Not because I don’t have words; I have too many. When I try to name what is happening to our government, to our democracy, to us, I reach for a word and it doesn’t quite fit. Kleptocracy? Yes, but that’s not all of it. Oligarchy? Closer, but still incomplete. Authoritarianism? Absolutely — and yet there’s more. Plutocracy. Theocracy. Each word captures something real and leaves something out.

I’ve decided that discomfort is information.

What we are living under was not built to be easily named. The difficulty isn’t a failure of our vocabulary. It’s a feature of the design. If you read my three-part series The Quiet Coup, you watched the construction happen in real time across five decades: the Federalist Society seeding the courts, Leonard Leo directing dark money, wealthy ideologues playing a very long game with extraordinary patience and discipline. What I want to do now is step back from the blueprints and look at the finished building.

It has five layers. Each one provides cover for the others. Together they form something American democracy was never designed to withstand, because nobody who designed our democracy believed anyone would be audacious enough to build it.

Layer One: Oligarchy — The Foundation

Start at the bottom, because that’s where the real weight is carried.

Oligarchy means rule by a small group, and what we have now is a small group of extraordinarily wealthy men with direct, personal access to state power. Elon Musk. Peter Thiel. The Mercer family. A constellation of billionaires who spent decades investing in political infrastructure and are now collecting the return. And behind them, providing the megaphone that made all of it possible: the Murdoch media empire. Rupert Murdoch didn’t just invest in this movement; he manufactured the audience it needed. 1 Three decades of Fox News spent normalizing conspiracy, delegitimizing journalism, and stoking fear and grievance until a radicalized base was ready and waiting to be inherited.

This is where the dark money networks documented in The Quiet Coup cashed in. The Federalist Society wasn’t a legal debate club. It was a decades-long recruitment and placement operation. The think tanks, the PACs, and the judicial nomination pipelines were all capital investment. 2 The government that exists today is the dividend.

The money came first. The government followed. The payoff is now.

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Layer Two: Plutocracy — The Daily Operations

If oligarchy describes who is in control, plutocracy describes how that control operates day to day.

Plutocracy is governance in service of wealth. Watch any major policy decision of the past several years and ask one question: who benefits? The tax cuts that overwhelmingly favored the wealthy. The systematic dismantling of regulatory agencies - the EPA, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Department of Education. The gutting of worker protections while stock buybacks soared.

This layer was made legally bulletproof by the same judicial strategy The Quiet Coup documented. And last week, it got a significant upgrade.

On June 30th, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in NRSC v. FEC to strike down post-Watergate laws that had limited how much money political parties can spend in direct coordination with their candidates. 3 Justice Brett Kavanaugh, writing for the majority, called the limits a violation of free speech. Justice Elena Kagan, in dissent, called it what it actually is: a ruling that allows a political party to function as “an alternative checking account for a campaign”, with no meaningful limits on what billionaire donors can funnel directly to the candidates of their choosing.4

This decision doesn’t just build on Citizens United. It completes it. The architecture documented in The Quiet Coup - decades of patient court-building, strategic appointments, ideological discipline - just delivered its most consequential campaign finance ruling yet. Plutocracy didn’t just survive last week. It got a courthouse full of new keys.

Layer Three: Kleptocracy — The Personal Enrichment

Here is where Donald Trump enters as his own distinct and clarifying element.

Kleptocracy is the use of political power for personal financial gain, and the current presidency has become a revenue stream in ways that would have been unthinkable even a decade ago. The cryptocurrency ventures launched while cryptocurrency regulation policy was being written. 5 The foreign governments paying top dollar for Mar-a-Lago access and accommodations. 6 The tariff negotiations that seem to bend toward the financial interests of the man conducting them. 7

The oligarchic infrastructure built by others over decades became, in Trump’s hands, a personal ATM.

It is worth saying plainly: this is not a bug in the system. The system was built by people who wanted a government too captured and too weakened to stop this kind of behavior. They may not have planned for Trump specifically, but they built exactly the conditions that made him possible and protected.

Layer Four: Authoritarianism — The Method of Control

A kleptocracy needs protection. An oligarchy needs obedience. And so we arrive at authoritarianism - not as an ideology but as a management strategy.

The weaponization of the Department of Justice against political opponents. The open contempt for congressional oversight. The attacks on the press - not just rhetorically, but through regulatory pressure, ownership leverage, and the systematic delegitimization of any institution that might hold power accountable. That delegitimization didn’t begin with Trump. It was seeded over thirty years by Fox News, which trained millions of Americans to distrust any source of information that might contradict the narrative the oligarchs needed them to believe. 8 The executive orders issued, not to govern, but to test how much can be seized without consequence.

