

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

Literally.

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

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

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

This is not serious governance. This is spectacle.

This is not rational.

This is not presidential.

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

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

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

As the New York Times reports:

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is not branding.

It is the architecture of a cult of personality.

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

As always, history points the way.

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

The parallels are difficult to ignore.

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

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

But such power does not exist in a vacuum.

It is enabled.

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

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

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

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

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

This is a constitutional crisis.

And the Constitution provides a remedy.

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

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

Section 4 is explicit:

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

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

Yet as Gaby Hinsliff concludes in The Guardian:

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

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

History suggests this is not unusual.

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

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

This was never supposed to be about politics.

It was never supposed to be about ideology.

It is about constitutional capability.

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

But there is no filter for this level of dysfunction.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Surveillance is expanding.

Policing is becoming more militarized.

Power is becoming more centralized and less accountable.

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

No mechanism to declare it unfit.

No procedure to remove it.

Or is there?

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

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

That principle still stands.

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

Not chaos, but constitutional resistance.

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

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

WC: 2187

See how TRI fought back.

The Rutherford Institute’s 2025 Annual Report documents a year in which constitutional freedoms faced some of the greatest assaults in modern American history. In 2025, the federal government expanded executive power, deployed the National Guard into civilian communities, intensified surveillance partnerships with Big Tech, targeted political dissent, and advanced policies that erode due process, privacy, and free expression.

Against this backdrop, TRI remained steadfast in its mission: to make the government play by the rules of the Constitution.

This report chronicles TRI’s major litigation, advocacy efforts, investigations, and public education initiatives—from challenging speech-based detentions and predictive policing to exposing thought-crime policies, financial deplatforming, religious discrimination, and government coverups.

Read the full report to see how TRI is defending liberty in an age of unchecked power.

2025 Annual Report: Protecting Liberty in a Year of Unchecked Government Power

Today, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments over whether President Trump exceeded his constitutional authority by unilaterally imposing tariffs under broad “national security” powers.

While it may sound like an economic dispute, this case strikes at the heart of our constitutional order.

Under the Constitution, only Congress—the branch closest to the people—has the power to impose taxes and tariffs. Yet for decades, presidents from both parties have relied on vague emergency statutes to expand executive control over trade, budgets, and national security with little oversight.

The Framers debated this very issue during the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Having just thrown off a monarchy that ruled by decree, they vested the taxing and spending powers firmly in Congress—the branch most accountable to the people. As James Madison later wrote in The Federalist No. 58, “This power over the purse may, in fact, be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people.” It was meant to ensure that no president could spend—or tax—the nation into submission without the consent of its citizens’ representatives.

Whether it’s tariffs, surveillance, or the use of military force, every such expansion edges us closer to government by fiat—the very form of rule the Founders warned against.

The question before the Court is bigger than tariffs: it’s whether the limits on presidential power still mean what they say.

Cases: Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump (Tariffs), Trump v. V.O.S. Selections

Stay up-to-speed on The Rutherford Institute’s ongoing work to sound the alarm over threats to our freedoms, restore the balance of power, and make the government play by the rules of the Constitution: https://www.rutherford.org/signup

Power and the Constitution is The Rutherford Institute’s ongoing series examining how the actions of government—no matter who holds office—measure up against the limits set by the U.S. Constitution.

The Rutherford Institute is sounding a renewed warning against efforts by the government to amass extensive, sensitive private information about individual citizens and their households through its mandatory American Community Survey (ACS). Rutherford Institute attorneys have also formally lodged concerns over a proposal by the U.S. Census Bureau to expand the already exhaustive, invasive ongoing monthly survey to include questions about each household member’s sex assigned at birth, current gender (including transgender, nonbinary, or others), and sexual orientation.

For individuals alarmed by the U.S. Census Bureau’s efforts to collect and track private information about the citizenry, their home life and personal habits, The Rutherford Institute has made its updated “Constitutional Q&A: American Community Survey” guidelines available at www.rutherford.org. The Institute has also provided a form letter of complaint for lodging objections to the ACS with the Census Bureau.

“In an age when the government has significant technological resources at its disposal to not only carry out warrantless surveillance on American citizens but also to harvest and mine that data for its own dubious purposes, whether it be crime-mapping or profiling based on race or religion, the potential for abuse is grave,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “Any attempt by the government to encroach upon the citizenry’s privacy rights or establish a system by which the populace can be targeted, tracked and singled out must be met with extreme caution. The American Community Survey qualifies as a government program whose purpose, while seemingly benign, raises significant constitutional concerns.”

The American Community Survey (ACS) is a highly invasive, ongoing monthly survey issued by the U.S. Census Bureau to collect detailed housing and socioeconomic data from about 3.5 million households each year. The ACS requires recipients to provide the government with extensive and sensitive information about each and every person in their household, including their work schedules, their physical disabilities and limitations, the number of automobiles kept at the residence, and their access to phone-service and the internet. The information collected by the ACS is not anonymous: the survey is to contain the name, age, sex, race, and home address of each person at the residence, along with the phone number of the person who fills out the form. There are so many questions on the ACS that it is estimated the average household will have to take 40 minutes to answer the questions. When people do not respond online or by mail, the Census Bureau repeatedly sends field representatives to their homes at unannounced times to harass and interview them until they answer the survey. People have reported that field representatives remained outside their houses for hours while waiting for them to arrive home or come out, have walked around their homes, and have talked to minor children when parents were away. The questions on the ACS are so invasive that many initially think the survey is a phishing scam to steal their personal information. Institute attorneys warn that the data collected and amassed by the Census Bureau through the ACS would be a goldmine for criminals.

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

WASHINGTON, DC — In the digital age, simply having a smartphone in your pocket can lead to the government collecting your data to investigate you as a suspect for a crime. That is the constitutional danger posed by geofence warrants—sweeping surveillance orders that compel technology companies to disclose location data for every device within a defined area and time frame, regardless of whether the individuals involved are suspected of wrongdoing.

The legality of these warrants is now before the U.S. Supreme Court in Chatrie v. United States, which must decide whether such dragnet searches violate the Fourth Amendment. In an amicus brief filed with the Court, The Rutherford Institute warns that geofence warrants represent a modern version of the general warrants that sparked the American Revolution. Rather than requiring law enforcement to identify a suspect and establish probable cause before conducting a search, these warrants reverse the constitutional order—authorizing the government to search first and decide later who might be suspicious.

“Geofence warrants allow the government to cast a wide net over innocent people, track their movements, and then narrow the list until someone fits the bill. That flips the presumption of innocence on its head,” 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 constitutional protections keep pace with technology—or whether technological capability becomes an excuse to erode them.”

Unlike traditional warrants, which must describe with particularity the person or place to be searched, geofence warrants begin with a location and sweep in everyone who happened to be nearby. Law enforcement can then request progressively more detailed information—movement patterns, account data, subscriber identities—until individuals are singled out for investigation.

In Chatrie, law enforcement obtained a geofence warrant directing Google to disclose anonymized device data for phones located within a 17.5-acre area surrounding the scene of a bank robbery. That meant the geofence area was about the size of over three New York City blocks with a diameter longer than three football fields and encompassed part of a nearby church. Although the district court found that “this particular geofence warrant plainly violates the rights enshrined in [the Fourth] Amendment,” the evidence was ultimately admitted based on an exception for the police officer acting in good-faith. But the Supreme Court’s review now squarely presents the question for future cases of whether this form of suspicionless location tracking is compatible with the Fourth Amendment at all.

During oral arguments, members of the Court grappled with the implications of allowing the government access to detailed location histories capable of revealing far more than proximity to a crime scene—such as where Americans worship, seek medical treatment, attend political meetings, or gather with family and friends. The Rutherford Institute’s brief argues that permitting geofence warrants at all, or at least without significant restrictions to protect privacy rights of innocent bystanders, would entrench a dangerous precedent in which digital convenience becomes a gateway to constant government oversight. By authorizing the bulk collection of location data from untold numbers of innocent people, these warrants threaten to normalize a system in which Americans must effectively surrender their privacy simply to move about in public life.

Ethan H. Townsend and Maura R. Cremin of McDermott Will & Schulte LLP advanced the arguments in the Chatrie amicus brief. This filing builds on Rutherford’s earlier challenge to geofence warrants in Wells v. Texas.

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.

Everything this nation once stood for is being turned on its head.

We are being asked—no, told—to believe that the greatest threat to America today is not government overreach, endless war, corruption, surveillance, or the steady erosion of constitutional rights.

No, the real threat, it seems, is speech.

Dangerous speech. Hateful speech. Critical speech. Speech that dares to challenge power.

In the wake of the reported assassination attempt on President Trump, the Trump administration has wasted no time advancing a dangerous narrative: that criticism of the president—especially criticism labeling him authoritarian or fascist—is not just wrong, but responsible for violence.

The implication is as chilling as it is unconstitutional: if you criticize the government too harshly, you may be to blame for what happens next.

Taken to its logical conclusion, the government’s argument is this: criticism fuels anger, and anger leads to violence against the Trump administration.

Which means the solution, in the government’s eyes, is simple: silence the criticism—but only when it is leveled at the Trump administration.

When White House officials suggest that calling a president a fascist may constitute libel or slander, they are not merely defending reputations—they are laying the groundwork for criminalizing dissent.

This is how it begins.

This is how republics become regimes.

First, criticism is labeled dangerous. Then it is labeled harmful. Then it is labeled illegal. And before long, it is gone.

Beware of those who want to monitor, muzzle, catalogue and censor speech—especially when the justification is “safety.” Because every time the government claims it must limit freedom to protect the public, what it is really doing is expanding its own power.

The irony is almost too glaring to ignore.

By the standards now being floated by those in power, America’s founders themselves would be considered extremists.

Seditionists. Radicals. Domestic threats.

Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Marquis De Lafayette, and John Adams would certainly have been placed on an anti-government watch list for suggesting that Americans should not only take up arms but be prepared to protect their liberties and defend themselves against the government should it violate their rights.

“What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance. Let them take arms,” declared Jefferson. He also concluded that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

“It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from its government,” insisted Paine.

And who could forget Patrick Henry with his ultimatum: “Give me liberty or give me death!”

By today’s standards, these are not the words of patriots.

They are the words of people who would be surveilled, flagged, censored—and likely arrested.

Had the government of their day succeeded in suppressing their “dangerous speech,” there would have been no Revolution. No Declaration of Independence. No Constitution. No Bill of Rights.

You see, the right to criticize the government is not a side issue.

It is the foundation of a free society. And yet, that foundation is already cracking.

More and more, any speech that challenges authority—exposes corruption, questions policy, or calls out abuses of power—is being recast as dangerous, extremist, or even violent.

The categories keep expanding: Hate speech. Misinformation. Disinformation. Conspiratorial speech. Radical speech. Anti-government speech.

Different labels, same goal: control the narrative.

What has changed is not the tactic—it’s the target.

Under the previous administration, “dangerous speech” meant election denial, COVID dissent, and those who challenged official narratives about public health and national security.

Now, under the Trump administration, “dangerous speech” means media outlets that report unfavorably on the government, comedians who mock those in power, and citizens who dare to call authoritarianism by its name.

The script keeps flipping depending on who is in power, but the ending never changes: censorship.

The message is unmistakable: criticize the wrong people, and your livelihood may be next—not because you committed a crime, but because your words were treated as one.

The latest example: the Trump administration is once again targeting former FBI director James Comey—this time for posting a photo of seashells spelling out “8647,” a slang expression of opposition to Trump, the nation’s 47^th president.

A social media post. Treated like a threat.

This is how dissent is being redefined—not as a constitutional right but as a threat.

Yet while the government wrings its hands over so-called dangerous rhetoric, it continues to wield—and expand—its own machinery of violence.

Criticism is being treated as a threat to public safety, while the police state openly embraces more brutal forms of punishment, soon in the form of execution by firing squads.

History makes one thing clear: governments do not fear violence nearly as much as they fear dissent. That is why the first target of any regime drifting toward authoritarianism is not the gun. It is the voice.

As George Orwell warned, “In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

If we allow the government to decide which words are too dangerous to be spoken, it won’t be long before we discover that the most dangerous words of all are the ones that speak truth to power.

We are further down that road than most Americans realize.

This is the part of the story Americans should recognize.

First, the government tells you certain speech is dangerous. Then it tells you those who engage in it are dangerous. Then it tells you those people must be monitored, silenced, and, eventually, punished. And all the while, it wraps these measures in the language of safety, unity, and national security.

This is not new. It is as old as tyranny itself.

As we warned in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the road to authoritarianism is paved with small compromises—especially when it comes to speech, dissent, and the willingness of the citizenry to push back.

This is how freedom rises or falls.

For those who still believe in exercising their First Amendment rights, the risks are becoming harder to ignore.

With every passing day, the line between a free society and a controlled one is being erased—replaced by a system where speech is monitored, dissent is punished, and truth itself is treated as a threat.

And once that happens, freedom doesn’t just fade—it dies, one silenced voice at a time.

WC: 1083

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

The constitutional guardrails are gone.

Leadership inside the White House is in disarray.

Congress—rather than acting as a constitutional check—has chosen blind devotion, competing to outdo itself in displays of loyalty.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

But this is not about efficiency.

It is about power.

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.

