The Founders anticipated Donald J. Trump. They knew tyranny was in the political bloodstream. What they did not anticipate was the cowardice and cruelty of the elected officials and rank and file of the Republican Party. In Federalist No. 51, James Madison argued that self-interest (“turf”) was the main bulwark against tyranny:
Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. … In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.
Madison knew the system could create a psychopathic demagogue: Aaron Burr, Father Coughlin, Huey Long. He counted on the turf consciousness of others to keep the demagogue in check.
Now, in Trump’s 2nd term, we have seen the destruction of an independent Congress that might counter Trump’s ambition. Trump nominates grotesquely unqualified appointees like Pete Hegseth or RFK, Jr., then threatens to destroy anyone who votes against them, and the spineless Republican Senate confirms perhaps the worst Cabinet ever. Madison’s system has collapsed.
MAGA loyalists spent four years in Trump’s first term applauding the blatant weaponization of the Department of Justice (DOJ) as he demanded investigations and prosecutions of his political foes. “Lock her up!” was the major theme of the 2016 campaign. His first AG, Jeff Sessions, and first FBI director, James Comey, were both fired for refusing to launch blatantly political investigations.
Now, Trump has appointed election deniers to top positions at DOJ, including the former lobbyist for Hamas-supporting Qatar, Pam Bondi, as AG. While promising to end “weaponization” in her confirmation hearing, Bondi promptly set about weaponizing the entire DOJ. Lawyers who worked for Special Prosecutor Jack Smith were fired. Others were transferred from cyber-security, crime, or terrorism to engage in investigations of Smith. Law firms who defended Democrats were bullied into dropping their work for Democrats and doing pro-bono work for Trump.
Perhaps the most brazen assault on our liberties is Trump’s offensive against immigrants and the accompanying last guardrail, the judicial process.
Trump’s claims of a “migrant crime wave” are lies. There are not that many criminals in the immigrant population, and it is hard work to exercise the judicial system to find them and provide due process. So instead, ICE haunts courthouses and grabs people coming for their citizenship hearings – or raids restaurants and deports people who have lived and worked here 20 years – or just cancels the visas of those loyal Afghan translators, and sends them back to almost certain death. And to accomplish this, we have basically become the Argentine junta, complete with broad daylight kidnappings by masked, unbadged people who might or might not be ICE agents, and by “disappearing” people who wrote op-eds critical of Israel or have Real Madrid tattoos.
Trump has made the absurd claim that the country is literally at war with a two-bit Venezuelan gang. These are not deportations. In a deportation, you send them home and off they go. These are “renditions,” the shame of Abu Ghraib, enacted on a mass basis. These people are simply disappeared – into a Salvadoran gulag.
Of course, most of this is so blatant that even the Trump-dominated courts have rejected most of these actions and issued injunctions to stop Trump’s most dangerous assaults on the Constitution. Trump’s officials, though, have ignored the plain language of judicial decisions, informed the Supreme Court that the Trump administration might or might not obey binding precedent, insisted judges have no authority over any Executive Branch decision, accused judges who rule against Trump of committing crimes, and demanded the impeachment of judges who ruled against Trump. In conjunction with all this, Trump loyalists have been unleashed and violent threats against judges are up 327% since last year.
Further, his emboldened staff are digging even deeper at the foundations of democracy. Presidential Advisor Stephen Miller states that the Trump Administration is considering suspending habeas corpus, which would be wholly illegal, both because that authority explicitly belongs to Congress and because it is only available in “Cases of Rebellion or Invasion [if] the public Safety may require it.” Judges are being arrested in the course of duty. U.S. citizen-children of immigrants are being deported. Recently, the Mayor of Newark, New Jersey was arrested while standing on a public sidewalk during a peaceful demonstration at an ICE facility. Shamelessly, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has threatened to arrest three Democratic members of Congress who were attending the same demonstration. Nobody is safe.
Leon Reed is a former US Senate staff member, defense consultant, and history teacher. He is a 10 year resident of Gettysburg, where he writes military history and explores the park and the Adams County countryside. He is the publisher at Little Falls Books, chaired the Adams County 2020 Census Complete Count Committee and is on the board of SCCAP. He and his wife, Lois, have 3 children, 3 cats, and 5 grandchildren.
Jeff Colvin has spent his professional career as a research physicist, first at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and then at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the two US nuclear weapons design laboratories. He lives in Gettysburg part-time and is chair of Gettysburg DFA Government Accountability task force.