And then last week, the Supreme Court handed the authoritarian layer its most powerful tool yet.

On June 29th, the Court ruled 6-3 in Trump v. Slaughter to overturn Humphrey’s Executor, a 91-year-old precedent that had protected the independence of federal agencies from presidential interference. 9 The ruling declares that the president may now fire the leadership of any independent agency, at any time, for any reason, or for no reason at all. The FTC. The SEC. The Consumer Product Safety Commission. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Dozens of agencies created by Congress, funded by Congress, and deliberately designed to be insulated from political pressure can now be brought to heel by a single phone call from the Oval Office.

Trump’s response was characteristically honest. “BIG WIN,” he posted. “One of the most important ever given with respect to Presidential Powers.”10 For once, he wasn’t exaggerating.

What makes this ruling so devastating is what The Quiet Coup documented underneath it: the judicial architecture that produced this decision was decades in the making. Leonard Leo. The Federalist Society. A Supreme Court, remade justice by justice, with exactly this outcome in mind. The normal checks and balances of American democracy assume that courts will function as a brake on executive overreach. That brake has not just been released. It has been removed and handed to the driver.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in dissent, warned that independent agencies will be transformed “in ways that those who created them never could have expected and actively sought to avoid.” 11 She is right. But the people who built this system expected exactly that. They planned for it.

The goal of authoritarianism is not just control. It is to make resistance feel futile. To exhaust people into compliance. To normalize the unacceptable through sheer repetition.

We cannot let it work.

Layer Five: Theocracy — The Moral Disguise

Every system of illegitimate power needs a story about why it is actually legitimate. This one has chosen God.

Christian nationalism is the moral disguise worn by everything above. It transforms oligarchic greed into divine order. It reframes plutocratic policy as biblical stewardship. It gives authoritarian control the language of righteousness. And it makes questioning any of it feel like heresy.

This is the layer The Quiet Coup showed being constructed most patiently. Decades of placing true believers in the courts; judges who hold a specific and aggressive vision of religious liberty that was never in the Constitution but has been read into it methodically, case by case. The Supreme Court’s religious liberty jurisprudence. Prayer in public schools. Christian nationalism openly embraced in the military. Reproductive rights stripped away and framed, not as policy, but as God’s will. 12

When power wraps itself in Scripture, it is not seeking your agreement. It is demanding your silence.

The Orbán Comparison And Why It May Be Letting Us Off Easy

When analysts and journalists reach for a comparison, they most often land on Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. And the comparison is useful - up to a point. Orbán is the clearest modern example of a democratically elected leader who dismantled democracy from the inside, capturing courts, neutralizing the press, tilting elections, all while maintaining just enough legal fiction to avoid being called a dictator outright. The same networks documented in The Quiet Coup studied him, praised him, and imported his methods. Steve Bannon. Rod Dreher. Peter Thiel. Budapest became a pilgrimage destination for American conservatives who wanted to see the future. 13

But I think the Orbán comparison may be doing us a disservice.

Orbán explains the method. Putin explains the scale.

The kleptocracy unfolding in Washington is not Budapest-scale; it is Moscow-scale. The dynamic of oligarchs trading personal loyalty for state protection, the presidency functioning as a personal revenue stream, the inner circle of wealthy men operating with informal but absolute power — this is the architecture of Putin’s Russia, not Orbán’s Hungary. The religious nationalism wrapped around authoritarian power is deeply Putinist. 14 And then there are the documented financial entanglements between Trump’s world and Russian oligarchic money; entanglements that have never been fully explained and have never fully gone away. 15

Here is the uncomfortable truth about why the media reaches for Orbán instead of Putin: the Orbán comparison says this could happen here. The Putin comparison says it already has. That is a much harder sentence for a mainstream outlet to print.

I am not a mainstream outlet. So I will print it.

Why the Layering Is Deliberate

None of this is accidental. None of it is the chaos it sometimes appears to be. Each layer of this system provides cover for the others. The theocracy gives moral legitimacy to the plutocracy. The authoritarianism protects the kleptocracy. The oligarchy funds all of it. And the deliberate complexity — the sheer difficulty of naming it — is itself a weapon. It is hard to fight what you cannot name. It is hard to organize resistance against a target that keeps shifting and blurring.

The decades of patient construction documented in The Quiet Coup were designed specifically to produce this confusion. An opposition that cannot agree on what it is opposing. A public exhausted by complexity. A press that cannot decide whether calling this authoritarianism is reporting or advocacy.

But here is what I know: confusion is a choice. Clarity is also a choice.