WC: 1039

WASHINGTON, D.C. — After more than a year of escalating efforts by the Trump administration to blacklist critics, censor dissent, and punish those who challenge its policies, a coalition of civil liberties organizations is urging a federal appeals court to draw a constitutional line against what it calls a sweeping and unconstitutional campaign to silence legal opposition.

The coalition filed amicus briefs with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in four consolidated cases—Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block, WilmerHale, and Susman Godfrey—and in Mark Zaid, on behalf of an attorney who represents national security whistleblowers in cases involving classified information. The coalition’s briefs challenge presidential actions that targeted law firms for representing clients and causes disfavored by the Trump administration. The coalition argues that the executive orders violate the First Amendment, the separation of powers, and due process, and represent an unprecedented attempt by the executive branch to weaponize government power against the legal profession itself. At stake, the coalition warns, is not just the fate of a handful of law firms—but whether lawyers across the country can continue to challenge the government without fear of retaliation.

“If the government can blacklist a law firm for representing an unpopular client or expressing an unpopular idea, then no one’s rights are safe,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “This is not just an abuse of power—it’s a direct assault on the Constitution. The right to dissent, to associate freely, and to challenge the government in court is what keeps tyranny in check.”

The legal challenge stems from a series of executive orders and actions issued by President Trump in 2025 targeting prominent law firms that had represented clients or causes opposed by the Trump administration. Framing such advocacy as partisan lawfare, Trump’s executive orders imposed sweeping sanctions—including revoking security clearances, terminating federal contracts, restricting access to government facilities, and discouraging federal agencies and contractors from doing business with the firms. Several were singled out for their involvement in election-related litigation, civil rights advocacy, and other matters seen as adverse to the administration’s political agenda. These measures appeared designed to coerce law firms into abandoning disfavored clients and causes and to deter others from challenging the administration in court. As the coalition argues in its brief, an independent judiciary depends on an independent bar willing to represent unpopular clients and challenge government overreach.

The Rutherford Institute joined a broad coalition in filing the amicus brief, including the ACLU, ACLU of D.C., Cato Institute, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), Institute for Justice, Knight First Amendment Institute, National Coalition Against Censorship, Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, and the Society for the Rule of Law.

 Cecillia D. Wang, Ben Wizner, Brian Hauss, Ashley Gorski, Hina Shamsi, Arthur B. Spitzer, Laura K. Follansbee, and Scott Michelman at ACLU advanced the arguments in the briefs.

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.

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

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

Another imagined a Trump-branded hotel on the Moon.

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

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

Blasphemous. Profane. Threatening. Self-aggrandizing.

These posts are not anomalies.

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

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

This is not normal.

Nor is it merely rhetorical excess.

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

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

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

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

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

Literally.

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

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

This is not serious governance. This is spectacle.

This is not rational.

This is not presidential.

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

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

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

As the New York Times reports, “Trump seems even less restrained and more incoherent at times. He uses more profanity, speaks longer and regularly makes comments rooted in fantasy rather than fact.”

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

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

As journalist Peter Baker notes, Trump “regularly depicts himself in a heroic, almost godly fashion, as a monarch, as a Superman, as a Jedi knight, as a military hero, even as a pope in a white cassock.” Trump even toyed with the idea of renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of Trump.

This is not branding.

It is the architecture of a cult of personality.

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

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

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

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

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

The Constitution provides a remedy.

The 25^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution provides a process by which the government continues to function should the president be unable to carry out his duties.

A growing chorus of individuals have loudly called to invoke the 25^th Amendment, insisting that the president is not fit for office.

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

But there is no filter for this level of dysfunction.

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

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

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

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

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

Surveillance is expanding.

Policing is becoming more militarized.

Power is becoming more centralized and less accountable.

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

No mechanism to declare it unfit.

No procedure to remove it.

Or is there?

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

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

That principle still stands.

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

Not chaos, but constitutional resistance.

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

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

WC: 1090

WASHINGTON, DC — As the U.S. government escalates military conflicts abroad and confronts rising anti-war resistance at home, a broad coalition of civil liberties organizations is warning that dissent itself is being treated as a threat.

In asking the Third Circuit Court of Appeals to rehear the case of Mahmoud Khalil—a legal U.S. resident, Columbia University graduate, husband to and father of U.S. citizens—the coalition cautions that the government is claiming the power to jail individuals for their political views while delaying any meaningful or timely judicial review. Khalil was among the first lawful residents targeted by ICE as part of the Trump administration’s crackdown on students engaged in nonviolent, anti-war protests critical of Israel’s war in Gaza.

Warning that a recent Third Circuit panel decision opens the door to government retaliation against protected political speech, the coalition—which includes the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), PEN America, The Rutherford Institute, and the First Amendment Lawyers Association—has filed an amicus brief in Khalil v. Trump calling on the full court to review and overturn the panel’s ruling. At issue is whether federal courts can immediately hear habeas corpus petitions challenging the government’s detention of an individual as being in retaliation for constitutionally protected speech before immigration proceedings have concluded. The panel ruled they cannot, effectively allowing the government to jail individuals for their speech indefinitely while insulating that conduct from timely judicial review.

“You don’t defend freedom by silencing dissent—especially in times of war,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “This is how rights disappear: when the government punishes lawful activity, delays justice, and normalizes the abuse of power. That’s not how constitutional government works—and if it’s allowed to stand, no one’s rights are secure.”

Mahmoud Khalil, a lawful permanent resident and graduate of Columbia University, was arrested by federal agents in March 2025 after engaging in nonviolent protest activity critical of U.S. foreign policy and Israel’s military actions in Gaza. Although he was not accused of any violence or criminal wrongdoing, the government sought to detain and deport him under a rarely used statute that allows the Secretary of State to remove noncitizens for speech deemed contrary to U.S. foreign policy interests. Khalil was transported to a detention facility in Louisiana, far from his family and legal counsel, and held for months while challenging his detention in federal court.

A federal district court later found that the government’s actions likely violated due process when combined with First Amendment protections and ordered his release. However, the government continued to pursue removal proceedings on alternate grounds, which Khalil maintains are pretextual and retaliatory. The civil liberties coalition’s brief warns that the Third Circuit panel’s ruling creates a dangerous precedent by allowing the government to detain individuals in retaliation for protected speech without meaningful judicial oversight for months or even years. By forcing individuals to wait until the conclusion of immigration proceedings to raise constitutional claims, the government is effectively permitted to silence speech first and answer for it later—if at all.

Jenin Younes with the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee advanced the arguments in the Khalil v. Trump 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.

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

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

Every bomb dropped abroad is a bill sent home.

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

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

This is not national defense.

This is organized theft.

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

This is not America First.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The president’s fiscal priorities include:

• $65.8 billion for Navy shipbuilding, including a new “Trump-class” Golden Fleet battleship.
• Pay raises for military troops, while freezing pay raises for civilian federal workers.
• $152 million to start rebuilding Alcatraz as a working federal prison.
• $10 billion for beautification projects in Washington, D.C.

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

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

This is how empires fall.

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

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

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

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

War is no longer a last resort.

It has become a business model.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The danger is not theoretical.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Those wars are also here at home.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The greatest threat to freedom is not a foreign enemy.

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

Don’t fall for the lie.

WC: 2170

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

Every bomb dropped abroad is a bill sent home.

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

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

This is not national defense.

This is organized theft.

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

This is not America First.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is how empires fall.

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

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

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

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

War is no longer a last resort.

It has become a business model.

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

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

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

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

The danger is not theoretical.

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

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

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

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

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

Even the administration’s account of a dramatic rescue mission of a downed weapons system officer—one involving massive resources and the destruction of U.S. aircraft—is coming under scrutiny, with some suggesting it may have been more in the way of a failed ground invasion to seize Iran’s enriched uranium.

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

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

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

It turns out that the greatest threat to freedom is not a foreign enemy.

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

Don’t fall for the lie.

WC: 1096

“Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.” — Matthew 5:3-12

“We negotiate with bombs.”— Pete Hegseth, Defense Secretary for the Trump Administration

The language of modern government is the language of empire.

It is the language of domination, retaliation, conquest and control—of enemies to be crushed, nations to be subdued, and dissenters to be silenced.

Under the Trump Administration, the language of empire has also been imbued with a religious fervor that recasts Jesus Christ—not as a peacemaker—but as a mascot for power, conquest and control.

War has been dressed up in patriotism. Wrapped in Scripture. Called “righteous.” Marketed as “peace through strength.”

But this is not a holy war. It is a political war dressed up as holy.

Despite the pageantry—crosses held aloft, prayers offered from podiums, politicians invoking God while demanding loyalty—the values animating America’s wars and power plays bear no resemblance to the teachings of Jesus Christ.

Jesus said: Love your enemies. The government says: destroy them.

Jesus said: Blessed are the peacemakers. The government says: blessed are the war-makers.

Jesus said: Whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me. The government cages the poor, criminalizes the homeless, bombs the foreigner, and calls it security.

This is not a misunderstanding of Christianity.

It is a deliberate rewriting of it.

Consider the prayer offered by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at a Pentagon worship service: “Let every round find its mark… Give … overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy. We ask these things with bold confidence in the mighty and powerful name of Jesus Christ.”

No mercy. Spoken in the name of the Prince of Peace.

This is not faith. This is blasphemy baptized in nationalism.

It is the hijacking of religion to sanctify violence—the turning of the Sermon on the Mount into a war manual.

It is also an attempt to recast modern warfare as a holy war—sanctioned by God, justified by faith, and beyond moral reproach.

That idea is as unconstitutional as it is un-Christian.

And it raises a constitutional question that should alarm every American, regardless of faith.

The First Amendment was designed to prevent exactly this kind of fusion of church and state power. It protects the free exercise of religion—but it also forbids the government from establishing, endorsing or advancing religion.

There is a difference between religious freedom and religious indoctrination.

There is a difference between private belief and state-sponsored theology.

When government officials invoke God to justify violence, when military power is cloaked in religious language, when prayer becomes a tool of state policy—we are no longer dealing with freedom of religion.

We are staring at the early stages of religious establishment.

History has shown us where that road leads.

As Thomas Jefferson warned, the Constitution erects a “wall of separation between church and state” precisely to prevent this kind of fusion of political power and religious authority.

When government begins to speak in the language of divine mandate, that wall is already being breached.

And more to the point—it is the very abuse of religion that Jesus Himself stood against.

Jesus did not preach “overwhelming violence.” He did not bless empire. He did not anoint governments to kill in His name.

As he was being executed—wrongly accused, beaten, nailed to a cross—Jesus did not call down vengeance. He prayed: “Father, forgive them.”

Forgive them. Not revenge. Not retaliation. Not “overwhelming violence.” Not “no mercy.”

And yet today, we are told that violence brings peace, domination ensures security, and revenge is strength.

It contradicts everything Jesus stood for. Everything Christianity is supposed to stand for.

What we are witnessing is not Christianity.

It is Christian nationalism—a counterfeit religion that wraps political power in religious language and calls it holy.

It is idolatry of the nation masquerading as devotion to God.

As theologian Mark Lewis Taylor warned, the true power of Jesus lies in His ability to critique empire—not to crown it.

Christians are not called to identify with power, but to speak truth to power—even at great cost.

That has always been the dividing line between genuine faith and political religion.

Yet today, far too many churches have traded prophecy for proximity to power. They have exchanged the cross for the flag.

As Peter Wehner writes in The Atlantic:

“The marketing genius of Donald Trump [is] that he never sold himself to Christians as one of them—pious, devoted, merciful, forgiving, irenic, biblically literate, a faithful husband and father, a man of high moral standards. Instead, he sold himself as their protector. He didn’t hide his cruelty or his belief that the ends justify the means; doing so would have been impossible for him because they are central features of his personality. So he did the opposite: He presented himself to Christians as a fierce, even ruthless, warrior on their behalf. It worked. He built a huge, loyal, fanatical following . . . Much of today’s evangelical world sees Trump’s viciousness not as a vice but as a virtue, so long as it is employed against those they perceive as their enemies, against those whom they resent and for whom they have a seething hatred.”

In abandoning the radical, disruptive, inconvenient Jesus, today’s evangelical church in America has opted to replace Him with a coarse, vindictive political savior in the form of Donald Trump.

This is the same man who has spitefully relished the deaths of political opponents from John McCain and Rob Reiner to Robert Mueller. Yet as Bret Stephens points out in the New York Times:

“Good people and good nations do not stomp on the grief of others. Politics is meant to end at the graveside. That’s not just some social nicety. It’s a foundational taboo that any civilized society must enforce to prevent transient personal differences from becoming generational blood feuds. That is where history will record that the deepest damage by the Trump presidency was done… But the damage that cuts deepest is never financial, legal or institutional.”

That this egomaniacal, bloviating demagogue has become the face of today’s evangelical movement underscores the profound disconnect between what Christianity should be and what it has become in the American police state.

The same Christians wholeheartedly supporting Trump’s policies rooted in cruelty, deception, violence and vengeance will proudly display their crosses, flood social media with Bible verses, and loudly proclaim Christ as the Prince of Peace.

That contradiction—celebrating leaders who lie, cheat, dehumanize and kill, so long as those leaders claim to be “on God’s side”—speaks louder than any sermon.

It tells the world that Christianity is not about following Jesus—it is about wielding power.

