This article was originally published by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead at The Rutherford Institute.
NYT: “Do you see any checks on your power on the world stage? Is there anything that could stop you if you wanted to?”
President Trump: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me, and that’s very good.”
In January 1776, Thomas Paine published Common Sense, a pamphlet that gave voice to the discontent of a nation struggling to free itself from a tyrannical ruler who believed power flowed from his own will rather than the consent of the governed.
Paine’s warning was not theoretical.
Two hundred and fifty years later, we find ourselves confronting the same dilemma—this time from inside the White House: can a people remain free if they place their faith in the virtue (or vice) of one man?
When asked by the New York Times what might restrain his power grabs, Donald Trump did not point to the Constitution, the courts, Congress, or the rule of law—as his oath of office and our constitutional republic require. He pointed to himself.
According to Trump, the only thing standing between America and unchecked power is his own morality.
Now America’s founders believed in faith and morality. As John Adams warned in 1798, “Avarice, Ambition, and Revenge or Galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Adams was not advocating for a theocracy. Rather, he was emphasizing that a government of liars, thugs, and thieves will not be bound by constitutional limits. It will treat them as inconveniences.
A constitutional government survives only when both the people and their leaders are willing to be bound by it.
If our freedoms depend on Donald Trump’s self-proclaimed morality, we are in dangerous territory.
Over the course of his nearly 80 years, Trump has been a serial adulterer, philanderer, liar, and convicted felon. He has cheated, stolen, lied, plundered, pillaged, and enriched himself at the expense of others. He is vengeful, petty, unforgiving, foul-mouthed, and crass. His associates include felons, rapists, pedophiles, drug traffickers, sex traffickers, and thieves. He disrespects the law, disregards human life, is ignorant of the Bible, illiterate about the Constitution, takes pleasure in others’ pain and misfortune, and is utterly lacking in mercy, forgiveness, or compassion.
Christian nationalists have tried to whitewash Trump’s behavior by wrapping religion in the national flag and urging Americans to submit to authoritarianism—an appeal that flies in the face of everything the founders risked their lives to establish.
That whitewashing effort matters, because it asks Americans to abandon the very safeguards the Founders put in place to protect them from men like Trump.
Trump speaks in a language of kings, strongmen, and would-be emperors advocating for personal rule over constitutional government. America’s founders rejected that logic, revolted against tyranny, and built for themselves a system of constitutional restraints—checks and balances, divided authority through a separation of powers, and an informed, vigilant populace.
“If men were angels, no government would be necessary,” James Madison argued in Federalist 51. Because men are not angels and because power corrupts, Thomas Jefferson concluded: “In questions of power then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”
All of their hard work is being undone. Not by accident, and not overnight.
The erosion follows a familiar pattern to any who have studied the rise of authoritarian regimes.
Trump and his army of enablers and enforcers may have co-opted the language of patriotism, but they are channeling the tactics of despots.
This is not about left versus right, or even about whether Trump is a savior or a villain. It is about the danger of concentrating unchecked power in any one individual, regardless of party or personality.
This should be a flashing red warning sign for any who truly care about freedom, regardless of partisan politics.
The ends do not justify the means.
Power that can be used “for the right reasons” today will be used for the wrong reasons tomorrow.
History shows that once the machinery of oppression is built—surveillance systems, militarized enforcement, emergency authorities—it does not care who operates the controls. The only question is who will be targeted next.
All presidents in recent years have contributed to the rise of the American police state with executive overreach, standing armies, militarized policing, war without consent, mass surveillance, and concentrated power.
But Trump 2.0 has done more to dismantle the nation’s constitutional guardrails than at any other time in history.
Rather than adhering to the script provided by America’s founders, it’s as if the Trump administration took the grievances leveled against King George III in the Declaration of Independence and adopted them as a governing playbook.
These are not hypotheticals or worst-case projections.
They are unfolding now through emergency declarations, warrantless raids, speech-based detentions, unaccountable surveillance, and military actions launched without consent or constitutional authority.
It is the same sequence every despot follows.
First, power is centralized.
- Trump has ruled by executive decree rather than law, sidelining Congress through emergency declarations and unilateral orders.
- He has obstructed laws necessary for the public good, refusing to enforce statutes that limit his authority.
- He has conditioned governance on loyalty, withholding protection, relief, or aid from those who oppose him.
Next, accountability is dismantled.
- Trump has obstructed the administration of justice, interfering with investigations and shielding allies from prosecution.
- He has politicized the judiciary, rewarding loyalty over independence and attacking courts that resist him.
- He has undermined due process, expanding detention, administrative punishment, and coercive enforcement.
Once law no longer restrains power, force takes its place.
- Trump has deployed militarized federal agents among the civilian population without meaningful oversight.
- He has blurred the line between civilian authority and military power, treating force as governance.
- He has protected agents from accountability, excusing abuse, violence, and killing by law enforcement.
If this is how Trump intends to celebrate the country’s 250th birthday, by reenacting the abuses that drove Americans to revolt in 1776, someone might need to clue him in to the fact that it ends with Americans rejecting “absolute tyranny.”
With every passing day, the American police state with Trump at its helm gets more unhinged.
Once force replaces law at home, it is only a matter of time before it is unleashed abroad.
With Trump’s blessing, the military carried out strikes on Nigeria on Christmas Day.
Without congressional authorization, without constitutional authority, and without any grounding in international law, Trump directed U.S. forces to invade a foreign country, abduct its president and his wife—and then Trump declared himself the new head of Venezuela.
Consumed with visions of global conquest and military expansion, Trump has treated sovereignty as negotiable and international law as an inconvenience. He has threatened, coerced, or destabilized nations including Venezuela, Greenland, Cuba, Nigeria, Iran, and others—not through diplomacy or lawful process, but through dominance, spectacle, and unilateral force.