The Building Is Finished

So what do we call it? We call it what it is. All of it. A system built layer by layer over decades by a determined group of wealthy, ideologically committed men who were patient enough to play a long game and ruthless enough to see it through. An oligarchic foundation. A plutocratic operating system. A kleptocratic executive. An authoritarian enforcement mechanism. And a theocratic veneer to make it all look like God’s plan.

No single word covers it because it was built specifically to evade single words. But we have enough words. We can use all of them.

And this week — with two Supreme Court rulings issued in two days — we watched the last load-bearing walls go up. Trump v. Slaughter handed the president dominion over the independent agencies Congress built to protect ordinary Americans. 16 NRSC v. FEC handed billionaire donors a direct pipeline to the candidates who will govern them. 17 Both decisions 6-3. Both along ideological lines. Both the product of a judicial architecture assembled over decades by the same networks this publication has been documenting all year.

If you want to understand how this building went up — beam by beam, decade by decade — read my three-part series: The Quiet Coup.

Part one: They Changed the Rules While You Were Watching The News.

Part two: The Court Was Built For this Moment.

Part three: Now They’re Coming For Your Vote

And then tell someone. Name it clearly. Refuse to normalize it. Refuse to be exhausted into silence.

The people who built this were counting on our confusion. Clarity is the first form of resistance.

Mad Mother Writes is a reader-supported publication. If this kind of work matters to you, consider subscribing or sharing with someone who needs to read it.

SOURCES:

My previous two pieces lay out what I believe is the most serious constitutional crisis in American history since the Civil War. In Part 1, I showed you what the Supreme Court has done - the shadow docket rulings, the firing of independent regulators, the immunity the Founders never wrote. In Part 2, I showed you how this Court was assembled: one man, forty years, $1.6 billion in dark money, and a justice who vacationed on a billionaire’s yacht while ruling on cases that billionaire cared about.

If you’ve been reading along, you’ve probably been asking yourself the same question I have. What’s left? If they control the presidency, the courts, and the agencies - what’s the final piece?

The vote. It’s always been the vote.

Because here’s the thing about all the power we’ve talked about: it only holds as long as elections can be controlled or circumvented. A democratic majority, organized and angry enough, can still vote out the people doing this. They know that. And they have a plan for it, written down, chapter and verse, in the same document I’ve been tracking for many months.

Let me show you what’s already in motion.

The Man Behind the Curtain

You need to know a name: Hans von Spakovsky. He’s a lawyer at the Heritage Foundation - the same organization that produced Project 2025. And, he has spent decades doing one thing: building the legal and political architecture to make it harder for certain Americans to vote.

He advised a Virginia voter integrity group in the early 2000s that advocated purging voter rolls. That group honored a company that had erroneously scrubbed thousands of disproportionately minority voters from Florida’s rolls before the 2000 election - an honor for innovation. 1 He was later appointed to oversee the voting rights section of the Bush-era Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, where former colleagues said he injected partisan political factors into enforcement decisions. 2 He was nominated to the Federal Election Commission and withdrew when Democrats refused to confirm him.

And then he wrote the elections chapter of Project 2025's Mandate for Leadership. When Trump said during the 2024 campaign that if he won, people won't have to vote again, von Spakovsky's blueprint is what that looks like in practice. 3

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The SAVE Act: A Solution to a Problem That Doesn’t Exist

The centerpiece of the current voter suppression effort is called the SAVE Act - the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act. It passed the House of Representatives on February 11, 2026, by a vote of 218 to 213, and is now before the Senate. 4

Here is what it requires: Every American who wants to register to vote, or update an existing registration, must appear in person at an election office and present documentary proof of citizenship. For most people, that means a passport or a certified birth certificate. Your driver’s license doesn’t count. Your REAL ID doesn’t count. Your military ID doesn’t count. 5

The stated rationale is preventing noncitizens from voting. Here is the problem with that rationale: noncitizen voting is already illegal, already a federal crime, and already exceedingly rare. After Utah conducted an exhaustive review of its entire voter registration list - more than 2 million registered voters reviewed over nine months - they found exactly one confirmed instance of noncitizen registration. One. 6

We are being asked to restructure the entire American voter registration system, and potentially remove millions of eligible citizens from the rolls, to address a problem that a nine-month statewide audit found exactly once.

Who gets hurt: By the numbers

More than 140 million American citizens do not have a valid passport. 7 For context: 153 million Americans voted in the 2024 presidential election. The Brennan Center estimates that at least 21 million eligible voters lack ready access to the documents the SAVE Act requires. 8 The University of Maryland puts the number of citizens with no citizenship documentation at all - no passport, no birth certificate, no naturalization papers - at 3.8 million. 9

As many as 69 million women who have taken their spouse’s name cannot easily present a birth certificate that matches their legal name. Among Americans with household incomes below $50,000, only one in five has a valid passport. Voters of color are disproportionately represented in every one of these categories.