This is not new.

Power has always sought to co-opt religion.

Politicians court pastors. Campaigns mimic revivals. Prayer rallies double as political launches. Faith becomes a voting bloc. Scripture becomes a talking point.

Yet there is always a price to be paid for proximity to power.

Time and again, religious institutions that align themselves with the government find their message compromised, their witness diluted, and their moral authority traded for access, influence and political favor.

And in the process, the message of Jesus is hollowed out. Stripped of its challenge. Neutralized.

Because the real Jesus is dangerous to power. He doesn’t flatter kings. He confronts them.

Jesus was not crucified for being polite. He was executed as a threat.

To the authorities of his day—both religious and political—Jesus was a destabilizing force. He challenged the legitimacy of power built on coercion, greed and violence. He exposed hypocrisy. He disrupted systems of exploitation.

And for that, the empire killed Him.

Crucifixion was not just execution.

It was a warning.

This is what happens to those who refuse to submit.

Which raises a question modern Christians would rather avoid: If Jesus walked into today’s halls of power—into the Pentagon, the White House, the halls of Congress—would He be welcomed?

Or would He be surveilled, silenced, labeled a threat?

Would He bless drone strikes and military parades? Or overturn tables?

Or would he be told, as Americans increasingly are, to comply, submit, obey and defer to authority?

Because the version of Christianity now being sold to the public is not one of resistance to injustice, but one of obedience to power.

The Jesus of the Gospels was not aligned with empire. He was aligned with the poor. The outcast. The imprisoned. The stranger. “I was hungry… I was a stranger… I was in prison…”

Not: I was powerful, and you defended me.

Yet today’s political religion flips that script.

It exalts power. It sanctifies wealth. It demands loyalty to the state. And it calls this inversion of the Gospel “faith.”

But Jesus was clear:

“Those who exalt themselves will be humbled.”

“Blessed are the merciful.”

“Blessed are the meek.”

“Blessed are the peacemakers.”

There is no footnote that says—except in matters of national security.

This is the great moral crisis of our time.

Not just that the government wages endless war, but that it dares to do so in the name of God—and too many cheer it on.

The early Christians understood something we have forgotten. Their allegiance was not to Rome. It was not to Caesar. It was not to the machinery of empire.

Their allegiance was to a higher law. And for that, they were persecuted, imprisoned, executed.

They did not seek to control the empire.

They refused to conform to it.

Today, by contrast, much of the modern church has chosen comfort over courage. Influence over integrity. Access over accountability.

As a result, it has become indistinguishable from the power it once challenged.

But the teachings of Jesus have not changed.

They still confront us.

They still demand something costly.

They still refuse to be weaponized for political gain.

So we are left with a choice.

The Constitution was designed to guard against the union of political power and religious authority.

As I make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, what we are witnessing today is not just a theological failure—it is a constitutional one.

Will we follow the empire? Or will we follow Jesus? Will we bless violence—or embody mercy? Will we conform—or will we resist?

Because the two paths are not the same. And they never have been.

“Jesus wept.”

He wept for a world that confuses power with righteousness.

He wept for a people who would rather conquer than love.

He wept for those who would invoke His name while betraying everything He stood for.

And if we’re paying attention—He is still weeping now.

WC: 1819

“We negotiate with bombs.”— Pete Hegseth, Defense Secretary for the Trump Administration

The language of modern government is the language of empire.

It is the language of domination, retaliation, conquest and control—of enemies to be crushed, nations to be subdued, and dissenters to be silenced.

Under the Trump Administration, the language of empire has also been imbued with a religious fervor that recasts Jesus Christ—not as a peacemaker—but as a mascot for power, conquest and control.

War has been dressed up in patriotism. Wrapped in Scripture. Called “righteous.” Marketed as “peace through strength.”

But this is not a holy war. It is a political war dressed up as holy.

Despite the pageantry—crosses held aloft, prayers offered from podiums, politicians invoking God while demanding loyalty—the values animating America’s wars and power plays bear no resemblance to the teachings of Jesus Christ.

Jesus said: Love your enemies. The government says: destroy them.

Jesus said: Blessed are the peacemakers. The government says: blessed are the war-makers.

Jesus said: Whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me. The government cages the poor, criminalizes the homeless, bombs the foreigner, and calls it security.

This is not a misunderstanding of Christianity.

It is a deliberate rewriting of it.

Consider the prayer offered by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at a Pentagon worship service: “Let every round find its mark… Give … overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy. We ask these things with bold confidence in the mighty and powerful name of Jesus Christ.”

No mercy. Spoken in the name of the Prince of Peace.

This is not faith. This is blasphemy baptized in nationalism.

It is the hijacking of religion to sanctify violence—the turning of the Sermon on the Mount into a war manual.

It is also an attempt to recast modern warfare as a holy war—sanctioned by God, justified by faith, and beyond moral reproach.

That idea is as unconstitutional as it is un-Christian.

And it raises a constitutional question that should alarm every American, regardless of faith.

The First Amendment was designed to prevent exactly this kind of fusion of church and state power. It protects the free exercise of religion—but it also forbids the government from establishing, endorsing or advancing religion.

There is a difference between religious freedom and religious indoctrination.

There is a difference between private belief and state-sponsored theology.

When government officials invoke God to justify violence, when military power is cloaked in religious language, when prayer becomes a tool of state policy—we are no longer dealing with freedom of religion.

We are staring at the early stages of religious establishment.

History has shown us where that road leads.

As Thomas Jefferson warned, the Constitution erects a “wall of separation between church and state” precisely to prevent this kind of fusion of political power and religious authority.

When government begins to speak in the language of divine mandate, that wall is already being breached.

And more to the point—it is the very abuse of religion that Jesus Himself stood against.

Jesus did not preach “overwhelming violence.” He did not bless empire. He did not anoint governments to kill in His name.

And yet today, we are told that violence brings peace, domination ensures security, and revenge is strength.

What we are witnessing is not Christianity.

It is Christian nationalism—a counterfeit religion that wraps political power in religious language and calls it holy.

It is idolatry of the nation masquerading as devotion to God.

Christians are not called to identify with power, but to speak truth to power—even at great cost.

Yet today, far too many churches have traded prophecy for proximity to power. They have exchanged the cross for the flag.

And in the process, the message of Jesus is hollowed out. Stripped of its challenge. Neutralized.

Because the real Jesus is dangerous to power. He doesn’t flatter kings. He confronts them.

Jesus was not crucified for being polite. He was executed as a threat.

To the authorities of his day—both religious and political—Jesus was a destabilizing force. He challenged the legitimacy of power built on coercion, greed and violence. He exposed hypocrisy. He disrupted systems of exploitation.

And for that, the empire killed Him.

Crucifixion was not just execution.

It was a warning.

This is what happens to those who refuse to submit.

Which raises a question modern Christians would rather avoid: If Jesus walked into today’s halls of power—into the Pentagon, the White House, the halls of Congress—would He be welcomed?

Or would He be surveilled, silenced, labeled a threat?

Would He bless drone strikes and military parades? Or overturn tables?

Or would he be told, as Americans increasingly are, to comply, submit, obey and defer to authority?

Because the version of Christianity now being sold to the public is not one of resistance to injustice, but one of obedience to power.

The Jesus of the Gospels was not aligned with empire. “I was hungry… I was a stranger… I was in prison…”

Not: I was powerful, and you defended me.

Yet today’s political religion flips that script.

It exalts power. It sanctifies wealth. It demands loyalty to the state. And it calls this inversion of the Gospel “faith.”

But Jesus was clear: “Blessed are the peacemakers.” There is no footnote that says—except in matters of national security.

This is the great moral crisis of our time.

Not just that the government wages endless war, but that it dares to do so in the name of God—and too many cheer it on.

The early Christians understood something we have forgotten. Their allegiance was not to Rome. It was not to Caesar. It was not to the machinery of empire.

Their allegiance was to a higher law. And for that, they were persecuted, imprisoned, executed.

They did not seek to control the empire.

They refused to conform to it.

Today, by contrast, much of the modern church has become indistinguishable from the power it once challenged.

But the teachings of Jesus have not changed.

They still confront us.

They still demand something costly.

They still refuse to be weaponized for political gain.

So we are left with a choice.

The Constitution was designed to guard against the union of political power and religious authority.

As I make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, what we are witnessing today is not just a theological failure—it is a constitutional one.

WC: 1097

“There is no art which one government sooner learns of another than that of draining money from the pockets of the people.”—Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations

You’re not imagining it.

Everything costs more. Everything is monitored.

Everything feels like it’s designed to take—from your wallet, your time, your freedom.

That’s because it is.

The government has turned everyday life into a revenue stream—funding endless wars, bloated agencies, surveillance systems, and profit-driven policing… all on your dime.

You’re not just paying taxes. You’re paying to be watched. Paying to be policed. Paying to be controlled.

This isn’t government. It’s a business model.

By now, it has become painfully clear that the only economic plan being advanced by the Trump administration is the kind that enriches the oligarchy at the expense of everyone else.

If the government’s newly dubbed “war on waste,” headed by Vice President J.D. Vance, is anything like its deceptively futile past efforts to drain the swamp and use DOGE to cut spending that is inefficient, we should expect to see corruption, graft and waste rise while vital programs that benefit the taxpayer get slashed.

The level of self-serving corruption, indulgence and excess by the elite ruling class while Americans struggle to make ends meet is off the charts.

Under President Trump, his gilding of the White House has coincided with the dawn of a new self-serving age of indulgence for the American oligarchy. As Debbie Millman writes for the New York Times: “Trump is showing the world that his presidency is a royal court where a select few are invited to pledge their allegiance… Trump is refashioning the presidential residence into a palace; our democracy is now a members-only club.”

This is Donald Trump’s “let them eat cake” moment.

Tens of millions in one year alone for the president’s weekend golf trips while government agencies are dismantled and tens of thousands of federal workers have their jobs slashed. According to the web tracker “Did Trump Golf Today?” Trump has spent 23.5% of his presidency golfing at an estimated cost of $141 million to the taxpayer.

An extra $200 billion in additional defense funding so Pete Hegseth can make a game out of war with Iran. More than $16 billion was spent in the first 12 days of Trump’s war on Iran. That does not include the rising cost of gas and consumer goods or the long-term costs of supporting those injured in the war.

$1 billion to a French company to not develop two wind projects off the coasts of North Carolina and New York.

$14 billion in oil revenue to Iran to fund its war with the U.S. 

$22 million in one month on lobsters and ribeye steak so the Defense Department wouldn’t have to risk losing some of their taxpayer-funded budget. $1.8 million for musical instruments, including a “$98,329 Steinway & Sons grand piano for the Air Force chief of staff’s home, a $26,000 violin, and a $21,750 custom handmade flute from the luxury Japanese brand Muramatsu.”

$400 million for a 90,000-square-foot ballroom to which most taxpayers will never be invited.

$75 - $150 million to turn a public golf course into a championship-level golf course in the nation’s capital.

$100 million for a 250-foot “Arc de Trump” next to Arlington National Cemetery.

At least $60 million for a UFC event on the White House South Lawn to commemorate Donald Trump’s 80^th birthday.

While members of Trump’s inner circle dine on lobster and filet mignon, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suggests that Americans struggling with the high cost of beef instead buy and eat “cheap cuts” like liver.

Meanwhile, the rest of the country is left to absorb a higher cost of living driven by Trump’s tariffs, inflation, and economic policies that punish the many to benefit the few.

At every turn, the Trump administration’s claims of slashing government spending have translated into even greater expense for the taxpayer with little to nothing to show for it.

All of those DOGE layoffs may have reduced the size of the federal workforce on paper, but in reality they have resulted in taxpayers footing the bill for unemployment benefits instead of salaries.

Trump may have dropped oversight into police misconduct—effectively giving a green light to police violence—but taxpayers will still be forced to pay for every lawsuit and settlement that follows.

In the eyes of Trump and his cohorts, you are not a citizen—you are a revenue stream, and the government is cashing in.

Call it what you will—taxes, penalties, fees, fines, regulations, tariffs, tickets, permits, surcharges, tolls, asset forfeitures—but the only word that truly describes the constant bilking of the American taxpayer by the government and its corporate partners is this: theft.

We’re living in a topsy-turvy Sherwood Forest where the government and its corporate allies aren’t stealing from the rich to feed the poor—they’re stealing from the poor, the middle class, and anyone not politically connected to further enrich the powerful.

The result is as predictable as it is devastating: the poor get poorer, the rich get richer, and the American Dream has been replaced by a surveillance state propped up by endless war, crippling debt, and legalized plunder.

What Americans still fail to grasp is this: if the government can take your property, your income, your privacy, and your freedom at will, you don’t have rights—you have privileges.

And privileges can be revoked.

The American police state, with its surveillance cameras, militarized police, SWAT raids, fusion centers, drones, AI tracking systems, predictive policing algorithms, asset forfeiture schemes, and privatized prisons, is not about keeping you safe.

It is about profit.

It is a sprawling, multi-trillion-dollar ecosystem designed to move money from taxpayers through government agencies and into corporate hands, all under the ever-shifting justifications of “security,” “law and order,” and “national emergency.”

The rationalizations never change.

