Unfit to Govern: We Need a 25th Amendment for the American Police State

Posted: April 15, 2026 in Uncategorized
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“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 47th 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 80th birthday as part of the nation’s 250th 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 25th 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 25th 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 25th 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.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/3msmnbt9

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

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

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

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

America Last: War Abroad, Tyranny at Home—and the Theft of a Nation

Posted: April 8, 2026 in Uncategorized
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“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:

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 25th Amendment.

Not surprisingly, the very same individuals who loudly called to invoke the 25th 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.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/4z57c7nw

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

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

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

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

Hijacking Religion: How the Pentagon Turned the Sermon on the Mount into a War Manual

Posted: April 1, 2026 in Uncategorized
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“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.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/ymttyrta

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

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

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

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

Preemptive War, Permanent Emergency: The Real Cost of Trump’s Iran Strike

Posted: March 4, 2026 in Uncategorized
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“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.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/u65m2syb

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

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

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Instead, the swamp has been privatized.

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

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

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

This is how you bilk a nation.

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

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

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

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

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

This is not savvy business. This is graft.

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

Just consider the entries in this administration’s ledger.

Personal indulgence and vanity projects:

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

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

$28 million for an Amazon documentary on Melania Trump.

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

Policy decisions that generate revenue or leverage:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Public money redirected toward private allies and enforcement expansion:

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

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

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

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

Foreign entanglements and gifts:

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

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

These are not isolated expenditures. They reveal a pattern.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Increasingly, we appear to have both.

And this is where the danger becomes clear.

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

It spreads into the Justice Department.

It spreads into the courts.

It spreads into law enforcement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The average American waits. The wealthy pay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That secrecy was not accidental. It was strategic.

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

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

Unfortunately, the rot doesn’t stop there.

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

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

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

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

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

This is not mercy. It is a protection racket.

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

The resemblance to a cartel grows harder to ignore.

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

As the Editorial Board of the New York Times concluded:

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

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

A republic cannot survive when public office becomes private property.

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

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

We are witnessing the hollowing out of a constitutional republic.

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

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

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

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

It is time to drain the swamp.

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

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

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

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

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

Protecting Sex Predators: The Sordid Reality of the Global Power Elite

Posted: February 18, 2026 in Uncategorized
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“When did pedophilia become a partisan issue? The American people deserve to know the whole truth about Jeffrey Epstein and every single powerful person who enabled him. Every name, every flight log, every cover up, all of it … If there’s one thing we should all be able to agree on Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and progressives—it’s that no one, including the President of the United States, should be able to cover up crimes against children.”—James Talarico (Texas politician, Presbyterian seminarian, and former public school teacher)

Nearly 30 years after the first complaints were filed, the Epstein files remain a masterclass in how the ruling class shields its own.

This is no longer just about one man’s crimes—it is about the machinery of silence that keeps the global elite untouchable.

We are long past the point for partisan excuses and institutional gaslighting.

The question is no longer whether Jeffrey Epstein—the hedge fund billionaire/convicted serial pedophile and sex trafficker—committed monstrous crimes against young girls, many of them children.

We know he did.

What remains unresolved is something far more troubling.

We know that Epstein did not act alone.

A decision by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals allowing thousands of pages of Epstein-related documents to be unsealed referenced allegations involving “numerous prominent American politicians, powerful business executives, foreign presidents, a well-known Prime Minister, and other world leaders.”

That alone should have been enough to trigger full transparency.

Instead, nearly 30 years after the first complaints against Epstein were filed, the full truth remains obscured.

Why are documents still partially sealed? Why do redactions remain? Why are investigations declared “closed” while unanswered questions linger?

Epstein may have conveniently died in a jail cell six weeks after his arrest on federal sex trafficking charges, but the machinery that empowered and protected him is still very much intact and it continues to work overtime to shield the global power elite, silence victims, and erase accountability.

And that is the real scandal.

Because this was never simply about Epstein. It was about the system that made Epstein possible.

The Epstein files should have been a moral bright line—an issue so morally reprehensible and widely condemned as to cut through partisan politics.

Instead, it has become part of the three-ring circus that is governance in America today.

The political noise. The wag-the-dog distractions. The slow-walking of the files’ release. The what-aboutisms.

This was never about one president.

It was never about one political party.