And perhaps most telling is passport ownership, which is overwhelmingly concentrated in blue states. In seven states - West Virginia, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Oklahoma - fewer than one-third of residents have a valid passport. These are, almost without exception, red states where Republican officials have enthusiastically supported the bill. 10

The bill was drafted by Representative Chip Roy, who has said openly that he wrote it alongside Stephen Miller and Hans von Spakovsky. The same man who wrote the Project 2025 elections chapter co-wrote the legislation implementing it. The circle, again, is not hidden.11

The Executive Orders Nobody Covered

While Congress has been working on the SAVE Act, the administration has been running a parallel track through executive orders - attempting to do by presidential fiat what legislation might take too long to accomplish.

On March 25, 2025, Trump signed Executive Order 14248, titled Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections. The Brennan Center called it an attempt to illegally overrule and take control of major parts of the nation’s election systems, asserting authority the Constitution explicitly gives to states and Congress, not the president. 12

The order did several things.

• It directed the Department of Homeland Security to give DOGE - Elon Musk’s operation -- full access to state voter files and voter list maintenance records.

• It directed the DOJ to sue states that don’t comply with its voter roll purge requirements.

• It attempted to prohibit states from counting mail ballots received after Election Day, even when those ballots were cast on time.

• It tried to direct the independent, bipartisan Election Assistance Commission - which Congress specifically created to be insulated from political interference - to implement the administration’s election rules. 13

Then, in March 2026, Trump issued a second executive order on elections. This one attempts to require the U.S. Postal Service to decide who is allowed to vote by mail - instructing it to refuse to deliver ballots cast by anyone not on newly created lists of approved mail voters. The Brennan Center and other groups have challenged it in court.

DOGE and the Voter Rolls

The most underreported element of this story is what DOGE’s access to voter files actually means in practice.

The administration’s goal, as laid out in both the executive order and the Project 2025 chapter, is to use federal databases - Social Security, DHS immigration records, State Department passport data -- to cross-reference state voter rolls and flag registrations that appear to belong to noncitizens. States would then be pressured to purge those voters. 14

Here is why that is dangerous, even if every person operating it has good intentions: the data is not clean. Cross-referencing databases that use different identifiers, different spelling conventions, and different data collection methods produces errors at scale. We already know this because we’ve seen it happen. Vigilante groups, using similar methods ahead of the 2024 election, challenged the eligibility of tens of thousands of registered Americans who were, in fact, eligible citizens. 15

We also know that DOGE itself has a documented track record of data mishandling. Within minutes of gaining access to the National Labor Relations Board’s systems, someone with a Russian IP address made several attempts to log in using one of DOGE’s newly created accounts. This is the operation being given access to every American voter’s personal data.

The DOJ’s voting section is now led by Maureen Riordan, who previously worked at the Public Interest Legal Foundation - a conservative organization that has spent years suing election officials to force aggressive voter roll purges. Under her leadership, the DOJ has already sued election administrators in North Carolina in what voting rights experts describe as an attempt to trigger a purge of thousands of eligible voters. 16

How This Maps to the Project 2025 Blueprint

Every piece of what I’ve just described has a corresponding line in the Mandate for Leadership. Von Spakovsky’s chapter calls for: expanding voter ID requirements; using federal agencies to force aggressive state voter roll purges; limiting mail voting; restructuring or neutering the independent Election Assistance Commission; raising campaign contribution limits, and using the DOJ’s civil rights division to pursue election integrity enforcement rather than voting rights protection. 17

The SAVE Act delivers the voter ID requirement. The executive orders deliver the agency access and the EAC interference. The new DOJ voting section leadership delivers the enforcement posture. DOGE delivers the data infrastructure for the purges. Each piece was written in the blueprint before Trump took office. Each piece is now being implemented. 18

And here is the part that should stop you cold: the Heritage Foundation’s political arm, Heritage Action, is a founding member of something called the Only Citizens Vote Coalition -- a network of election denial activists and right-wing groups that voting rights experts describe as spreading deliberate misinformation about noncitizen voting to create the public justification for the suppression measures they’ve already planned. 19 They manufacture the crisis. Then they solve it with the solution they already had.

What You Can Actually Do

I want to end this piece differently than the first two, because this one has a more immediate action component. The SAVE Act has passed the House. It is in the Senate. It is not yet law. And the executive orders are being challenged in court.