We are told it is about terrorism, drugs, immigration, public safety, or civil unrest. Today, those justifications have simply been expanded to include artificial intelligence, foreign adversaries, domestic extremism, and a permanent state of war abroad.

But these are pretexts.

The real motive has remained the same for decades: control the population, monetize the system, and keep the money flowing upward.

Follow the money and the truth becomes impossible to ignore: The government isn’t serving you. It’s billing you.

The federal government is now barreling toward $1.5 trillion in annual military spending, a staggering escalation that will add trillions more to the national debt in the coming decade. At the same time, the Trump administration is pouring hundreds of billions more into a widening conflict with Iran, where the cost of war is measured not only in lives lost but in taxpayer dollars funneled directly into the coffers of defense contractors.

At home, policing has become a billion-dollar industry unto itself. Federal, state and local governments spend more than $80 billion a year on policing, much of it used to transform civilian police forces into paramilitary units equipped with battlefield weapons and surveillance technology.

The prison system continues to operate as a profit engine, costing more than $100 billion annually while warehousing nearly 2 million people and placing millions more under government supervision. It costs taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars each year to incarcerate a single individual, many of them nonviolent offenders, while private prison corporations reap the financial rewards of a system designed to keep cells full.

Through civil asset forfeiture, law enforcement agencies seize billions of dollars in cash, cars and property, often without ever charging the owner with a crime, creating a perverse incentive to police for profit rather than justice.

The Department of Homeland Security, once sold to the public as a temporary safeguard, has become a permanent fixture of the American landscape, consuming more than $100 billion annually while expanding its reach into every corner of domestic life.

Immigration enforcement has evolved into a sprawling detention and deportation machine fueled by tens of billions in taxpayer funding, increasingly targeting not only undocumented immigrants but also legal residents and individuals whose only offense is dissent.

Layered on top of all of this is a rapidly expanding digital dragnet in which government agencies partner with private tech companies to deploy artificial intelligence systems capable of tracking, predicting and cataloging human behavior, turning everyday life into a series of data points to be monitored, analyzed and controlled.

Even local governments have been drawn into the scheme, generating billions through fines, fees, traffic cameras and automated enforcement systems that disproportionately target those least able to pay, turning ordinary citizens into revenue streams.

This is not accidental. It is a business model.

The same government that claims it cannot afford healthcare, education or housing somehow always finds unlimited funds for war. As President Eisenhower warned, the military-industrial complex feeds on conflict, and today that machine has become both global and permanent.

The wars do not end.

The spending does not stop.

And the bill always comes due to the American taxpayer.

Every bomb that falls, every missile launched, every drone strike carried out carries a price tag, and that price tag has your name on it.

At home, the logic is no different.

Policing has shifted away from protecting communities and toward managing populations, particularly those deemed inconvenient, undesirable or expendable. SWAT raids are deployed for minor offenses, predictive policing programs target individuals before any crime has been committed, and surveillance technologies are used to monitor activists, journalists and political dissenters.

Poverty itself has been criminalized, with people fined, ticketed and jailed for low-level infractions, while homelessness is treated not as a social failure but as a law enforcement opportunity.

Even the nation’s schools have been folded into this pipeline, where zero-tolerance policies and truancy enforcement funnel children into the criminal justice system at an early age.

What passes for law enforcement today is increasingly indistinguishable from revenue enforcement.

None of this happens in isolation.

Corporate America is deeply embedded in every aspect of this system. Defense contractors profit from war. Technology companies profit from surveillance. Private prison corporations profit from incarceration. Data brokers profit from harvesting and selling your personal information. Financial institutions profit from the ever-expanding national debt.

Even prison labor, paid pennies on the dollar, feeds directly into corporate supply chains, creating yet another incentive to keep the system running at full capacity.

When government power and corporate profit become intertwined in this way, the Constitution becomes optional and profit becomes policy.

In this new economy, you are no longer just a citizen.

You are a revenue stream, a data point, a potential suspect, and a body to be managed.

Whether through taxes, fines, surveillance or forced labor, the system is designed to extract value from you at every stage of your life.

And when you add it all up, the cost is not merely financial—it is constitutional.

Every dollar poured into this machinery comes at the expense of your privacy, your property, your due process rights, your freedom of movement, and your freedom of speech.

As I make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is the real bottom line: you are paying for the erosion of your own freedoms.

If this system continues unchecked, the future is already taking shape—a nation in which everything is monitored, everything is monetized, and nothing is truly free.

The solution is not more funding, more surveillance or more enforcement.

It is the opposite.

It is time to defund the police state, dismantle the profit incentives, restore constitutional limits, and return power—and resources—to the people.

Because until that happens, the theft will continue.

And the only question left will be how much is left to steal.

WC: 1964

You’re not imagining it.

Everything costs more. Everything is monitored.

Everything feels like it’s designed to take—from your wallet, your time, your freedom.

That’s because it is.

The government has turned everyday life into a revenue stream—funding endless wars, bloated agencies, surveillance systems, and profit-driven policing… all on your dime.

You’re not just paying taxes. You’re paying to be watched. Paying to be policed. Paying to be controlled.

This isn’t government. It’s a business model.

By now, it has become painfully clear that the only economic plan being advanced by the Trump administration is the kind that enriches the oligarchy at the expense of everyone else.

This is Donald Trump’s “let them eat cake” moment.

Tens of millions in one year alone for the president’s weekend golf trips while government agencies are dismantled and tens of thousands of federal workers have their jobs slashed. According to the web tracker “Did Trump Golf Today?” Trump has spent 23.5% of his presidency golfing at an estimated cost of $141 million to the taxpayer.

An extra $200 billion in additional defense funding so Pete Hegseth can make a game out of war with Iran. More than $16 billion was spent in the first 12 days of Trump’s war on Iran. That does not include the rising cost of gas and consumer goods or the long-term costs of supporting those injured in the war.

$1 billion to a French company to not develop two wind projects off the coasts of North Carolina and New York.

$14 billion in oil revenue to Iran to fund its war with the U.S. 

$22 million in one month on lobsters and ribeye steak so the Defense Department wouldn’t have to risk losing some of their taxpayer-funded budget. $1.8 million for musical instruments, including a “$98,329 Steinway & Sons grand piano for the Air Force chief of staff’s home, a $26,000 violin, and a $21,750 custom handmade flute from the luxury Japanese brand Muramatsu.”

$400 million for a 90,000-square-foot ballroom to which most taxpayers will never be invited.

$75 - $150 million to turn a public golf course into a championship-level golf course in the nation’s capital.

$100 million for a 250-foot “Arc de Trump” next to Arlington National Cemetery.

At least $60 million for a UFC event on the White House South Lawn to commemorate Donald Trump’s 80^th birthday.

While members of Trump’s inner circle dine on lobster and filet mignon, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suggests that Americans struggling with the high cost of beef instead buy and eat “cheap cuts” like liver.

Meanwhile, the rest of the country is left to absorb a higher cost of living driven by Trump’s tariffs, inflation, and economic policies that punish the many to benefit the few.

At every turn, the Trump administration’s claims of slashing government spending have translated into even greater expense for the taxpayer with little to nothing to show for it.

All of those DOGE layoffs may have reduced the size of the federal workforce on paper, but in reality they have resulted in taxpayers footing the bill for unemployment benefits instead of salaries.

Trump may have dropped oversight into police misconduct—effectively giving a green light to police violence—but taxpayers will still be forced to pay for every lawsuit and settlement that follows.

In the eyes of Trump and his cohorts, you are not a citizen—you are a revenue stream, and the government is cashing in.

Call it what you will—taxes, penalties, fees, fines, regulations, tariffs, tickets, permits, surcharges, tolls, asset forfeitures—but the only word that truly describes the constant bilking of the American taxpayer by the government and its corporate partners is this: theft.

We’re living in a topsy-turvy Sherwood Forest where the government and its corporate allies aren’t stealing from the rich to feed the poor—they’re stealing from the poor, the middle class, and anyone not politically connected to further enrich the powerful.

The result is as predictable as it is devastating: the poor get poorer, the rich get richer, and the American Dream has been replaced by a surveillance state propped up by endless war, crippling debt, and legalized plunder.

What Americans still fail to grasp is this: if the government can take your property, your income, your privacy, and your freedom at will, you don’t have rights—you have privileges.

And privileges can be revoked.

The American police state, with its surveillance cameras, militarized police, SWAT raids, fusion centers, drones, AI tracking systems, predictive policing algorithms, asset forfeiture schemes, and privatized prisons, is not about keeping you safe.

It is about profit.

It is a sprawling, multi-trillion-dollar ecosystem designed to move money from taxpayers through government agencies and into corporate hands, all under the ever-shifting justifications of “security,” “law and order,” and “national emergency.”

The rationalizations never change.

We are told it is about terrorism, drugs, immigration, public safety, or civil unrest. Today, those justifications have simply been expanded to include artificial intelligence, foreign adversaries, domestic extremism, and a permanent state of war abroad.

But these are pretexts.

The real motive has remained the same for decades: control the population, monetize the system, and keep the money flowing upward.

Follow the money and the truth becomes impossible to ignore: The government isn’t serving you. It’s billing you.

The same government that claims it cannot afford healthcare, education or housing somehow always finds unlimited funds for war.

And the bill always comes due to the American taxpayer.

In this new economy, you are no longer just a citizen.

You are a revenue stream, a data point, a potential suspect, and a body to be managed.

Whether through taxes, fines, surveillance or forced labor, the system is designed to extract value from you at every stage of your life.

And when you add it all up, the cost is not merely financial—it is constitutional.

Every dollar poured into this machinery comes at the expense of your privacy, your property, your due process rights, your freedom of movement, and your freedom of speech.

As I make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is the real bottom line: you are paying for the erosion of your own freedoms.

It is time to defund the police state, dismantle the profit incentives, restore constitutional limits, and return power—and resources—to the people.

Because until that happens, the theft will continue.

And the only question left will be how much is left to steal.

WC: 1088

WASHINGTON, DC —In a unanimous ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court has cleared the way for a Mississippi street preacher to challenge a local law that restricted his ability to share his faith—making clear that Americans do not lose their right to challenge the future enforcement of unconstitutional laws simply because they were punished under those laws in the past.

In Olivier v. City of Brandon, the Supreme Court narrowed the scope of its prior ruling from Heck v. Humphrey, which has often been used by government officials to shut down constitutional challenges before they ever get heard. The decision removes a major obstacle not just for street preachers, but for anyone speaking out in public. Protesters, journalists, students, and everyday citizens who are convicted under questionable laws can still ask the courts to stop those laws from being used against them going forward.

The ruling comes as The Rutherford Institute is warning officials in South Padre Island, Texas, not to target street preachers during Spring Break through selective enforcement of local laws. For decades, The Rutherford Institute has defended the rights of individuals to speak freely in public spaces, standing firm on the principle that the government cannot pick and choose which messages are allowed.

“Street preachers today are the canaries in the coal mine for the First Amendment. If the government can silence them, it can silence anyone—protesters, dissidents, and anyone whose speech runs afoul of those in power,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “For too long, officials have imposed minor violations as an excuse to shut down speech and then argued that those same violations prevent any legal challenge. This ruling pushes back against that playbook and makes clear that the Constitution still applies.”

In a letter sent to the South Padre Island City Council, Rutherford Institute attorneys detail how city officials allegedly targeted street preachers for noise ordinance violations during Spring Break in 2025 while allowing nearby bars and beachgoers to blast louder music without consequence—an example of unconstitutional, viewpoint-based discrimination. According to the Institute’s letter, street preachers were warned or cited for using sound amplification, while others producing equal or greater noise in the exact same area were left alone, suggesting that enforcement was aimed at silencing a particular message rather than addressing noise levels. Rutherford attorneys argue that this kind of unequal treatment violates the First Amendment, runs afoul of basic due process protections, and infringes on religious freedom under the Texas Religious Freedom Restoration Act (TRFRA). Warning that such actions expose the city to legal liability, the letter urges officials to ensure that the law is enforced fairly and not used as a tool to suppress protected speech.

The situation in South Padre Island highlights the very concerns at the heart of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Olivier. Although the Court’s ruling centered on access to the courts, its implications reach much further: the government cannot shield potentially unconstitutional laws from review simply by having punished people who violated them.

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.

“When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything... Grab ‘em by the pussy. You can do anything.”— Donald J. Trump on seizing women, Access Hollywood (2005)

“I think I can do anything I want with it. Whether I free it, take it, I think I can do anything I want with it.”—Donald Trump on seizing Cuba (2026)

It’s been 20 years since Donald Trump bragged that, as a star, he could do anything—even assault women—and get away with it.

Two decades later, what once sounded like crude bravado has become a governing philosophy: might makes right, power excuses everything, and accountability is for other people—not this president.

Despite the Access Hollywood recording—and everything it revealed about his character—Trump was elected to the White House twice. And ever since, he has governed exactly as he promised: as a man who believes he is unaccountable, entitled, and free to act without limits.

The same mindset that once bragged about being able to “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters” has now been scaled up and weaponized through the presidency.

With a core MAGA following that seems unwilling to hold him accountable for any wrongdoing, Trump has justifiably earned his nickname as “Teflon Don.”

