By John & Nisha Whitehead
July 30,
2026
“The
old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind. It
is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather
than win his understanding; it seeks to annihilate rather
than to convert… It creates bitterness in the survivors
and brutality in the destroyers.”—Martin Luther King
Jr.
We have been ambushed.
We should be talking
about the dangerous, destabilizing things being done to this
country.
We should be talking about the data
centers spreading across the landscape, draining
electricity and water, straining local infrastructure and
expanding the technological machinery needed to track,
profile and control the population.
We should be
talking about the government’s growing network of
detention centers and its family-separation policies, which
have resulted in an estimated
145,000 American children experiencing the detention of at
least one parent—including more than 22,000
U.S.-citizen children whose entire household of co-resident
parents has been detained.
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We should be talking about
license-plate
readers, facial
recognition, government
databases and artificial intelligence capable of turning
our movements and associations into a digital dossier on
every person in America.
We should be talking about masked
government agents, endless
war, disappearing constitutional safeguards and an imperial
presidency accountable to no one.
Instead, we are
trapped in a vicious
loop of nonsense, mania, political demagoguery and
manufactured spectacle while the country goes to hell in
a handbasket.
Every day—sometimes every
hour—brings another outrage, another threat, another
vulgar display of power, another self-glorifying meme,
another political provocation and another distraction
demanding our attention.
Before we can fully
comprehend one assault on the Republic, another takes its
place.
That is not merely the chaos surrounding this
government.
It is one of the ways this government
maintains power.
Keep the public angry, exhausted,
frightened and distracted. Force everyone to chase the
latest outrage. Crowd out serious scrutiny with political
theater. Then push past another constitutional boundary
while no one is able to keep track of what has already been
lost.
This is how every crisis appears fleeting and
every constitutional violation merely the latest controversy
in an endless political spectacle.
Taken together,
however, these are not isolated events.
They are
tests.
Donald Trump is not defending the Constitution.
He is testing how much of it he can violate before anyone
stops him.
He is testing whether a president can wage
war without Congress. He is testing whether federal power
can be turned into personal power. He is testing whether
dissent can be punished without formally outlawing speech.
He is testing whether masked government agents can operate
as a secret police force beyond public scrutiny and
constitutional accountability. He is testing whether the
government can watch, track and profile everyone without
meaningful limits. He is testing whether the Twenty-Second
Amendment, which limits a president to two terms in office,
means what it says.
Most of all, he is testing how
much abuse the American people will tolerate before
exhaustion, fear, distraction and partisan loyalty wear down
their willingness to resist.
That is the real
constitutional crisis confronting America.
Trump has
turned constitutional government into a continuous test of
submission: He pushes beyond a boundary and waits. Will
Congress resist? Will the courts intervene? Will government
officials refuse? Will the public object? Or will everyone
retreat, rationalize, delay and adjust?
If no one
stops him, the violation becomes precedent. Then he pushes
farther.
This is how a republic is dismantled—not
necessarily through one dramatic declaration of
dictatorship, but through a succession of constitutional
violations that go unanswered long enough to become the new
normal.
The administration’s approach to war offers
a revealing glimpse into the instincts driving much of its
conduct.
Asked about Iran’s promise to retaliate
according to the principle of “an eye for an eye,”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared that Trump’s
policy is “a
head for an eye.”
Not proportionality. Not
restraint. Vengeance to the maximum.
The
impulse behind that doctrine—to retaliate when challenged,
punish when criticized, escalate when restrained and push
harder when the law says no—is not confined to the
battlefield. It runs through the administration’s approach
to political opponents, dissent, immigration enforcement,
executive power and constitutional limits.
“A
head for an eye” may be Trump’s philosophy of war,
but it is also a warning about the kind of government that
philosophy produces. The result is a government at war not
only with foreign enemies but with dissent, privacy, due
process, constitutional limits—and ultimately with the
American people.
Meanwhile, as the administration
tests how much damage it can inflict and how many boundaries
it can cross without consequences, the public is being
overwhelmed by a relentless barrage of noise, spectacle and
manufactured outrage.
And the costs of the
government’s recklessness continue to mount.
The war
with Iran continues to consume lives, military resources and
tens of billions of taxpayer dollars.
Critical
munitions are reportedly running
low. Military commanders are being forced to make difficult
decisions about which weapons must be preserved.
American service members have been killed
and hundreds more injured. Disruptions
to global oil supplies threaten higher prices, shortages
and further economic instability.
Yet even as the
administration demands
billions more to replenish the weapons expended in its
war, it is preparing to end
a Medicare subsidy program that has helped hold down
prescription-drug-plan premiums for millions of older
Americans.
The government can find billions
for bombs but tells senior
citizens to brace for higher costs. It can also spend public
money on enormous banners bearing Trump’s face and regilding
statues while ordinary Americans struggle to afford
food, medicine, housing and fuel.