And yet, at this present moment, it is one president and one party that appear to be resisting full transparency.

Donald Trump was at one time socially connected to Epstein. Bill Clinton was, too. Both men were shielded, in different ways and at different times, by a partisan system willing to look the other way when politically convenient.

The same voices who denounced Clinton for sexual impropriety often fell silent in the face of Trump’s own history. Likewise, some who defended Clinton had no hesitation in condemning Trump.

The principle was never the point. Power was.

And that is why this cannot be dismissed as partisan score-settling.

This is not a minor incident involving minor players, nor can it be confined to one political party or one political era.

This is about the darkness at the heart of the American police state: a system built to shield the powerful from justice.

Epstein did not sidestep accountability because he was clever. He sidestepped accountability because he was protected.

Power protects power.

Epstein was aided, abetted and protected by a cross-section of political, corporate and societal classes here in the United States and abroad. He cultivated relationships across politics, finance, academia, entertainment, and global power circles. His social network spanned parties, ideologies, and continents.

Trump’s name alone reportedly appears more than 38,000 times. Numerous top officials connected to the Trump administration have also appeared in the Epstein files, including Elon Musk, Steve Bannon, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

While mere association is not tantamount to guilt, these associations speak volumes about how power operates according to its own rules.

As Rep. Thomas Massie warned Attorney General Pam Bondi, who has been at the forefront of the Trump administration’s effort to slow-walk the release of the Epstein files: “This is bigger than Watergate. This goes over four administrations. You don’t have to go back to Biden. Let’s go back to Obama. Let’s go back to George Bush. This cover-up spans decades, and you are responsible for this portion of it.”

If it looks like a cover-up, smells like a cover-up, and appears to benefit the same entrenched interests, we have every right—indeed, a civic and moral duty—to demand greater transparency.

Nothing illustrates how the power elite protects its own more clearly than Epstein’s 2008 plea agreement.

Almost two decades ago, when Epstein was first charged with molesting, raping and trafficking underage girls, he was gifted a secret plea deal.

According to the Palm Beach Post, that sweetheart deal, arranged by then-U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta, led to 15 more years of abuse by Epstein.

The Justice Department estimates that Epstein victimized at least 1,000 women and children. Over 100 survivors of Epstein’s sexual abuse have come forward so far.

Yet the plea deal allowed Epstein to evade federal charges and serve what amounted to a privileged sentence. For the first 13 months, he was allowed to “work” at home six days a week before returning to a private wing of the Palm Beach County jail to sleep. Later, under house arrest, he was allowed to travel extensively, including to his private island.

Acosta, the U.S. attorney who enabled that arrangement—which, in turn, shielded Epstein’s associates from federal exposure—was later nominated by Trump and served as his Labor Secretary.

This is how corruption by the power elite flourishes: not through secrecy alone but through get-out-of-jail cards that tacitly sanction immoral, illegal and corrupt bad behavior by the ruling classes.

As the Associated Press pointed out, “The arrest of the billionaire financier on child sex trafficking charges is raising questions about how much his high-powered associates knew about the hedge fund manager’s interactions with underage girls, and whether they turned a blind eye to potentially illegal conduct.”

The rot goes deep, and the Epstein case is only the most visible symptom of a much larger disease.

For years, the Epstein case has stood as a grotesque emblem of the depravity within the global power elite: a sex trafficking ring operated not only for Epstein’s personal pleasure but also for that of his friends and business associates—billionaires, politicians, and celebrities.

According to The Washington Post, “several of the young women…say they were offered to the rich and famous as sex partners at Epstein’s parties.”

Once again, fact and fiction mirror each other.

Popular culture has long hinted at what polite society refuses to confront.

Almost 30 years ago—three years after the first complaint against Epstein was filed—Stanley Kubrick’s final film Eyes Wide Shut provided viewing audiences with a sordid glimpse of an elite sexual underworld insulated from consequence: a secret sex society that indulged the basest urges of its affluent members while preying on vulnerable young women.

Kubrick suggested these secret societies flourish because the public chooses not to see what’s right in front of them, content to navigate life in denial about the ugly, obvious truths in our midst.

The Epstein case suggests he was not wrong.

Sex slaves. Sex trafficking. Secret societies. Powerful elites. Government corruption. Judicial cover-ups.