He can be accused of sexually assaulting young girls, and he won’t lose any voters. He can, as commander-in-chief, sanction the bombing of a girls’ school in Iran—killing young girls, their mothers and teachers—and he won’t lose any voters. He can torpedo a thriving economy, sending inflation and gas prices soaring, and he won’t lose any voters. He can dismantle a government structure that has been in place for over 200 years, and he won’t lose any voters. He can be a walking—talking—living contradiction of everything Christians claim to stand for, and he won’t lose any voters. He can send Americans servicemen and women to die in wars that the U.S. had no business starting, and he won’t lose any voters.

This is the mindset now shaping American policy.

Trump’s acts of aggression against other nations—Venezuela. Iran. Greenland. Canada. Now Cuba—are expansions of the same worldview, only this time backed by the full force of the U.S. military and funded by American taxpayers.

It is the logic of the schoolyard bully: Take what you want. Dare others to stop you. Punish anyone who resists.

That same might-makes-right mindset has transformed the American presidency into something that tracks more closely with the abuses of King George III than with our revolutionary forebears who risked their lives and fortunes to stand against tyranny.

Our Founders didn’t just fight a war—they fought a mindset. They stood against a King who thought his word was the law.

By treating the Constitution like a list of suggestions, Trump is bringing that King back to life. He’s trading our hard-won freedom for the ego of one man who thinks he is untouchable.

We are trading a republic for a playground where the bully makes the rules.

Trump wanted Venezuela’s oil, so he used the military to get it—and then bullied the country’s leaders into letting him keep it and its profits.

The tactics—swaggering, arrogant, and always prepared to browbeat and mow over anyone and anything in his way—have become all too familiar.

Trump wants a new ballroom? Tear down the old one and build another.

Trump wants to be in charge of global peace? Seize the U.S. Institute of Peace and rename it.

Trump wants to prove his economic prowess? Levy tariffs against any nations who refuse to fall in line.

Trump wants to be seen as the one who solved Iran? Launch a preemptive war that kills civilians, destabilizes regions, and threatens the global economy—then turn to the same allies he once disparaged to bail him out.

The pattern is unmistakable: Power without restraint. Action without accountability. Force without principle.

And when the law stands in the way, it is bent—or ignored. Justice is weaponized. Congress is sidelined. The courts are defied, their rulings delayed or disregarded when inconvenient. Due process becomes conditional—a privilege for the favored few, optional for the disfavored.

This is not constitutional governance. This is how a bully operates: rules are for other people, constitutional prohibitions are inconveniences, and the law becomes whatever the one in power says it is.

The same egomaniacal traits are evident in how Trump treats dissent.

Criticism is not tolerated—it is punished.

Media outlets that report unfavorably are threatened with government retaliation. The FCC is weaponized to intimidate broadcasters. “Fake news” is redefined to mean anything that challenges the narrative.

Truth, in Trump’s America, is whatever serves power.

And those who challenge that power are ridiculed, demeaned, and dehumanized.

Trump insults, belittles, and mocks anyone he considers an opponent.

He calls California Governor Gavin Newsom “Newscum” and mocks him as “low IQ” for being dyslexic.

He routinely disparages women, attacking their appearance and intelligence if they dare to challenge him. He referred to New York Times correspondent Maggie Haberman as “Maggot Hagerman” and a “SLEAZEBAG writer.” He told Bloomberg reporter Catherine Lucey to be “quiet, piggy.”

This is not behavior that should be brushed off as a personality quirk.

It is a reflection of character.

And when that character is paired with unchecked power, it becomes dangerous.

Trump’s embrace of the so-called unitary executive theory—which elevates the presidency into an all-powerful office under a distorted reading of Article II—reveals the logical endpoint of this mindset: a president who believes he can do anything, answer to no one, and operate above the law.

In a constitutional republic, no one is supposed to be above the law.

A bully—an autocrat—a dictator—believes he is the law.

One think tank has rightly concluded that the U.S. under Trump is going through a rapid process of “autocratisation,” faster than any other dictatorship in the world.

As The Guardian reports, “the speed with which US democracy is being dismantled is unprecedented in modern history. The main factor is a ‘rapid and aggressive concentration of powers in the presidency’… Congress has been marginalised, jeopardising the ‘checks and balances’ (judicial and legislative constraints on the executive) so crucial to US democracy. At the same time, civil rights have been rapidly declining and freedom of expression is now at its lowest level since the 1940s.”

This is what happens when a man who believes he can do anything is given the power to do almost everything.

“Peace through strength” has become the Trump administration’s rhetorical cover for preemptive violence, military incursions, and acts of aggression that bypass Congress and ignore constitutional limits.

Distractions. Deflections. Wag-the-dog theatrics. That is the spectacle.

It’s increasingly hard not to feel as if the noise on the world stage—the wars, the threats, the swagger—is a convenient distraction meant to keep us from asking the hard questions about the man who reportedly appears tens of thousands of times in the Epstein files.

Perhaps if we are distracted enough—by the brutality of war and the easy dismissal of innocent lives lost—we will fail to grapple with the deeply troubling allegations and connections raised in the Epstein files. One account alleges that Epstein introduced a 13-year-old girl to Trump, “who subsequently forced her head down to his exposed penis which she subsequently bit. In response, Trump punched her in the head and kicked her out.”

This allegation alone deserves serious scrutiny. Because if there is even a grain of truth to it, it raises profound questions about Trump’s character and fitness for public office.

This should never be a partisan issue.

It is a question of character.

And even setting aside the most disturbing allegations, the public record alone tells a troubling story: a man who has long boasted of his treatment of women, who has admitted to infidelity and exploitation, and who has faced repeated accusations of dishonesty, fraud, and abuse of power.

Is this really the man we want as a role model for our young people?

Is this really the image of leadership we want to project to the nation—and the world?

At what point do we admit that character still matters?

Because the character on display here—cruel, arrogant, insulting, egomaniacal, and devoid of restraint—is not incidental to Trump’s presidency.

It defines it.

For too long, Trump’s supporters have excused his behavior as a refreshing willingness to “tell it like it is.” His press secretary has described his insults as “frank” and open and honest.

But vulgarity is not honesty. Cruelty is not strength. And abuse of power is not leadership.

Americans recognize this. According to Pew Research, nearly seven in ten Americans believe Trump is attempting to expand presidential power beyond that of his predecessors—and most view that as a danger, not a virtue.

When asked to rank U.S. presidents, Trump comes in last, with nearly half of respondents rating him as poor.

History has set a higher standard.

Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, and George Washington—they were rated as “outstanding.” Not perfect men, but men who understood that leadership requires restraint, responsibility, and a sense of duty beyond oneself.

John F. Kennedy challenged Americans to ask what they could do for their country.

Trump, by contrast, governs as if the country exists to serve him.

We should be better than this.

America deserves better than a president whose conduct is defined by insult, impulse, and intimidation.

Because in the end, this is what it comes down to: we have put a schoolyard bully on the world stage, and we are pretending it is leadership.

A man who measures strength by how much he can dominate others. A man who confuses cruelty with leadership. A man who believes that power means never having to say no—to himself.

The bully doesn’t follow rules—he rewrites or ignores them. And like all bullies, this particular bully thrives not just on aggression, but on silence, fear, and complicity.

Bullies don’t rise to power alone.

They are enabled. Excused. Defended. Normalized. Until their behavior becomes the standard.

That is how a nation loses its moral center.

We are already seeing the consequences.

A government that mocks instead of leads. A presidency that intimidates instead of inspires. A political culture that rewards aggression and punishes restraint.

The bully’s code—might makes right—has replaced the Constitution’s promise of equal justice under law. But history warns us that power without restraint is just another name for a King.

This nation was born in defiance of a bully.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, a king who believed himself untouchable used force, intimidation, and unchecked power to bend a people to his will.

The colonists refused.

They stood their ground—not because they were the strongest, but because they believed they were right.

They understood something we seem to be forgetting: Power without principle is tyranny. And tyranny, no matter how loud or forceful, is not invincible.

The question now is whether we still believe that.

Whether we still have the courage to reject the politics of domination. Whether we are willing to demand leaders who embody something better than ego, arrogance and aggression. Whether we will continue to reward the bully—or finally refuse to be ruled by one.

Because the example we tolerate is the example we become.

And right now, the lesson we are teaching our children, our country, and the world is this: the bully wins—unless someone finally refuses to play by his rules.

We’ve seen this script before.

As I’ve warned in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the collapse of a country starts the moment we decide that the bully is the hero.

We may already be in the final act of that story. But we can still change the ending—if we remember that in America, the law is king, and the citizenry are supposed to be the masters, not the servants.

WC: 2025

“When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything... Grab ‘em by the pussy. You can do anything.”— Donald J. Trump on seizing women, Access Hollywood (2005)

“I think I can do anything I want with it. Whether I free it, take it, I think I can do anything I want with it.”—Donald Trump on seizing Cuba (2026)

It’s been 20 years since Donald Trump bragged that, as a star, he could do anything—even assault women—and get away with it.

Two decades later, what once sounded like crude bravado has become a governing philosophy: might makes right, power excuses everything, and accountability is for other people—not this president.

Despite the Access Hollywood recording—and everything it revealed about his character—Trump was elected to the White House twice. And ever since, he has governed exactly as he promised: as a man who believes he is unaccountable, entitled, and free to act without limits.

The same mindset that once bragged about being able to “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters” has now been scaled up and weaponized through the presidency.

With a core MAGA following that seems unwilling to hold him accountable for any wrongdoing, Trump has justifiably earned his nickname as “Teflon Don.”

He can be accused of sexually assaulting young girls, and he won’t lose any voters. He can, as commander-in-chief, sanction the bombing of a girls’ school in Iran—killing young girls, their mothers and teachers—and he won’t lose any voters. He can torpedo a thriving economy, sending inflation and gas prices soaring, and he won’t lose any voters. He can dismantle a government structure that has been in place for over 200 years, and he won’t lose any voters. He can be a walking—talking—living contradiction of everything Christians claim to stand for, and he won’t lose any voters. He can send Americans servicemen and women to die in wars that the U.S. had no business starting, and he won’t lose any voters.

This is the mindset now shaping American policy.

Trump’s acts of aggression against other nations—Venezuela. Iran. Greenland. Canada. Now Cuba—are expansions of the same worldview, only this time backed by the full force of the U.S. military and funded by American taxpayers.

It is the logic of the schoolyard bully: Take what you want. Dare others to stop you. Punish anyone who resists.

Trump wanted Venezuela’s oil, so he used the military to get it—and then bullied the country’s leaders into letting him keep it and its profits.

The tactics—swaggering, arrogant, and always prepared to browbeat and mow over anyone and anything in his way—have become all too familiar.

Trump wants a new ballroom? Tear down the old one and build another.

Trump wants to be in charge of global peace? Seize the U.S. Institute of Peace and rename it.

Trump wants to prove his economic prowess? Levy tariffs against any nations who refuse to fall in line.

Trump wants to be seen as the one who solved Iran? Launch a preemptive war that kills civilians, destabilizes regions, and threatens the global economy—then turn to the same allies he once disparaged to bail him out.

The pattern is unmistakable: Power without restraint. Action without accountability. Force without principle.

This is not constitutional governance. This is how a bully operates: rules are for other people, constitutional prohibitions are inconveniences, and the law becomes whatever the one in power says it is.

The same egomaniacal traits are evident in how Trump treats dissent.

Criticism is not tolerated—it is punished.

Media outlets that report unfavorably are threatened with government retaliation. The FCC is weaponized to intimidate broadcasters. “Fake news” is redefined to mean anything that challenges the narrative.

Truth, in Trump’s America, is whatever serves power.

And those who challenge that power are ridiculed, demeaned, and dehumanized.

This is not behavior that should be brushed off as a personality quirk.

It is a reflection of character.

And when that character is paired with unchecked power, it becomes dangerous.

In a constitutional republic, no one is supposed to be above the law.

A bully—an autocrat—a dictator—believes he is the law.

“Peace through strength” has become the Trump administration’s rhetorical cover for preemptive violence, military incursions, and acts of aggression that bypass Congress and ignore constitutional limits.

Yet abuse of power is not leadership.

America deserves better.

Because in the end, this is what it comes down to: we have put a schoolyard bully on the world stage, and we are pretending it is leadership.

A man who measures strength by how much he can dominate others. A man who confuses cruelty with leadership. A man who believes that power means never having to say no—to himself.

The bully doesn’t follow rules—he rewrites or ignores them. And like all bullies, this particular bully thrives not just on aggression, but on silence, fear, and complicity.

The bully’s code—might makes right—has replaced the Constitution’s promise of equal justice under law. But history warns us that power without restraint is just another name for a King.

This nation was born in defiance of a bully.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, a king who believed himself untouchable used force, intimidation, and unchecked power to bend a people to his will.

The colonists refused.

They stood their ground—not because they were the strongest, but because they believed they were right.

They understood something we seem to be forgetting: Power without principle is tyranny. And tyranny, no matter how loud or forceful, is not invincible.

The question now is whether we still believe that. Whether we will continue to reward the bully—or finally refuse to be ruled by one.

Because the example we tolerate is the example we become.

And right now, the lesson we are teaching our children, our country, and the world is this: the bully wins—unless someone finally refuses to play by his rules.

We’ve seen this script before.

As I’ve warned in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the collapse of a country starts the moment we decide that the bully is the hero.