• Check your registration. Go to vote.org or your state’s official election website and verify that you are still registered at your current address. Do this today, not the week before an election. And, then make it a routine verification every so often.

• Know your documents. Under current law, you don’t need a passport to vote. But if the SAVE Act passes, you will need one to register or update your registration. If you don’t have a passport, look into what it would take to get one -- and help the people in your life do the same. This is especially important for elderly relatives, young people who have never gotten a passport, and anyone who has recently moved or changed their name.

• Contact your senators. The SAVE Act needs 60 Senate votes to overcome a filibuster. That means it needs some Democratic support or some Republican defections. If you are in a state with a senator who might be persuadable, call. Not email -- call. The calls still matter.

• Support voting rights organizations. The Brennan Center, Democracy Docket, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and the League of Women Voters are all actively litigating the executive orders and monitoring the SAVE Act. They need resources to do that work.

I’ve presented three pieces now documenting what I believe is a coordinated, methodical effort to convert American democracy into something that looks like democracy on the surface but functions like authoritarian rule underneath. Courts that implement a predetermined agenda. Agencies stripped of independence. And now a voting system being redesigned to produce predetermined outcomes.

The people doing this are not hiding. They wrote it all down. They told us exactly what they intended. They are counting on our exhaustion, our overwhelm, our tendency to normalize the abnormal because the alternative -- staying permanently outraged -- feels unsustainable.

Don’t give them that. Stay in it.

I’m a mad mother. I intend to vote. And I intend to make sure everyone I know can too.

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SOURCES:

A few days ago, I told you what the Supreme Court has done - the rulings, the shadow docket, the systematic dismantling of the independent regulators who were supposed to stand between corporate power and your family’s safety. I told you about Project 2025 and the blueprint that Vought and Miller and the rest of them wrote while the country wasn’t paying attention.

This week I want to go back further. Because the question I keep getting - in the comments, in my inbox, from people I know in real life - is some version of: How did we end up with this Court?

It’s the right question. And the answer is more deliberate, more documented, and more disturbing than most people realize. This wasn’t luck. This wasn’t the natural drift of American politics. This was a project - a specific, funded, forty-year project -and it has a name, a paper trail, and a face.

It Started in a Reagan-Era Conference Room

The unitary executive theory - the doctrine that gives the president total control over the entire executive branch - is not an ancient constitutional principle that scholars rediscovered. It was invented in 1981, by lawyers in the Reagan administration who needed a constitutional argument that would expand presidential power in the directions the conservative movement wanted it expanded. They needed the argument first, and then they built the legal case for it afterward. 1

Edwin Meese, Reagan’s Attorney General, turned the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel into a workshop for this new doctrine. They wrote the briefs. They built the intellectual scaffolding. And then they founded an organization to train the next generation of lawyers in it.

That organization launched in 1982, at Yale Law School and the University of Chicago. You know it as the Federalist Society. 2

This matters because the theory was emphatically rejected - even by conservative justices -- as recently as 1988. Chief Justice Rehnquist, himself a conservative, wrote the majority opinion in Morrison v. Olson upholding independent agency protections. Only Justice Scalia dissented, calling for a more powerful presidency. The current Court has spent the last several years turning Scalia’s lonely dissent into the law of the land.3

The Man Who Ran the Pipeline

The Federalist Society has been called the single most influential advocacy organization in Washington. That is probably an understatement. But to understand how it became what it is, you have to understand one man who has spent his career at its center: Leonard Leo.

Leo joined the Federalist Society in 1991 and spent the next three decades building what scholars now call a judicial pipeline - a system for identifying conservative law students, placing them in prestigious clerkships, moving them into government positions, vetting them for judgeships, and funding the confirmation battles to get them onto the bench. All the way up to the Supreme Court.4

The results are not subtle. Leo played a key role in the nominations of Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, John Roberts, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.5 That is six of the nine current justices. One man shaped the nominations of six Supreme Court justices across multiple presidencies. A 2023 study found that a nominee’s affiliation with the Federalist Society increased the probability of Senate confirmation by around 20 percent.6

“A federal court system dominated by conservative judges who believe the Constitution must be interpreted literally.”

-- Leonard Leo, describing his life’s goal, as reported by the American Constitution Society 7

Notice what that goal is not. It is not: a fair court. It is not: a court that reflects the range of American legal thought. It is a court that thinks in a specific way - the way Leo and his network trained it to think before those justices ever put on a robe.