The sums spent on
banners and gilded statues may be small compared with the
cost of war, but their symbolism is impossible to miss. They
reveal the priorities of a government that increasingly
treats public money as a fund for war, political propaganda,
personal glorification and imperial
spectacle.
Meanwhile, Trump golfs, circulates
self-aggrandizing artificial-intelligence memes, demands
praise and continues to treat the presidency as though it
were a personal brand rather than a constitutional
trust.
This is what government without constitutional
limits looks like: war without accountability, policing
without transparency, surveillance without warrants,
propaganda without shame and power without
restraint.
America does not need another political
slogan. It does not need to be made great again, stronger
again, feared again, richer again or more powerful
again.
America needs to be made free again.
Free
from a government that tracks everywhere we go, treats
dissent as dangerous, wages war without accountability,
polices communities like occupied territory and insists that
constitutional rights must yield whenever those in power
invoke national security.
The question is no longer
whether the Constitution is welcome in America. The question
is whether the government still considers the Constitution
binding at all.
By all indications, the answer is
no.
Trump’s war with Iran is testing whether a
president can bypass Congress, wage war on his own authority
and force the country to absorb the consequences
afterward.
So far, the answer appears to be
yes.
The Constitution gives Congress—not the
president—the power to decide whether the country goes to
war. Yet each time Congress funds an unauthorized war rather
than stopping it, presidential lawlessness becomes more
firmly entrenched. Each time the courts decline to
intervene, executive war-making becomes harder to challenge.
Each time the public becomes distracted by the latest
spectacle, another constitutional boundary
disappears.
The theatrical and costly rebranding
of the Department of Defense as the Department of War
may be the most truthful thing about the Trump
administration.
It is a government organized around
war: war abroad, war at the border, war in the streets, war
on dissent, war on privacy, war on poverty’s victims and
war on anyone who refuses to fall in line. Every crisis has
become an excuse to expand government power. Every enemy
becomes a reason to weaken constitutional protections. Every
emergency becomes permanent.
Trump is also testing
whether federal power can be transformed into personal
power.
The Constitution requires presidents to
faithfully execute the laws. Trump demands that government
officials faithfully execute his will. He has surrounded
himself with loyalists, purged or sidelined officials who
might resist him, treated independent oversight as
insubordination and demonized critics as enemies.
The
danger is not merely that Trump possesses enormous executive
power. It is that the government increasingly treats loyalty
to Trump as interchangeable with loyalty to the
country.
That is how constitutional government gives
way to personal rule.
Public servants cease to ask
whether an order is lawful and begin asking whether it
pleases the president. Agencies cease to serve the public
and begin protecting the ruler. Independent oversight
becomes sabotage. Disagreement becomes disloyalty.
Resistance becomes treason.
Trump did not create the
imperial presidency or the American police state. He
inherited them.
Republican and Democratic
administrations spent decades building the machinery he now
commands: emergency powers, mass surveillance, militarized
policing, executive war-making, government secrecy and a
sprawling bureaucracy accustomed to operating beyond
meaningful accountability.
Each administration
inherited dangerous powers from the one before it. Each
promised that those powers would be used responsibly. Each
left the government more powerful and the people less
free.
Trump’s particular danger is that he has
seized this machinery, expanded it, personalized it and
stripped away much of the pretense that it exists for
anything other than power and control.
He is testing
whether dissent can be punished without formally outlawing
speech.
The First Amendment remains on paper.
Americans are still legally permitted to criticize the
government. Yet the administration does not need to repeal
the First Amendment if it can make exercising those rights
sufficiently dangerous. It can investigate critics, threaten
opponents, pressure universities and law firms, target
protesters, intimidate journalists and brand dissenters as
enemies of the state. It can exploit the vast surveillance
apparatus already in place to identify who attends a
protest, visits a controversial website, associates with an
unpopular group or travels to a politically sensitive
location.
This is where the test of dissent merges
with the test of surveillance.
The government no
longer needs to assign an officer to follow you.
Your
phone, your car, your face, your purchases and your digital
associations do the reporting for it. License-plate readers,
facial recognition, geofence searches, social-media
monitoring and artificial intelligence can assemble detailed
profiles of people never suspected of a crime.
The
danger is no longer simply that the government can watch
everyone. It is that an administration demanding personal
loyalty possesses the machinery to identify, track,
intimidate and retaliate against those who refuse to
submit.
Speech does not have to be formally outlawed
when people can be frightened into silence.
Trump is
also testing whether federal agents can operate beyond
constitutional and public accountability.
Immigration
enforcement has become the proving ground for this
authoritarian model of policing. Yet government powers do
not remain confined to their original targets. Once the
government claims the power to hide agents’ identities,
conduct militarized raids, track people through vast
databases and detain them without meaningful due process,
those powers will eventually be turned on
others.