We may already be in the final act of that story. But we can still change the ending—if we remember that in America, the law is king, and the citizenry are supposed to be the masters, not the servants.

WC: 1092

WASHINGTON, DC — The U.S. Supreme Court has paved the way for police to enter homes without a warrant under the pretext of emergency aid.

In a blow to longstanding Fourth Amendment protections inside the home, the Court ruled in Case v. Montana that police need only an “objectively reasonable basis” for believing an occupant is seriously injured or imminently threatened with injury in order to enter a home without a warrant.

Attorneys for The Rutherford Institute warned the Court in an amicus brief that an expansive emergency-aid exception could be easily manipulated to allow unchecked government intrusion into the home. Although the Court declined to require the higher standard of probable cause—insisting that probable cause is “peculiarly related to criminal investigations”—it agreed with the Institute in rejecting the Montana Supreme Court’s broader “community caretaker” justification that would have allowed warrantless entry based merely on reasonable suspicion.

“There was a time in America when a person’s home was a sanctuary, protected from unlawful searches and seizures by the Fourth Amendment. That promise is dead,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “When government agents can invade homes on flimsy pretexts, every American’s privacy is at risk.”

The case arose after police were dispatched to William Case’s residence for a welfare check. Case’s ex-girlfriend had called 911 to report that he was intoxicated and suicidal and that she heard a sound resembling a gun being cocked before the line went dead. When officers arrived, no one responded to their knocking and announcements. Through the windows, officers observed empty beer cans, an empty holster, and a notepad. After approximately forty minutes, officers breached the home with long-barrel firearms and a ballistic shield—but without a warrant. During the sweep of the home, an officer shot Case when he emerged from a closet holding an object the officer believed was a weapon.

Case survived and was later charged with assaulting a police officer. He moved to suppress the evidence obtained following the warrantless entry, arguing that the Fourth Amendment requires police to meet the higher probable cause standard before entering a home. The Supreme Court disagreed, holding that officers need only an “objectively reasonable basis” to believe an occupant is seriously injured or imminently threatened with injury in order to justify warrantless entry. The Court noted, however, that an emergency-aid entry does not authorize officers to search beyond what is reasonably necessary to address the emergency while ensuring officer safety.

Civil liberties advocates warn that the ruling could have dangerous consequences in situations involving mental health crises. The Institute’s brief cited a Washington Post report showing that during a two-year period, calls for help resulted in police killing 178 of the very people officers had been summoned to assist. Justice Sotomayor referenced the same report in her concurring opinion, cautioning that unwanted police entry into a home during a mental health crisis “can escalate the situation rather than ameliorate it.”

Advocates also warn that the Court’s decision, combined with another recent ruling allowing warrantless searches of homes based on suspicion that a probationer or parolee may reside there, continues to erode the Fourth Amendment’s protection of the home.

Michael J. Lockerby, Matthew Horton, Samuel M. Habein, and Molly Hayssen of Foley & Lardner 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.

“He went mad and lost America.”—Ian Martin, “The madness of King Trump, America’s sulky George III sequel”

Dysfunction, decadence, depravity and a death cult: that, in a nutshell, sums up the mindset now at the heart of the Trump administration.

History shows that when political movements glorify violence, celebrate cruelty, and frame conflict in apocalyptic moral terms, they often drift toward what scholars describe as a “death cult”—a worldview in which destruction becomes proof of righteousness and human life becomes expendable in pursuit of ideological victory.

Troubling reports have surfaced that apocalyptic Christian rhetoric is being used to justify the Trump administration’s attacks on Iran as part of an “end-times” struggle between good and evil. “President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth,” one commander told his combat unit.

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation—which is comprised primarily of Christians—has received more than 200 calls and more than 100 complaints that military commanders have characterized Trump’s attacks on Iran as a religious war.

Once war is framed as a holy mission, cruelty quickly becomes a virtue.

Measured against that standard, what we are witnessing now should alarm anyone who values human life or constitutional government.

With each new release from the Epstein files, another allegation of depravity surfaces involving Donald Trump.

Every day, the Trump administration doubles down on cruelty, inhumanity, and a wrecking-ball approach to governing.

Every moment Congress allows this madness and corruption to continue, more innocent people die—and the American dream of a nation built on liberty, justice and opportunity dies a little more.

That taxpayers are being forced to fund this evil masquerading as governance only deepens the outrage. In the first two days of the U.S. war with Iran alone, the Pentagon reportedly used roughly $5.6 billion worth of munitions—spent in service of a war Congress never authorized.

Congress has failed in its duty to act as a guardrail against executive excess and overreach. Its inaction is not merely partisan—it is a betrayal of “we the people.”

The Supreme Court has deferred, deflected and delayed in holding the president accountable to the rule of law, which reveals exactly where their allegiance lies—and it is not with the Constitution.

Meanwhile, large segments of the evangelical community remain silent about the mortal and venial sins being perpetrated in their name by leaders who show little interest in what the Judeo-Christian tradition actually requires of its followers.

That silence speaks volumes. And while religious leaders look the other way, the consequences are playing out on the battlefield.

Now we have war crimes to add to the list of moral failings by the people supposedly in charge.

Leading news outlets, including the New York Times, report that it is likely the U.S. military was not only responsible for the Tomahawk missile that killed a school of over 165 Iranian girls, but may have carried out a double tap strike— a tactic widely condemned as a war crime under international humanitarian law—to target any parents and officials attempting to rescue survivors.

Pete Hegseth, the self-dubbed Secretary of War, has publicly boasted about directing a U.S. submarine attack on an Iranian naval vessel in international waters—an action critics argue could constitute a violation of international law.

When asked about the possibility that the number of casualties will mount from this reckless, heedless, mindless war, the official response from Trump and Hegseth has been largely a dismissive shrug that fails to recognize the magnitude of loss when even a single human life is lost.

The founders warned that moral corruption at the highest levels of government would eventually destroy the republic.

When John Adams declared that “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,” he was not advocating for a theocracy, but for a government grounded in moral restraint.

Two centuries later, the warning reads less like history and more like prophecy.

And yet here we are.

We should be better than this.

If ever there were a time to draw a line in the sand, it is now.

We are long past the point of partisan nitpicking over which politician’s positions are marginally better than another’s.

This is no longer a debate about Democrats vs. Republicans, Christians vs. non-Christians, or citizens vs. immigrants. It is about the extent to which the U.S. government has been overtaken by a cabal of immoral, amoral, and indecent degenerates who use religion as a front for their abuses of power.

These are not serious people.

They are power-hungry demagogues who have been playing reckless and costly war games with people’s lives, livelihoods, and freedoms for far too long.

The Constitution anticipated exactly this kind of danger.

Under the Constitution, the power to declare war belongs to Congress—not the president.

Yet once again, Congress has surrendered that authority, allowing a single individual to plunge the nation into conflict without debate, authorization, or accountability.

Without presenting any credible case of an imminent threat requiring offensive war maneuvers by the military without congressional authorization—first in Iran to destroy their supposed nuclear labs, then against shipping vessels in the Caribbean, then in Venezuela to kidnap the nation’s president, and now again in Iran—Trump is attempting to normalize brutality, aggression and thuggery as the defining characteristics of American leadership.

In the process, he risks staining the reputation of the American military itself.

The rhetoric and imagery being pushed by the Trump administration is in-your-face, unapologetically glorifying war, death and destruction.

In one Truth Social post, Trump warned that “Death, Fire, and Fury will reign upon them” if Iran does anything to stop the flow of oil within the Strait of Hormuz.

In one Facebook post, captioned “We have Only Just Begun to Fight,” the so-called Department of War depicts a missile with the words “No mercy” superimposed over it. This from the same Secretary of War who has tattooed a cross on his body, invited his own pastor to preach at the Pentagon, and repeatedly speaks of his Christian faith in one breath while bragging that “America is winning decisively, devastatingly, and without mercy.” Hegseth might need to be reminded of Matthew 5:7: “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.”

This rhetoric is not accidental. It reflects a deliberate attempt to normalize brutality as a virtue. The language being embraced by Trump officials—especially Hegseth—takes open pride in violence.

“This was never meant to be a fair fight. We are punching them while they are down, as it should be,” Hegseth bragged about the U.S. military’s attacks on Iran, which have reportedly resulted in more than 1,000 civilian deaths so far, including hundreds of children.

The U.S. and Israel have also been accused of deliberately targeting civilian sites such as schools, a hospital, and historic landmarks.

There is a reason Trump wants blanket immunity for himself and his top officials from the International Criminal Court, the world’s permanent war crimes tribunal.

The reason is simple: he knows the policies he is pursuing could be prosecuted as war crimes.

In other words, the administration is demanding immunity for actions it knows could be judged illegal.

That hypocrisy reveals more of the same double standard we have come to expect from Trump and his administration: he wants to be able to break the laws—repeatedly—but he believes he should get a free pass for doing so.

This culture of impunity does more than excuse lawlessness— it reshapes the language of war itself, normalizing brutality and erasing the humanity of the enemy.

As Casey Ryan Kelly, a communication scholar who has studied political rhetoric, explains, Hegseth routinely employs “what is known as ‘kill talk,’ a verbal strategy, typically directed at new military recruits, that denies the enemy’s humanity and disguises the terrible costs of violence.”

The kill talk has been accompanied by a social media presence straight out of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove and the video game Call of Duty, in which images of battle, war and destruction are glorified and presented as noble.

Juan Cole predicted this a decade ago:

“I have long wondered why no one in Hollywood has remade Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 ‘Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb’… From the paranoid military officer Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper … to the ex-Nazi evil genius (Peter Sellers) who can barely constrain himself from repeated Hitler salutes to the exuberant cowboy fighter pilot Major T. J. “King” Kong (Slim Pickens), who rides a nuke down on the old Soviet Union, the film is an archive of the craziest Cold War excesses. Now it turns out that Donald Trump is remaking Dr. Strangelove in real life.”

In other words, what once passed for political satire has become our political reality.

Nearly every accusation made by Donald Trump and his cohorts against political opponents is proving, with time, to have been projection of the greatest magnitude to deflect from his even greater transgressions.

He accused Hilary Clinton of national security violations for using a private email server for official government business. Yet investigations have shown that members of Trump’s own administration repeatedly mishandled classified materials, used unsecured communications platforms, and ignored long-standing national security protocols.

He accused political opponents of being linked to Jeffrey Epstein. Yet Trump himself appears repeatedly in Epstein-related records, and the allegations leveled against him—of sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl and forcing her to perform sexual acts—make a mockery of every religious leader who continues to hold him up as a political savior.

Trump mocked Joe Biden as too old and mentally incapacitated to govern. Yet Trump himself now appears increasingly absent from public view, reportedly falling asleep during meetings and struggling to deliver coherent remarks without a teleprompter.

He accused Obama of being so weak he would start a war with Iran just to stay in office. Instead, Trump has launched a war so reckless and unauthorized that every official who approved it should face investigation for war crimes.

It must be said: Donald Trump is no longer fit for office.

Reports, including by those who once supported him, indicate increasing concerns that he may no longer be running the show. Instead, critics point to White House aide Stephen Miller as the acting shadow president.

Whether the problem is cognitive decline, moral corruption, or simply a president more interested in personal power and wealth than constitutional duty, the result is the same: a government untethered from competence, restraint and accountability.

Donald Trump is not making America great again. He is not making America (or Iran) safe again. He is not making America healthy again. And he is certainly not making America wealthy again.

So where does that leave us?

Republicans in Congress have refused to restrain Trump’s unlawful war powers.

That failure is not merely political cowardice—it is a constitutional betrayal.

A president who wages unauthorized wars, glorifies civilian casualties, and openly flirts with war crimes cannot remain in office.

As James Madison warned, the accumulation of power in a single set of hands “may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

The founders understood that republics do not collapse overnight—they collapse when those sworn to defend the Constitution refuse to act.

The remedy is the same one the founders provided for moments like this: impeachment.

Impeach them all—from the president on down.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, every official who has betrayed the Constitution and the American people must be held accountable, regardless of party.

WC: 1974

Dysfunction, decadence, depravity and a death cult: that, in a nutshell, sums up the mindset now at the heart of the Trump administration.

Troubling reports have surfaced that apocalyptic Christian rhetoric is being used to justify the Trump administration’s attacks on Iran as part of an “end-times” struggle between good and evil. “President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth,” one commander told his combat unit.

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation has received more than 100 complaints that military commanders have characterized Trump’s attacks on Iran as a religious war.

Once war is framed as a holy mission, cruelty quickly becomes a virtue.

Measured against that standard, what we are witnessing now should alarm anyone who values human life or constitutional government.

The pattern extends far beyond the battlefield.

With each new release from the Epstein files, another allegation of depravity surfaces involving Donald Trump.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration continues to double down on cruelty, inhumanity, and a wrecking-ball approach to governing.

Every moment Congress allows this madness and corruption to continue, more innocent people die—and the American dream of a nation built on liberty, justice and opportunity dies a little more.

That taxpayers are being forced to fund this evil masquerading as governance only deepens the outrage. In the first two days of the U.S. war with Iran alone, the Pentagon reportedly used roughly $5.6 billion worth of munitions—spent in service of a war Congress never authorized.