And the money behind this operation is staggering. In 2022, Leo secured what is believed to be the largest political donation in American history: a $1.6 billion gift to his conservative legal network from manufacturing magnate Barre Seid. 8 He also sits at the center of a web of dark money organizations totaling nearly $250 million -groups with names that fund judicial confirmation campaigns, attack nominees they oppose, and promote the ones they want.

And Leo’s Teneo Network - one arm of this operation - sat on the advisory board of Project 2025. 9 The man who built the Court also helped build the blueprint the Court is now implementing. If that feels like the same people showing up everywhere you look, that’s because it is.

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Now About Clarence Thomas

I want to be precise here, because the facts are damning enough without any embellishment.

For more than two decades, Justice Clarence Thomas accepted luxury travel from Harlan Crow, a Dallas real estate billionaire and major Republican donor, without disclosing any of it. Vacations on Crow’s 162-foot private superyacht. Flights on Crow’s private jet. Weeks every summer at Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks. A real estate transaction in which Crow purchased properties owned by Thomas and his family in Savannah, Georgia, including the house where Thomas’s elderly mother lives, rent-free, to this day. 10

None of this appeared on Thomas’s financial disclosures. Federal law, passed after Watergate, specifically to prevent this kind of thing, requires justices to disclose most gifts. Ethics experts say his failure to report the flights and yacht trips violates that law. Members of Congress are prohibited from accepting gifts worth more than $50. Thomas accepted gifts worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, year after year, from a man whose political network brought cases before the Supreme Court.

ProPublica’s ongoing investigation has now documented at least 38 destination vacations and 26 private jet flights Thomas received from multiple billionaires - not just Crow. 11 Thomas eventually acknowledged two of the trips were inadvertently omitted from his filings. He has not acknowledged the rest. 12

What Harlan Crow believes

Crow is not a casual donor. He has given more than $10 million in publicly disclosed political donations, and unknown additional amounts to groups not required to reveal their donors. He is a committed supporter of the conservative legal movement - the same movement that produced the Federalist Society, Project 2025, and the unitary executive theory. He has funded causes that have come before the Court. And Thomas has never recused himself from a single case that touched on Crow’s interests or the broader conservative legal agenda.

Thomas also has a documented relationship with the Koch Brothers, developed at the Bohemian Grove - a secretive all-male retreat in Northern California. He attended at least two Koch donor summits, functioning as a fundraising draw for a network that was simultaneously bringing cases before his Court. 13

And then there is Ginni Thomas. His wife was actively involved in efforts to overturn the 2020 election - texting Trump’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to stand firm and urging the White House to follow Sidney Powell’s conspiracy theories. The Senate Judiciary Committee’s December 2024 investigative report concluded that her activities created a direct and unaddressed conflict of interest with cases her husband was ruling on. 14

The Court adopted a voluntary code of ethics in 2023 under intense public pressure. But voluntary is doing enormous work in that sentence - it has no teeth. A December 2024 report from Senator Sheldon Whitehouse found that the Supreme Court is the only high court in the country - among all fifty states - with no enforcement mechanism for ethics violations whatsoever. 15

The Senate Judiciary Committee investigated. They issued subpoenas. They published a 294-page report documenting the gifts, the trips, the conflicts, the flags at Alito’s houses. Republicans on the committee expressed no concerns. The report sits there, detailed and damning, with no enforcement mechanism attached to it.

This is by design. Not malicious design, but the design of people who assumed that those who reached the Supreme Court would be too committed to institutional integrity to behave this way. That assumption, like Madison’s assumption about Congress, has not held.

What This All Means Together

Let me draw the full picture, because when you see it assembled it is more clarifying than any individual piece of it.

The conservative legal movement invented a doctrine in 1981 to expand presidential power. It founded an organization in 1982 to train lawyers in that doctrine and pipeline them toward the bench. Over forty years, it raised hundreds of millions - then billions - in dark money to fund confirmation battles and attack nominees it opposed. It placed six justices on the Supreme Court, all shaped by the same ideological project. At least one of those justices accepted gifts worth hundreds of thousands of dollars from donors whose movement he now serves from the bench, disclosed none of it, and refused to recuse himself from the cases that mattered most.

And then that same network wrote Project 2025. And that same Court is implementing it.

This is not a conspiracy theory. Every piece of what I’ve just described is documented: In ProPublica’s reporting, in the Senate Judiciary Committee’s own investigative record, in Federalist Society membership rolls, in FEC filings, in Leo’s own public statements about his goals. The paper trail exists. The money trail exists. The through-line is not hidden.

What is hard - what I find genuinely difficult - is sitting with what it means that a democracy allowed this to happen in plain sight. That the checks failed not because they were secretly disabled, but because the people responsible for them looked away, or calculated that looking away served their interests, or simply couldn’t imagine that anyone would push this far.