Trump’s push to boost the military budget to $1.5 trillion speaks less to national defense than to imperial ambition.
This is not leadership. It is lawlessness carried out by mercenaries and thugs on the government payroll.
Not content to wage war abroad, the government has systematically worked to transform America into a battlefield, setting its sights on the American people.
That transformation is almost complete.
In Minneapolis, a federal ICE agent shot and killed 37-year-old Renee Good in the head, while she was behind the wheel of her car. In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, the Trump administration rushed to paint Good as an agitator and domestic terrorist, justifying the cold-blooded assassination of an American citizen by a masked gunman as an act of self-defense.
Video footage, including from the ICE agent who can be heard remarking, “Fucking bitch,” reflects poorly on the government’s claims.
Rather than de-escalating a situation that they created, the Trump administration has continued to add fuel to the fire, deploying more militarized agents, more force, more intimidation.
ICE agents have been battering down doors, ramming into private homes, and carrying out warrantless militarized raids that treat constitutional protections as inconveniences and human beings as expendable obstacles.
This is the reality of Trump’s America: moral collapse, thuggery, violence, greed, and dehumanization.
Due process has become optional. Restraint has vanished. Violence has been normalized.
A government that recognizes no moral limits will recognize no legal limits.
And a nation that places its faith in the “morality” of unrestrained power will soon discover that morality—like liberty—cannot survive where law no longer rules.
Unchecked power does not protect its supporters—it eventually turns on them, too.
This is what happens when the rule of law gives way to rule by force.
Looming over all of this is a question that can no longer be ignored: who is pulling the strings?
Nothing about Trump’s behavior is rational or sane, even by his own standards: he’s bulldozing the White House, blitz-bombing boats, threatening to seize foreign lands by force, and plastering his name and face on every available surface.
As diabolical as these distractions are, they are a sideshow to keep us from seeing the long-term plans to lock down the country being put in place by an unaccountable shadow apparatus operating behind the scenes for whom the Constitution means nothing.
We ignore them at our own peril.
What we are witnessing is not merely presidential overreach, but the consolidation of power within an unaccountable executive-security apparatus—one that operates beyond meaningful public oversight and treats constitutional limits as obstacles rather than obligations.
A ruler who sees himself as indispensable soon comes to believe the law is expendable.
A government that elevates personal ambition over public accountability begins to treat constitutional restraints as obstacles rather than safeguards.
And a nation that confuses brute force with authority inevitably finds itself governed by fear rather than consent.
When a president surrounds himself with military parades, inflates defense budgets to obscene levels, deploys federal forces against the civilian population, and insists that his personal morality is the only safeguard against abuse, the republic is no longer drifting towards tyranny—it is sliding fast.
And when ego becomes policy, the results are predictable: perpetual war, endless surveillance, normalized violence, the criminalization of dissent, and a public conditioned to accept abuses in the name of security and patriotism.
This is how republics fall.
Not all at once. Not with a single coup or declaration. But gradually, through the steady erosion of norms, the hollowing out of institutions, and the quiet surrender of moral responsibility.
Paine warned that “a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.” That warning resonates with terrifying clarity today.
Americans are being trained to accept what would have once been unthinkable: law enforcement that kills without consequence, presidents who operate above the law, wars launched without consent, and power exercised without accountability.
That normalization is the true danger.
Which brings us to the question that Common Sense forced Americans to confront in 1776—and that we must confront again now: Are we a nation governed by laws, or by the will of a man?
If the answer is the latter, then no election, no court, no ritual invocation of patriotism can save us.
The founders did not risk everything to replace one tyrant with another. They did not reject monarchy only to embrace executive supremacy. They did not enshrine checks and balances so that future generations could shrug and hope that those in power would restrain themselves.
They understood that freedom requires moral courage, not blind loyalty; that resistance to tyranny is not treason, but duty; and that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance—not eternal trust.
But when the law itself is perverted for corrupt ends, the burden of resistance does not disappear. It shifts.
The founders also understood something else—something history has confirmed again and again: when government descends into lawlessness, people of conscience, faith and deep moral beliefs are tested. And they either rise to confront injustice, or become complicit in its abuses.
The Franklin Grahams of this world, who have exchanged moral authority for a seat at Trump’s table, would have us believe the lawful response is simply to comply with those in power.
But scripture does not command blind obedience to power. The same Bible invoked to demand submission also records prophets confronting kings, apostles defying unjust rulers, and Jesus himself executed for refusing to submit to an immoral state.
As Martin Luther King Jr. pointed out, “One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”
That resistance has historic roots.
During the years leading up to the American Revolution, it was the so-called Black Robed Regiment—a derisive term used by the British to describe colonial clergy—who spoke most forcefully against tyranny. From pulpits across the colonies, pastors preached sermons condemning unchecked power, defending liberty of conscience, and warning that obedience to unjust authority was itself a form of moral corruption.
Those ministers did not preach submission to power. They preached resistance to it.
In Nazi Germany, theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer watched as the church gradually surrendered its independence and aligned itself with state power. Bonhoeffer warned that when the church becomes silent in the face of evil—or worse, when it cloaks injustice in religious language—it ceases to be the church at all. Silence, he argued, was not neutrality; it was collaboration.
Bonhoeffer paid for that conviction with his life.
These pastors understood that the church’s role is not to sanctify empire, but to confront it.
The same themes running through Paine’s Common Sense and the later American Crisis are just as relevant now as they were 250 years ago: no ruler is above the law, no government is entitled to unchecked power, and no people remain free who surrender their conscience to the ambitions of the powerful.
And as I make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, history has already told us what happens next: when government becomes destructive of liberty, it is not only the right of the people to resist—it is their duty.
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