Congress has failed in its duty to act as a guardrail against executive excess and overreach. Its inaction is not merely partisan—it is a betrayal of “we the people.”

The Supreme Court has deferred, deflected and delayed in holding the president accountable to the rule of law, which reveals exactly where their allegiance lies—and it is not with the Constitution.

Now we have war crimes to add to the list of moral failings by the people supposedly in charge.

Leading news outlets, including the New York Times, report that it is likely the U.S. military was not only responsible for the Tomahawk missile that killed a school of over 165 Iranian girls, but may have carried out a double tap strike— a tactic widely condemned as a war crime under international humanitarian law—to target any parents and officials attempting to rescue survivors.

Pete Hegseth, the self-dubbed Secretary of War, has publicly boasted about directing a U.S. submarine attack on an Iranian naval vessel in international waters—an action critics argue could constitute a violation of international law.

We should be better than this.

If ever there were a time to draw a line in the sand, it is now.

We are long past the point of partisan nitpicking over which politician’s positions are marginally better than another’s.

This is no longer a debate about Democrats vs. Republicans, Christians vs. non-Christians, or citizens vs. immigrants.

It is about the extent to which the U.S. government has been overtaken by a cabal of immoral, amoral, and power-hungry demagogues who have been playing reckless and costly war games with people’s lives, livelihoods, and freedoms for far too long.

Without presenting any credible case of an imminent threat requiring offensive war maneuvers by the military without congressional authorization—first in Iran to destroy their supposed nuclear labs, then against shipping vessels in the Caribbean, then in Venezuela to kidnap the nation’s president, and now again in Iran—Trump is attempting to normalize brutality, aggression and thuggery as the defining characteristics of American leadership.

In the process, he risks staining the reputation of the American military itself.

The rhetoric and imagery being pushed by the Trump administration is in-your-face, unapologetically glorifying war, death and destruction.

In one Truth Social post, Trump warned that “Death, Fire, and Fury will reign upon them” if Iran does anything to stop the flow of oil within the Strait of Hormuz.

In one Facebook post, captioned “We have Only Just Begun to Fight,” the so-called Department of War depicts a missile with the words “No mercy” superimposed over it. This from the same Secretary of War who has tattooed a cross on his body, invited his own pastor to preach at the Pentagon, and repeatedly speaks of his Christian faith in one breath while bragging that “America is winning decisively, devastatingly, and without mercy.” Hegseth might need to be reminded of Matthew 5:7: “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.”

This rhetoric is not accidental. It reflects a deliberate attempt to normalize brutality as a virtue. The language being embraced by Trump officials—especially Hegseth—takes open pride in violence.

“This was never meant to be a fair fight. We are punching them while they are down, as it should be,” Hegseth bragged about the U.S. military’s attacks on Iran, which have reportedly resulted in more than 1,000 civilian deaths so far, including hundreds of children.

The kill talk has been accompanied by a social media presence straight out of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove and the video game Call of Duty, in which images of battle, war and destruction are glorified and presented as noble.

When this kind of propaganda becomes the public face of American leadership, it signals a government that has lost its moral bearings.

It must be said: Donald Trump is no longer fit for office.

Whether the problem is cognitive decline, moral corruption, or simply a president more interested in personal power and wealth than constitutional duty, the result is the same: a government untethered from competence, restraint and accountability.

Donald Trump is not making America great again. He is not making America (or Iran) safe again. He is not making America healthy again. And he is certainly not making America wealthy again.

So where does that leave us?

A president who wages unauthorized wars, glorifies civilian casualties, and openly flirts with war crimes cannot remain in office.

As James Madison warned, the accumulation of power in a single set of hands “may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

The remedy is the same one the founders provided for moments like this: impeachment.

Impeach them all—from the president on down.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, every official who has betrayed the Constitution and the American people must be held accountable, regardless of party.

WC: 1079

“From the least to the greatest, all are greedy for gain; prophets and priests alike, all practice deceit. They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious. ‘Peace, peace,’ they say, when there is no peace.”—Jeremiah 6:13–14

“This is insane. Regime change will result in a bloody civil war... Resist this!”—Charlie Kirk (2025)

The military-industrial complex and the American police state have joined forces.

War abroad and war at home are no longer separate enterprises. They have fused.

This did not happen overnight.

Every modern president has stretched the limits of war-making power. Some have shredded those limits altogether.

Each time that boundary is breached, the Constitution recedes a little further.

This is one of those moments.

In a complete about-face from his claims to being a peace president, Donald Trump has authorized yet another preemptive strike—this time against Iran—without a declaration of war from Congress, without meaningful public debate, and without constitutional clarity.

The gravity of that decision cannot be overstated.

While American troops were being ordered into harm’s way, Trump was hosting a $1 million-a-ticket fundraiser for himself at Mar-a-Lago, trotting out his signature dance moves between curtained war briefings.

That spectacle tells you everything you need to know.

That is how we arrived at Operation Epic Fury.

With its Orwellian proclamations of “peace through strength,” Operation Epic Fury is less strategy than spectacle—an egotistical, muscle-flexing distraction by the Trump administration and an overarching attempt to normalize the use of unilateral force by the executive branch without congressional input or authorization.

This was never about peace. It was always about power.

And the Constitution is clear about how this is supposed to work, even if the White House is not.

Article I, Section 8 grants Congress—not the president—the power to declare war. The president under Article II, Section 2 is designated as commander-in-chief with the power to command the military. He is not commander-of-everything.

Yet here we are.

The Trump administration is advancing a global policing doctrine that mirrors the domestic police state: strike first, ask questions later.

Since January 2025, Trump has carried out more than 600 military strikes on foreign targets that include Iran, Yemen, Nigeria and Venezuela, while threatening forceful military takeovers of Greenland, Colombia and Mexico.

Preemptive force has become policy.

Call it what it is: war.

Despite the word games over its war games—the administration insists its actions in Iran do not constitute a war—members of Trump’s Cabinet use the word “war” freely until congressional authorization is mentioned.

And when the administration is asked to explain themselves, the answer is not constitutional deference but open defiance.

Clearly, they have lost sight of who they answer to—and who funds their war chests: we the taxpayers.

Pete Hegseth—the self-righteous blowhard who brags about lethal weapons and has rebranded the Defense Department as the Department of War—dismissed public accountability outright, expressing in no uncertain terms that it’s none of our business: “Why in the world would we tell you, you, the enemy, anybody what we will or will not do in pursuit of an objective. We fight to win. We fight to achieve the objectives the President of the United States has laid out and we will do so unapologetically.”

The Constitution is the “why.”

The American people have a right to debate war before it begins. We have a right to know how our tax dollars are spent. We have a right to insist our representatives authorize the use of force. We have a right to know why our sons and daughters are sent into harm’s way. We have a right to refuse to have our tax dollars used to kill other people’s daughters and sons.

As Rick Steves, the globetrotting travel writer, put it:

“As an American taxpayer, I believe that every US bomb that falls and every bullet that flies has my name on it. In the last year, our president (who won votes by promising to keep America out of wars and is now famously agitating for a Nobel Peace Prize) has dropped bombs on seven foreign countries—and each of those bombs has your name on it, too…including the one that just recklessly decapitated a nation of 90 million people in a war-torn corner of our world.”

He is right. War is not abstract—it is done with our money, and too often without our consent.

As Cato Institute’s Katherine Thompson explains, “War…costs American blood and treasure. The Founders placed the power to initiate it in Congress precisely to ensure those costs are confronted and debated before the country walks into battle.”

That safeguard is being ignored.

And the damage does not stop at constitutional injury, because war is not only a constitutional problem. It is an economic one.

War fuels defense contracts, reconstruction deals and intelligence budgets. It sustains a vast military-industrial apparatus whose profits depend on instability.

Nothing about Operation Epic Fury puts America first. It pushes us toward a fiscal cliff.

Within days, the costs were staggering: $300 million for three F-15E jets downed by “friendly” fire. $630 million to transport troops, ships and aircraft to the region in advance of the attacks. More than 50,000 troops deployed to the region. $13 million a day just for two aircraft carriers stationed nearby. $43.8 million for 1,250 Kamikaze drones. $2 million each for Tomahawk missiles. $12.8 million each for anti-ballistic missile interceptors.

Forbes estimates that Trump’s military strikes in Iran have already cost American taxpayers over $1 billion, “with a price tag that could approach $100 billion, depending on how long it can stretch on.” The total economic cost of the conflict “could trigger an economic loss for the U.S. of between $50 billion and $210 billion.”

And that is before accounting for the human cost.

Innocent civilians—over a hundred young girls between the ages of 7 and 12—have died because the U.S. and Israel reportedly launched a deadly strike on a girls’ elementary school in Iran using outdated maps.

American servicepeople are dying because of one man’s unilateral decision to play at war.

So much for “America First.”

Permanent war places empire first.

And as usual, “we the people” will be forced pay for another unpopular forever war—financially, constitutionally, and domestically—and for the presidential hubris and the greed of the military-industrial complex and Deep State undergirding it all.

Congress anticipated this danger.

The War Powers Act was meant to rein in presidents who bypass Congress. But laws are only as strong as the institutions willing to enforce them.

Without congressional authorization, without meaningful debate, without constitutional clarity, the executive branch claims the unilateral authority to wage war.

This is how dictatorships arise and republics erode.

It happens when a president is allowed to treat constitutional limits as inconveniences rather than restraints.

Trump routinely dismisses unfavorable polls, ignores the courts, sidesteps Congress, shows contempt for the will of the American people, and ignorance about the fact that he works for “we the people.” He behaves not as a public servant but as a potentate.

As John Jay warned in The Federalist No. 4:

“Absolute monarchs will often make war when their nations are to get nothing by it, but for the purposes and objects merely personal, such as thirst for military glory, revenge for personal affronts, ambition, or private compacts to aggrandize or support their particular families or partisans. These and a variety of other motives, which affect only the mind of the sovereign, often lead him to engage in wars not sanctified by justice or the voice and interests of his people.”

If this were merely a constitutional dispute, it would be grave enough.

But it is not merely constitutional.

The consequences are immediate, political, and profoundly destabilizing.

Trump has a tendency to bulldoze through constitutional and legal restraints, creating a spectacle or a crisis, and then leaving others to clean up the fallout—whether it is a gutted ballroom, an eviscerated federal agency, a chaotic immigration crackdown, or now a widening war in the Middle East.

Long after the headlines move on, the wreckage remains.

And when the crisis involves war, the consequences are not merely bureaucratic or political — they are measured in lives and liberties.

War, in particular, has always been the most convenient tool of presidents facing troubles at home. When approval ratings slide, when economic policy falters, when scandal threatens to consume the headlines, foreign conflict has a way of shifting the narrative.

Trump’s Iran escalation—a deadly, costly, immoral, unpopular distraction from missteps of Trump’s own making—comes amid dismal polling, a faltering economy, escalating immigration crackdowns, eroding constitutional protections, and renewed scrutiny tied to the Epstein files.

Six out of ten Americans disapprove of Trump’s military action against Iran.

And while there is little to defend about Iran—it is a brutal regime—no nation has the right to declare itself judge, jury and executioner of another without lawful authority. To suggest otherwise is the language of strongmen.

Moreover, what happens abroad does not stay abroad.

The same government that claims unilateral authority to bomb foreign nations claims expanded authority to surveil, detain and silence domestically.

The military-industrial complex and the police state operate in tandem.

At home, we are being subjected to many of the same tactics and technologies deployed overseas. This is how America becomes a battlefield.

The pattern is not new. George W. Bush expanded warrantless surveillance. Obama normalized drone warfare. Presidents of both parties have stretched executive power.

Trump inherited the imperial presidency—and leaned into it. He boasts of his authority, derides the courts, dismisses Congress, and treats constitutional limits as inconveniences rather than guardrails.

He governs as though Article II were a royal charter.

Defense contractors may prosper in such a climate. The Constitution does not.

History teaches that war abroad produces blowback at home. Twenty-five years ago, 9/11 was itself blowback—the consequence of decades of military intervention and occupation in the Middle East.

Blowback justifies emergency powers. Emergency powers justify a police state. A police state justifies a permanent national security state.

The “war on terror” did not end terrorism. It institutionalized emergency. And permanent emergency makes constitutional government fragile.

James Madison warned that “the means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.”

We have seen it unfold over the past quarter century: the militarization of police, battlefield tactics in American neighborhoods, expansive surveillance justified by counterterrorism. The same tactics and rationale deployed abroad eventually get used against the American people here at home.

War abroad justifies control at home. That is the pattern.

As legal scholar Aziz Huq, professor of law at the University of Chicago, warns, the same national-security powers used to justify bombing foreign nations can be turned inward—against domestic opponents and even against the electoral process itself.

That is the long game being played right now.

This unprovoked attack on Iran is turning the Middle East into a war zone, in turn laying the groundwork for Trump to act on the fantasies he has long entertained about cancelling the mid-term elections.

It is not far-fetched to imagine he might attempt it. He has repeatedly hinted about it and has already demonstrated how far he is willing to go to overturn an election.

On the very day bombs began falling on Tehran, Huq notes that the White House was reportedly considering a unilateral executive order asserting the power to control how and when Americans vote in the upcoming midterm elections—citing “national security” and alleged foreign meddling as justification.