I’ve been a mad mother writing about this for eighteen months. I am more convinced now than I was at the beginning that the only force capable of reversing any of it is an informed, organized, relentless citizenry that refuses to treat this as normal.

So: don’t treat it as normal.

Keep reading. Keep sharing. Keep talking to people who’ve tuned out. The Court was built over forty years. Rebuilding the guardrails will take time too. But it starts with enough people understanding exactly what happened, and deciding they are not willing to accept it.

I’m not. And I don’t think you are either.

SOURCES

I’m a retired English teacher. I’ve helped hundreds of students find their way into stories. And somehow it took a little girl with a big imagination to finally get me writing my own.

So I wrote it for her, and I put her in it too! And then something funny happened; I thought maybe other kids might want it too.

Ainsley and Bigfoot in the City is now available on Amazon. It’s a storybook and coloring adventure for children ages 4–8, about an ordinary day that becomes anything but ordinary when Bigfoot knocks on the door. The two friends spend the day biking, swimming, cooking, reading, playing, and generally causing the kind of joyful chaos that grandmothers find completely irresistible.

It’s part read-aloud story, part coloring book — so kids can follow along and then make each scene their own. There’s even a bonus activity page at the end, because why stop the fun?

I know most of you follow me here for my writing about democracy and the state of the country — heavy stuff, and important. But I also believe, maybe now more than ever, that stories about friendship, curiosity, and unexpected adventures matter too. That books for little people are part of how we keep hope alive.

This one started as a gift for one child. I hope it finds its way to yours.

[Ainsley and Bigfoot in the City on Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/Ainsley-Bigfoot-City-Jeri-Gia/dp/B0H35Q8VW2)

If you read it with a little one, I’d love to know. And if you feel moved to leave a review on Amazon, even just a sentence, it makes an enormous difference for an independent author. Thank you for being here, always.

— Jeri

For more than a year, I've been writing about Project 2025 — its origins, its architects, the Seven Mountains doctrine and the Manifest Destiny thinking baked into its bones. I've written about Russell Vought, who now runs the Office of Management and Budget and helped write the chapter calling for the president to “bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will.” I've written about Stephen Miller, Karoline Leavitt, and Brendon Carr. What I didn't fully anticipate, though I probably should have, is how many of them would end up running the government they designed to dismantle.

You took it seriously. You’ve been reading these pieces. You’ve been sharing them.

So I’m not going to explain Project 2025 to you today. What I’m going to do is show you that we’ve crossed a line. The warnings are behind us. What I’ve been describing as a plan is now, in significant and possibly irreversible ways, the law.

The Supreme Court has been doing the work. Quietly. Mostly through emergency orders that don’t even get oral arguments; what lawyers call ‘the shadow docket.’ ¹ And the six-justice conservative supermajority has handed down a string of rulings that, taken together, have built something the Founders would not recognize and explicitly did not want.

Let me show you exactly what happened, and then let’s talk honestly about what, if anything, can be done about it.

The Checklist

Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership is 920 pages. But its central demand is simple: the president should have total, unimpeded control over everything in the executive branch. Every regulator. Every agency. Every federal employee. No independence. No exceptions.

It names specific agencies to be brought to heel. It names specific 90-year-old legal protections it wants eliminated. Vought didn’t dress this up in polite language.2

The president must make aggressive use of his power to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will.

— Russell Vought, Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, Chapter 2

Bend or break. From the man who now controls the federal budget. This was not a think-piece. It was a checklist. And someone has been checking the boxes, with the Supreme Court’s blessing, one emergency ruling at a time.

What the Court Actually Did

They let him fire the watchdogs. In May 2025, in a case called Trump v. Wilcox, the Court ruled, through an emergency order — no oral arguments — that the President could fire commissioners at the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board. Congress had explicitly protected those positions for nearly 90 years. 3 You could only be removed ‘for cause.’ Not anymore.

What this means in practice

The people whose job is to regulate powerful industries — without fearing political punishment — can now be fired by any president, for any reason, at any time. The FTC, which protects consumers from corporate fraud. The FDIC, which protects your bank deposits. The FCC, which oversees your airwaves and internet. The legal firewall that kept these agencies out of direct partisan control since the New Deal is coming down, piece by piece, through orders that don’t even get a full hearing. 4

Justice Kagan, in dissent, said the majority had wiped out a foundational precedent ‘by fiat’ — bypassing the deliberative process that overturning 90 years of law should probably require. ^] She wasn’t being dramatic. The majority didn’t really argue with her. They just did it anyway.