It is not so different from the real world, where powerful men, insulated from accountability, indulge their base urges.

As The Guardian reports, “By the mid-2000s, Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse of teen girls was routine. From 2002 to 2005 alone, the late financier victimized ‘dozens’ of underage teens by luring them into sex acts for payment under the auspices of massage work, some as young as 14.”

If Epstein exposed the rot at the top, the broader landscape of child sex trafficking reveals how deep and systemic that rot truly runs.

The numbers alone are staggering.

Child sex trafficking—the buying and selling of women, young girls and boys for sex, some as young as 9 years old—has become big business in America. It is one of the fastest growing criminal operations and the second most-lucrative commodity traded illegally after drugs and guns.

Adults purchase children for sex at least 2.5 million times a year in the United States.

It’s not just young girls who are vulnerable to these predators, either. Boys account for over a third of victims in the U.S. sex industry.

Who buys a child for sex?

Otherwise ordinary men from all walks of life. “They could be your co-worker, doctor, pastor or spouse,” writes journalist Tim Swarens, who spent more than a year investigating the sex trade in America.

Ordinary men, yes. But then there are the so-called extraordinary men—like Epstein and his associates—with wealth, connections, and protection who are allowed to operate according to their own rules.

Power does not create perversion, but it does insulate the powerful.

These men skate free of accountability because the criminal justice system panders to the powerful, the wealthy and the elite.

For years, investigative journalists and survivors have documented how blackmail, intelligence agency ties, and financial leverage helped shield elite sexual predators—not just from prosecution, but from public scrutiny.

For every Epstein who is—finally—called to account for his illegal sexual exploits after years of being given a free pass by those in power, there are hundreds (perhaps thousands) more in the halls of power and wealth whose predation continues unabated.

While Epstein’s alleged crimes are heinous enough on their own, he is part of a larger narrative of how a culture of entitlement becomes a cesspool and a breeding ground for despots and predators.

Nor is this culture of impunity confined to billionaires and political elites.

Across the country, law enforcement officers have been caught running sex trafficking rings, abusing women and girls in their custody, or exploiting their badge to coerce sex.

From Louisiana to Ohio to New York, officers have been arrested for trafficking underage girls, assaulting vulnerable women, and raping detainees—often shielded by unions, prosecutors, or a blue wall of silence.

This isn’t a few bad apples. It is a culture of impunity baked into the system.

This is how the system works, protecting the untouchables—not because they’re innocent, but because the system has made them immune.

And this is why this case was never just about one man.

As Piotr Smolar writes for Le Monde, “Epstein was the most striking face of a two-tier system of justice, one that provided a privileged path for the powerful.”

We see this pattern everywhere.

A cop shoots an unarmed citizen and walks free. A president sidesteps constitutional limits. An agency spies on its citizens. A financier negotiates immunity.

Abuse of power—and the ambition-fueled hypocrisy and deliberate disregard for misconduct that make those abuses possible—works the same whether you’re talking about sex crimes, government corruption, or the rule of law.

Sexual predators aren’t the only threat.

For every prominent name who eventually gets called out for his sexual misbehavior, there are hundreds—thousands—of others in the American police state who are getting away with murder—in many cases, literally—simply because they can.

And as history repeatedly demonstrates, power corrupts.

Worse, as 19th-century historian Lord Acton concluded, absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Give any one person—or government agency—too much power and allow them to believe that they are entitled, untouchable and will not be held accountable for their actions, and those powers will be abused.

History proves it. The present moment confirms it.

We can agree to disagree about many things, but the sex trafficking and abuse of children is one issue where there should be absolutely no dissembling, no wiggle room, and no immunity.

America should have zero tolerance for child sex trafficking.

So when President Trump insists that there’s nothing more to discuss or investigate so we should just move on, our collective, unequivocal answer should be an absolute refusal to move on, be distracted or engage in what-aboutisms.

At some point, moral outrage must give way to moral clarity.

The Trump administration’s cover-up is unacceptable. The selective redactions of non-victims’ names and faces are unacceptable. The removal of files by biased administration operatives is unacceptable.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, a constitutional republic cannot survive a protected class.