As Huq explains, the presidency is especially weakly bound by law when “national security” is invoked. The absence of legal authority did not prevent the strikes on Iran—strikes that are unlawful under the Constitution, which assigns Congress alone the power to initiate war.

If national security can be invoked to bypass Congress abroad, it can be invoked to bypass constitutional limits at home.

In other words, if a president can launch a war without congressional authorization, he can claim similar emergency authority to restrict voting, suppress dissent, or silence opposition.

This is not republican governance. It is rule by force.

Even some of Trump’s former allies sense the instability. As Marjorie Taylor Greene bluntly put it, “I think it’s time for America to rip the Band-Aid off and we need to have a serious conversation about what the f— is happening in this country and who in the hell are these decisions being made for and who is making these decisions.”

America’s founders understood this danger. They structured the Constitution to prevent any one man from dragging the nation into war.

In making the case that decisions about war should never be left to one man, legal scholar David French quotes then-Congressman Abraham Lincoln at the close of the Mexican-American War in 1948: “Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This, our convention understood to be the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us.”

Concludes French: “Those words were true then, and they’re true now. No matter what he thinks, Trump is not a king. But by taking America to war all on his own, he is acting like one.”

If we are to preserve any semblance of constitutional government, Congress must reclaim its war powers. The War Powers Resolution must be enforced. Emergency powers must be narrowed, sunsetted and restrained. Surveillance must be reined in. Domestic military deployment must be limited to the most narrow, exceptional circumstances.

But structural reform alone will not save a republic that has grown comfortable with permanent war. Because once war abroad and war at home fully merge, the Constitution becomes little more than words on paper.

War is not peace. Preemptive war is not strength. And an imperial presidency—no matter how loudly it wraps itself in flags—is not constitutional government.

The Founders understood that the gravest threat to liberty would not come from foreign enemies alone, but from the concentration of power in the hands of one man who believed himself indispensable.

A president who can send bombs abroad without consent can silence opposition at home without hesitation.

A government that governs by the rule of emergency eventually ceases to govern by the rule of law.

And a nation that trades liberty for spectacle will wake up to find that it has neither.

History is a relentless teacher: military empires may rise on the back of war, but they fall just as quickly from being spread too thin. Already, days after the start of this debacle of a war on Iran, U.S. forces are being used to combat drug trafficking in Ecuador.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the question is no longer whether America can police the globe. The question is whether our Republic can survive the weight of the Empire it has become.

We are at the point where we must choose: the spectacle of permanent war, or the survival of the American experiment in freedom.

We cannot have both.

WC: 2566

“‘Peace, peace,’ they say, when there is no peace.”—Jeremiah 6:13–14

The military-industrial complex and the American police state have joined forces.

War abroad and war at home are no longer separate enterprises. They have fused.

This did not happen overnight.

Every modern president has stretched the limits of war-making power. Some have shredded those limits altogether.

Each time that boundary is breached, the Constitution recedes a little further.

This is one of those moments.

In a complete about-face from his claims to being a peace president, Donald Trump has authorized yet another preemptive strike—this time against Iran—without a declaration of war from Congress, without meaningful public debate, and without constitutional clarity.

With its Orwellian proclamations of “peace through strength,” Operation Epic Fury is less strategy than spectacle—an egotistical, muscle-flexing distraction by the Trump administration and an overarching attempt to normalize the use of unilateral force by the executive branch without congressional input or authorization.

This was never about peace. It was always about power.

And the Constitution is clear about how this is supposed to work, even if the White House is not.

Article I, Section 8 grants Congress—not the president—the power to declare war. The president under Article II, Section 2 is designated as commander-in-chief with the power to command the military. He is not commander-of-everything.

Yet here we are.

The Trump administration is advancing a global policing doctrine that mirrors the domestic police state: strike first, ask questions later.

Since January 2025, Trump has carried out more than 600 military strikes on foreign targets that include Iran, Yemen, Nigeria and Venezuela, while threatening forceful military takeovers of Greenland, Colombia and Mexico.

Preemptive force has become policy.

And when the administration is asked to explain themselves, the answer is not constitutional deference but open defiance. Clearly, they have lost sight of who they answer to—and who funds their war chests: we the taxpayers.

The Constitution is the “why.”

The American people have a right to debate war before it begins. We have a right to know how our tax dollars are spent. We have a right to insist our representatives authorize the use of force. We have a right to know why our sons and daughters are sent into harm’s way. We have a right to refuse to have our tax dollars used to kill other people’s daughters and sons.

As Cato Institute’s Katherine Thompson explains, “The Founders placed the power to initiate it in Congress precisely to ensure those costs are confronted and debated before the country walks into battle.”

That safeguard is being ignored.

And the damage does not stop at constitutional injury, because war is not only a constitutional problem. It is an economic one.

Operation Epic Fury is pushing America towards a fiscal cliff.

Within days, the costs were staggering: $300 million for three F-15E jets downed by “friendly” fire. $630 million to transport troops, ships and aircraft to the region in advance of the attacks. More than 50,000 troops deployed to the region. $13 million a day just for two aircraft carriers stationed nearby. $43.8 million for 1,250 Kamikaze drones. $2 million each for Tomahawk missiles. $12.8 million each for anti-ballistic missile interceptors.

Forbes estimates that Trump’s military strikes in Iran have already cost American taxpayers over $1 billion, “with a price tag that could approach $100 billion, depending on how long it can stretch on.” The total economic cost of the conflict “could trigger an economic loss for the U.S. of between $50 billion and $210 billion.”

And that is before accounting for the human cost.

Innocent civilians—over a hundred young girls between the ages of 7 and 12—have died because the U.S. and Israel reportedly launched a deadly strike on a girls’ elementary school in Iran using outdated maps.

American servicepeople are dying because of one man’s unilateral decision to play at war.

So much for “America First.”

As usual, “we the people” will be forced pay for another unpopular forever war—financially, constitutionally, and domestically—and for the presidential hubris and the greed of the military-industrial complex and Deep State undergirding it all.

If this were merely a constitutional dispute, it would be grave enough.

But it is not merely constitutional.

The consequences are immediate, political, and profoundly destabilizing.

Trump’s Iran escalation—a deadly, costly, immoral, unpopular distraction from missteps of Trump’s own making—comes amid dismal polling, a faltering economy, escalating immigration crackdowns, eroding constitutional protections, and renewed scrutiny tied to the Epstein files.

Moreover, what happens abroad does not stay abroad.

History teaches that war abroad produces blowback at home. Twenty-five years ago, 9/11 was itself blowback—the consequence of decades of military intervention and occupation in the Middle East.

Blowback justifies emergency powers. Emergency powers justify a police state. A police state justifies a permanent national security state.

The “war on terror” did not end terrorism. It institutionalized emergency. And permanent emergency makes constitutional government fragile.

James Madison warned that “the means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.”

We have seen it unfold over the past quarter century: the militarization of police, battlefield tactics in American neighborhoods, expansive surveillance justified by counterterrorism. The same tactics and rationale deployed abroad eventually get used against the American people here at home.

War abroad justifies control at home. That is the pattern.

As legal scholar Aziz Huq, professor of law at the University of Chicago, warns, the same national-security powers used to justify bombing foreign nations can be turned inward—against domestic opponents and even against the electoral process itself.

That is the long game being played right now.

If we are to preserve any semblance of constitutional government, Congress must reclaim its war powers. The War Powers Resolution must be enforced. Emergency powers must be narrowed, sunsetted and restrained. Surveillance must be reined in. Domestic military deployment must be limited to the most narrow, exceptional circumstances.

A government that governs by the rule of emergency eventually ceases to govern by the rule of law.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the question is no longer whether America can police the globe. The question is whether our Republic can survive the weight of the Empire it has become.

We are at the point where we must choose: the spectacle of permanent war, or the survival of the American experiment in freedom.

We cannot have both.

WC: 1090

RICHMOND, Va — The Rutherford Institute is calling out the double standard inherent in the government’s willingness to prosecute political protesters for disrupting worship services while allowing ICE agents broad discretion to disrupt those same services by carrying out immigration enforcement operations inside churches, temples, and other sacred spaces.

From the earliest days of the Republic, houses of worship have occupied a unique place in American life as spaces set apart for the free exercise of religion. The First Amendment was adopted to prevent the government from intruding into matters of faith or coercing religious practice through fear or force. As The Rutherford Institute warns, that historic boundary is now at risk.

Until Trump’s second term, the Department of Homeland Security treated houses of worship as protected locations, permitting enforcement actions only under exigent circumstances or with prior agency approval. That policy has now been rescinded, leaving the decision entirely to the discretion of individual officers in the field. In an amicus brief filed in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends v. DHS, The Rutherford Institute is urging the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit to impose clear constitutional limits on ICE and Border Patrol agents’ authority to enter sacred spaces. The Institute argues that granting ICE agents unilateral discretion to conduct enforcement operations inside houses of worship violates the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) by chilling the free exercise of religion.

“Churches, synagogues, temples and mosques have long stood as places where individuals can gather to worship without fear of government intrusion,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “When armed ICE agents are empowered to enter houses of worship without a judicial warrant or exigent circumstances, it sends a chilling message that no space is beyond the reach of the police state.”

The policy change removing these longstanding religious freedom guardrails, directed by President Trump, was challenged by members of three faith communities—Quakers, Cooperative Baptists, and Sikhs—who allege that the new DHS approach violates their First Amendment rights and RFRA protections. They argue that the threat of immigration raids has already reduced attendance at services and undermined their ability to practice their faith traditions freely.

For Quakers, whose pacifist beliefs reject violence, the presence of armed ICE agents in or near Quaker meeting houses is fundamentally at odds with their religious convictions. Cooperative Baptists, whose faith compels them to offer radical hospitality to immigrants and refugees, report locking their church doors and no longer encouraging immigrant neighbors to attend services out of fear that worship could become a site of enforcement. Sikh congregations, which teach that all must be welcomed into their places of worship without fear, say even members with lawful status have expressed uncertainty about whether it is safe to attend services.

Recognizing the constitutional concerns, the district court issued a preliminary injunction requiring DHS to adhere to its prior policy at the plaintiffs’ places of worship. The federal government appealed, and the plaintiffs are seeking broader relief in their lawsuit to prevent ICE from conducting raids at houses of worship absent a judicial warrant or exigent circumstances.

Joshua C. McDaniel, Parker W. Knight III, Kathryn F. Mahoney, and Steven W. Burnett with Harvard Law School’s Religious Freedom Clinic 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.

“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.

WC: 2627

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.

According to the New York Times Editorial Board, “Trump has used the office of the presidency to make at least $1.4 billion… 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.”

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

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.

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

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.”

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

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

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

A republic cannot survive when public office becomes private property.

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.

It is time to drain the swamp.

WC: 1096

WASHINGTON, D.C. — In a major rebuke of presidential power, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6–3 that President Trump cannot impose billions of dollars in tariffs on the American people by declaring a national emergency. At stake was a key constitutional question: Who has the power to tax — Congress or the president?

In Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, consolidated with Trump v. V.O.S. Selections, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) does not authorize the president to unilaterally impose sweeping tariffs of “unlimited amount, duration, and scope.” The ruling rejects the administration’s attempt to treat tariffs as emergency executive tools rather than congressional taxes. Since taking office, the Trump administration has collected more than $200 billion in tariff revenue — costs borne largely by American businesses and consumers. Critics have described the sweeping tariffs on nearly every one of America’s trading partners as stealth taxes on the American people.

“The Founders did not fight a revolution to replace one king’s taxes with another’s,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “Whether it’s tariffs, surveillance, or martial law, the pattern is the same: emergency powers become a back door for executive rule. The Constitution does not allow taxation by executive fiat.”

Under Article I of the Constitution, the power to levy taxes and regulate commerce with foreign nations belongs to Congress—the branch closest and most accountable to the people. Having just overthrown a monarchy that imposed taxes by decree, the Framers deliberately vested the “power of the purse” in the legislative branch to ensure that no president could tax or spend the nation into submission without the consent of the people’s representatives. As James Madison wrote in The Federalist No. 58, “This power over the purse may, in fact, be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people.”

Beginning on the first day of his second term, President Trump issued a series of executive orders under declared national emergencies imposing sweeping “drug trafficking tariffs,” aimed at penalizing countries from which drugs allegedly flowed into the U.S., and “reciprocal tariffs,” aimed at addressing trade deficits. The administration relied on IEEPA, which authorizes the president to regulate certain foreign economic transactions to address “unusual and extraordinary” external threats.

The Supreme Court concluded that this statute does not extend to imposing tariffs — a core legislative function. During oral argument, Justice Gorsuch warned that the administration’s expansive reading of IEEPA risked creating a “one-way ratchet toward the gradual but continual accretion of power in the executive branch and away from the people’s elected representatives.”

In dissent from the majority’s 6-3 ruling, Justices Kavanaugh, Alito, and Thomas suggested alternative statutory mechanisms that might support future tariff actions. Trump has already threatened to pursue other avenues to reimpose tariffs without congressional approval.

The Supreme Court’s ruling in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump is available at www.rutherford.org.

The Rutherford Institute is a nonprofit civil liberties organization dedicated to making the government play by the rules of the Constitution. To this end, the Institute defends individuals whose constitutional rights have been threatened or violated and educates the public on a broad range of issues affecting their freedoms.