Today, the target may be an undocumented
immigrant. Tomorrow, it may be a protester, journalist, gun
owner, government critic, parent, medical patient, religious
minority or anyone whose movements and beliefs trigger an
algorithmic warning.
The test is whether Americans
will accept government lawlessness when it is directed at
people they have been taught to fear or despise.
If
they do, the precedent will be waiting when the government
chooses its next enemy.
Finally, Trump is testing
whether the Twenty-Second Amendment means what it
says.
The Constitution could hardly be clearer: no
person may be elected president more than twice. Yet Trump
continues to flirt with the possibility of remaining in
power beyond two terms, while allies float amendments and
theories for circumventing the prohibition.
These
provocations are often dismissed as jokes, trolling or
political theater.
That is a
mistake.
Authoritarians rarely begin by announcing
that they intend to dismantle constitutional government.
They float an idea, repeat it until it sounds less shocking,
ridicule those who take it seriously and wait for the public
to grow accustomed to the possibility.
Trump is
testing whether an explicit constitutional prohibition can
be weakened through repetition, rationalization and partisan
loyalty.
There is another test underway that may
determine whether any of these constitutional restraints
survive: will
Trump accept an election that threatens his hold on
power?
Trump has a habit of giving away his
intentions.
He has mastered
the art of accusing others of what he is doing, has
already done or may be preparing to do. He accuses others of
weaponizing government while turning federal power against
his critics. He accuses others of corruption while treating
public office as an instrument of personal enrichment and
political reward. He accuses others of censorship while
seeking to punish speech he dislikes. He accuses others of
lawlessness while treating the Constitution as something to
evade whenever it obstructs him.
So when Trump
repeatedly warns that elections are being “rigged” or
“stolen,” we should pay close attention.
The
question is not merely whether he is repeating old
grievances about 2020. The question is what those
accusations are conditioning the country to accept in
2026.
Are they preparing supporters to reject results
that cost Republicans control of Congress? Are they laying
the groundwork for federal intervention in elections
traditionally administered by the states or for emergency
actions carried out in the name of “election
integrity”?
These are not far-fetched
concerns.
Trump has an enormous personal stake in the
midterm elections. A Congress controlled by his opponents
could investigate his administration, expose abuses, block
his agenda, cut off funding and begin impeachment
proceedings.
That makes the coming election another
constitutional test.
Will the president respect the
right of the people to withdraw their political support? Or
will he once again insist that any election he does not
control must have been stolen?
Trump has spent years
teaching his followers to believe that only two election
outcomes are possible: either he wins, or someone
cheated.
That is not faith in democracy. It is a
warning that democratic government will be tolerated only as
long as it produces the ruler’s preferred result.
He
will keep testing until someone stops
him.
Unfortunately, Congress has largely abandoned its
duty to check presidential power. The courts increasingly
allow constitutional controversies to be resolved through
delays, procedural maneuvers and doctrines that shield
government officials from accountability. Federal agencies
resist transparency, police investigate themselves, and
private contractors help the government evade constitutional
limits.
And the American people are encouraged to
treat every abuse as a partisan question rather than a
constitutional one.
That is the trap.
The police
state survives because Americans have been conditioned to
oppose tyranny only when the other party is responsible for
it.
Republicans defend executive power when a
Republican occupies the White House. Democrats defend it
when a Democrat is president. Both parties promise reform.
Neither dismantles the machinery.
This is why merely
replacing one president with another will not make America
free again.
Freedom cannot depend on finding a
benevolent ruler.
The Constitution was not written on
the assumption that good people would always hold power. It
was written because power corrupts, government officials
lie, institutions protect themselves and rulers invariably
insist that whatever they do is necessary.
Yet
constitutional limits are not self-enforcing. Congress must
defend its powers. The courts must issue rulings the
government cannot evade or ignore. Public officials must
refuse unlawful commands. Journalists must expose abuses
rather than become consumed by spectacle. The people must
withdraw their consent from leaders who treat the
Constitution as a dare.
Otherwise, the Constitution
becomes little more than a catalogue of restrictions the
president has learned he can violate without
consequence.
That is the larger pattern obscured by
the hourly barrage of outrage, mania and political
theater.
Cross a line.
Wait.
If Congress
hesitates, the courts delay, officials comply and the public
moves on, the line was never real.
Then cross
another.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield
America: The War on the American People and its
fictional counterpart The
Erik Blair Diaries, constitutional limits mean
nothing when the institutions entrusted with enforcing them
refuse to act.
The greatest danger is not that Trump
keeps testing the limits.
It is that the institutions
entrusted with enforcing those limits keep failing the
test.
WC: 2721
Constitutional attorney
and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The
Rutherford Institute. His latest books The
Erik Blair Diaries and Battlefield
America: The War on the American People are
available at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at
johnw@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive
Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The
Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.
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