If the Epstein files force us to think and act differently about anything, let it be this: the rule of law cannot be a one-sided weapon used against the powerless. It must require that the powerful be held just as accountable for their abuses as anyone else.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/3cec2zrj

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

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

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Locked Down. Rounded Up. Warehoused. The Rise of America’s Concentration Camps

Posted: February 4, 2026 in Uncategorized
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“No doubt concentration camps were a means, a menace used to keep order.”—Albert Speer, Nuremberg Trials

In 2021, amid a global pandemic, warnings that the federal government might repurpose warehouses into detention facilities on American soil were dismissed as speculative, alarmist, even conspiratorial.

Five years later, what was speculation is a blueprint for locking up whomever the government chooses to target.

According to investigative reports, the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement are actively purchasing warehouses, factories and industrial buildings across the country for use as detention centers—often with little public notice, minimal oversight, and virtually no accountability.

This is no longer a warning.

It is a five-alarm fire.

With the Trump administration moving forward with plans to rapidly acquire warehouses for what could become a nationwide mass detention network, it’s no longer a question of whether the government will expand mass detention to lock up Americans for defying its mandates but when.

This is how it begins.

The government already has the means, the muscle and the motivation. It has spent decades building a vast archipelago of prisons, detention centers, and emergency facilities capable of imprisoning large numbers of people.

Almost 70,000 people are currently being held by ICE. With $45 billion burning a hole in its budget, the Department of Homeland Security is spending big on its concentration camps in order to hold more people, for longer periods, with fewer constraints.

While the Trump administration insists that it is only targeting the “worst of the worst”—murderers, rapists, gang members, pedophiles and terrorists—most of those being rounded up have no criminal record. Being undocumented is a civil violation, not a crime.

This is where we have to tread cautiously, because authoritarian regimes love to play Orwellian word games, and the current administration is no exception.

Case in point: DHS Secretary Kristi Noem claims that every single individual arrested or detained has committed a crime, but being charged with or even suspected of a crime is very different from being convicted of a crime.

When the Secretary of Homeland Security equates an arrest with a crime, she isn’t just playing word games—she is effectively nullifying the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments’ guarantee of due process and the presumption of innocence.

If the bar for being arrested is merely committing a crime, we’d all be locked up.

It may come to that eventually.

Given the over-criminalization of the American legal code, which contains over 5,000 federal criminal statutes and hundreds of thousands of regulations—translation: every single American unknowingly commits at least three crimes a day—every American can be rendered a “criminal” at the government’s whim.

When you have a government in the business of rounding people up in order to fill warehouses and play to the optics of being tough on crime, it won’t just be undocumented immigrants getting rounded up.

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, political theorist Hannah Arendt warned that concentration camps were not built primarily for criminals. They were built to imprison the innocent—people rendered “criminal” by the state simply for who they were or what they believed.

These camps functioned as laboratories for total domination, where guilt was irrelevant and innocence offered no protection. Individuals were stripped of rights, reduced to categories, and rendered expendable.

That is the danger we are facing now: rightlessness in an age of rights.

When detention quotas replace due process, when people are locked up not for what they have done but for who the government decides they are, the machinery of authoritarianism is already in motion.

Reports of ICE smashing car windows, grabbing people off the streets, and detaining American citizens despite proof of legal status offer a preview of what lies ahead.

We’re not supposed to live in a “papers, please” society, and yet under Trump’s leadership, America is rapidly becoming one.

History has a name for what happens when governments abandon due process and begin locking people up for who they are rather than what they have done.

The next step is always logistical. Once the decision is made to detain people en masse, the state must find places to hold them—out of sight, out of reach, and outside the law.

That is where the warehouses come in.

Make no mistake: these are concentration camps in their earliest form, rebranded and revived for a new age.

“We need to get better at treating this like a business,” ICE director Todd M. Lyons said of deportations. “Like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.”

This language has been used before.

Concentration camps were not initially designed as extermination centers. They were built to intimidate, isolate, and neutralize those deemed undesirable—political dissidents, religious minorities, social outcasts, and anyone perceived as a threat to the regime.

As the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum explains, “The term concentration camp refers to a camp in which people are detained or confined, usually under harsh conditions and without regard to legal norms of arrest and imprisonment that are acceptable in a constitutional democracy.”

That is the point.

This is not about immigration.

It is about what happens when any government claims the power to decide who belongs, who poses a threat, and who can be disappeared for the sake of order.

The legal framework already exists.

Under the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the President and the military are authorized to detain individuals—including U.S. citizens—without access to family, legal counsel, or the courts if the government labels them terrorists.

That label can now be applied so interchangeably with the terms anti-government and extremist that it doesn’t take much to be considered a terrorist anymore.

The Department of Homeland Security, for example, broadly defines extremists as individuals and groups that are “mainly antigovernment,” reject federal authority, or question the legitimacy of government power. Military veterans have been flagged as potential extremist threats simply for being disgruntled or disillusioned. Ordinary Americans exercising their constitutional rights—speaking freely, protesting, criticizing the government, owning firearms, or demanding warrants—can find themselves on a government watch list.

As a New York Times editorial once warned, you may be viewed as an anti-government extremist (a.k.a. domestic terrorist) if you are afraid that the government is plotting to confiscate your firearms, believe the economy is about to collapse, suspect the government will soon declare martial law, or display too many political bumper stickers on your car.

According to the FBI, espousing conspiracy theories or holding views that are contrary to the government’s can also qualify someone as a domestic terrorism concern.

This is what happens when you put the power to determine who is a potential danger in the hands of government agencies, courts, and police, but also give those agencies sweeping authority to detain individuals and lock them up for perceived wrongs without due process.

It is a system begging to be abused. And it has happened here before.

In the 1940s, Japanese-Americans were rounded up and imprisoned in concentration camps based solely on their ancestry. The Supreme Court upheld the policy in Korematsu v. United States (1944), concluding that national security concerns outweighed individual liberty.

Courts have a habit of recognizing injustice only after the fact, and the government has a tendency to sidestep the rule of law when it suits its purposes. As Justice Scalia once warned, “In times of war, the laws fall silent.”

The groundwork has been laid.

The infrastructure for domestic concentration camps has existed for decades.

FEMA—the Federal Emergency Management Agency—has long been tasked with emergency planning that includes large-scale detention capabilities.

Created by executive order in the 1970s, FEMA’s mandate expanded quietly. By the 1980s, it was involved in classified military-type training exercises carried out in conjunction with the Department of Defense. Code named Rex-84, federal agencies, including the CIA and the Secret Service, were trained on how to respond to domestic unrest and carry out mass round-ups.

FEMA’s role in planning for domestic internment and mass detention is well-documented.

Now if you’re going to have internment camps on American soil, someone has to build them— or repurpose existing structures to serve that function—and then staff them—and eventually fill them.

In 2006, the government awarded a Halliburton subsidiary a $385 million contract to build American detention facilities for use during “emergencies,” including mass immigration, “natural disasters,” or to support the rapid development of new programs in the event of other emergencies.

That rationale has now been updated for a new era.

Today, DHS and ICE are buying up and converting warehouses, factories, and industrial spaces across the country into detention facilities. These buildings—designed for storage and logistics, not human beings—are being outfitted with fencing, surveillance systems, holding areas, and makeshift sleeping quarters. Many operate outside the standards that apply to traditional correctional facilities, with fewer inspections, limited oversight, and little public visibility.

The government insists these warehouse detention sites are necessary to handle prisoner overflow, respond to emergencies, and maintain flexibility.

History tells a different story.

What begins as temporary becomes permanent. What is justified as exceptional becomes routine. And what is done to non-citizens has an uncanny way of expanding—especially when dissent, protest, or noncompliance are rebranded as threats to national security.

Once again, the language of emergency is being used to normalize extraordinary abuses of power.

Now, detention camps require not only buildings but lists of potential detainees, and here, too, the government is prepared.

For decades, the government has acquired and maintained, without warrant or court order,  databases of individuals considered threats to national security. One such database—reportedly known as “Main Core”—contains millions of names and is intended for use during national emergencies to locate and detain perceived enemies of the state.

As Salon reports, this database, reportedly dubbed “Main Core,” is to be used by the Army and FEMA in times of national emergency or under martial law to locate and round up Americans seen as threats to national security.

In 2026, the static lists of the past have been replaced by “living” databases.

Fueled by agentic AI and mass data-scraping, the government’s surveillance architecture no longer relies on manual updates. These AI systems autonomously crawl social media, financial records, and geolocation data in real-time, creating high-accuracy “threat profiles” that are virtually impossible to escape.

Once you are flagged by an algorithm that operates without human oversight, you aren’t just a name on a list—you are a permanent node in a digital dragnet that follows you from your keyboard to the warehouse door.

This AI-driven dragnet is on the hunt using a specific, long-established ideological map. The technology has simply caught up to the government’s decades-old desire to categorize dissent as a national security threat.

Remember back in 2009, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released two reports, one on “Rightwing Extremism,” which broadly defines rightwing extremists as individuals and groups “that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely,” and one on “Leftwing Extremism,” which labeled environmental and animal rights activist groups as extremists.

Incredibly, both reports used the words terrorist and extremist interchangeably.

That same year, the DHS launched Operation Vigilant Eagle, which calls for surveillance of military veterans returning from Iraq, Afghanistan and other far-flung places, characterizing them as extremists and potential domestic terrorist threats because they may be “disgruntled, disillusioned or suffering from the psychological effects of war.”

These reports indicated that for the government, so-called extremism is not a partisan matter.

Anyone seen as opposing the government—whether they’re Left, Right or somewhere in between—is a target.

Which brings us to the inevitable conclusion: when the government claims the authority to broadly define who is a threat, uses taxpayer funds to erect a network of concentration camps across the country, and methodically builds databases identifying anyone seen as opposing the government as an extremist, the question is not if that power will be abused—but when and how often.

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 slippery slope.

If the price for fighting illegal immigration is the complete abdication of our constitutional republic, that price is too high.

The means do not justify the ends.

The police state’s solutions to our so-called problems pose the greatest threat to our freedoms.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/vhew4kzk

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

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

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Homeowners Beware: ICE Claims Power to Enter Homes Without Judicial Warrants

Posted: January 22, 2026 in Uncategorized
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WASHINGTON, D.C. — One year after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to protect homeowners from warrantless searches by police based merely on a suspicion that a person on probation or parole resides on the premises, agents with Immigration and Customs Enforcement are now forcibly entering private homes without a judge’s warrant.

According to reporting by the Associated Press, ICE officers are being instructed that they may use force to enter a residence based solely on an administrative arrest warrant tied to a final order of removal—despite prior guidelines and legal precedent holding that such warrants do not authorize entry into a private home absent consent or exigent circumstances.

“This is not law enforcement. It’s a home-invasion policy,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “The Fourth Amendment does not disappear at the doorstep simply because the government labels a piece of paper an ‘administrative warrant.’ Judicial oversight is not optional. It is the Constitution’s first line of defense against tyranny.”

The Rutherford Institute warned one year ago that the Supreme Court’s refusal to intervene in Bailey v. Arkansas set the nation on a slippery slope toward a society in which police may invade homes based on nothing more than a hunch. That warning now carries graver weight in light of ICE’s newly revealed internal memo authorizing officers to forcibly enter private residences without judicial approval—a sweeping assertion of power that directly collides with the Fourth Amendment’s core protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. Disturbingly, these warrantless raids are not confined to non-citizens. In a widely reported incident, ICE agents forced open the door to the Minnesota home of ChongLy Thao, a U.S. citizen, dragged him outside in his underwear, and detained him without a judicial warrant—despite his repeated assertions of citizenship. The incident underscores the real-world consequences of treating administrative authority as a substitute for constitutional safeguards. Unlike judicial warrants issued by neutral judges upon a showing of probable cause, ICE administrative warrants are signed internally by immigration officials—allowing the same agency to act as lawmaker, judge, and enforcer. Civil liberties advocates warn that this concentration of power invites precisely the kind of warrantless, militarized home raids the Fourth Amendment was written to prevent.

For years, The Rutherford Institute has documented the steady erosion of Fourth Amendment protections through no-knock raids, militarized policing, and “Constitution-free” enforcement tactics—often targeting the most vulnerable communities first. ICE’s new guidance represents a dangerous escalation of that trend. “This memo doesn’t just threaten immigrants. It normalizes the idea that armed government agents may force their way into a home without judicial approval. Once that line is crossed, no one’s privacy is secure—not even citizens,” Whitehead said. “The government is once again testing how much lawlessness the public will tolerate. History shows that when agencies are allowed to ignore the Fourth Amendment in the name of expediency, abuse follows—and freedom is the casualty.”

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

Source: https://tinyurl.com/mryprccm

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