They took away the courts’ fastest tool. Even if you think a president should run his own executive branch, (fine, people can disagree on that) there’s a separate question: what happens when he does something unconstitutional? Who stops it, and how fast?

The traditional answer was federal judges issuing nationwide injunctions. When Trump signed an order on Day One trying to strip birthright citizenship — a right guaranteed by the 14th Amendment since 1868 — judges blocked it within hours. That’s the system working as designed.

In Trump v. CASA, Inc. (June 2025), the Court ended that. Six to three. Federal courts can no longer issue those broad, immediate blocks. 5 Now every affected person files their own lawsuit. The administration can implement a constitutionally dubious policy and let it run while years of fragmented litigation slowly catch up. Project 2025, Chapter 2, called for exactly this outcome. The Court delivered it.

They gave the president immunity the Founders never wrote. And then there’s Trump v. United States — the immunity ruling. The Court held that presidents have broad, presumptive immunity from criminal prosecution for acts committed in office. 6 Chief Justice Roberts couldn’t point to the word ‘immunity’ in the Constitution, because it isn’t there. The Founders, who had just fought a revolution against a king they regarded as above the law, wrote no such protection. The Court invented it, 6-3, in 2024.

The Yale Law Journal has since raised an even darker possibility: that this immunity may not stay in the Oval Office. Historically, when courts create special protections for presidents, those protections spread, reaching officials throughout the executive branch. 7‘Just following orders’ has taken on a troubling new legal resonance.

Can Any of This Be Undone?

I’m not going to soften this. Here’s the honest math:

Constitutional Amendment: Nearly impossible now. Two-thirds of both houses of Congress, then 38 states. It is the right fix, permanent and court-proof, but it requires consensus that simply doesn’t exist today.

Court reverses itself : 10–30 years. The six-justice majority is young. Conservative control of the Court is projected through the mid-2060s. Reversal requires new cases and a new majority.

Court expansion: Legally doable, politically brutal. Congress can change the number of justices; it’s been done before. But, it requires a political trifecta willing to absorb enormous backlash.

New laws + new Court: Most achievable, but slow. Restore agency protections by statute, establish ethics rules, pass term limits, and wait for a reconstituted Court to uphold them.

The hardest part to sit with is this: the Founders made the amendment process deliberately difficult so temporary political majorities couldn’t rewrite the Constitution on a whim. That same safeguard now makes it very hard to correct what this Court has quietly, methodically constructed to fulfill the Project 2025 mandates. 8

James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 47 that “the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” He was describing what he feared most. The current Court has used his own framework to build the very thing he warned against.

What Madison also assumed — and this is what keeps me up at night — was that members of Congress would fight to protect their branch’s power. That they would not simply watch their own authority drain away. That assumption has not held. Not even close.

Which leaves the rest of us.

I’ve spent many months telling you this was coming. I wish I’d been wrong. I wasn’t, and neither were you for taking it seriously when it was still easier to look away.

Courts change when public pressure is sustained and impossible to ignore. Amendments pass when enough Americans demand them across decades, not just news cycles. Majorities shift when people vote — and organize, and run for office, and show up, and write on Substacks, and refuse to let their neighbors tune out.

I’m a mad mother. I have children and grandchildren who will live in the country this Court is building. I have been angry about this for a long time, and I am not done.

I hope you aren’t either.

But before you go, I need to ask you something. We’ve been talking about what the Court has done. But here’s the question I haven’t answered yet: how did we end up with this particular Court? Six justices. All selected by one pipeline. All committed to the same theory before they ever put on a robe. And at least one of them accepting luxury gifts from billionaires who fund the very movement whose goals he is now implementing from the bench.

This Court didn’t fall from the sky. It was built. Deliberately, methodically, over forty years, with billions of dollars in dark money and the quiet work of one man most Americans still don’t know by name.

COMING NEXT: THE QUIET COUP - PART TWO

The Court Was Built for This Moment

Forty years. One man. $1.6 billion in dark money. And a Supreme Court justice who vacationed on a billionaire’s yacht while ruling on cases that billionaire cared about — and disclosed none of it. Next week, I’m going to tell you how this Court was assembled, who paid for it, and what that means for everything we’ve just been through together. It is not a comfortable story. But you need to know it.

STAY TUNED!

SOURCES:

I hope you will forgive the quieter stretch when you know the reason: I have been finishing a children’s book.

Not a political investigation. Not a democracy-in-crisis essay. Not another deep dive into Project 2025, corruption, authoritarian overreach, or the daily assault on our institutions.

A children’s book.

And today, after more formatting battles, margin mysteries, resolution fixes, cover adjustments, and KDP-induced confusion than I ever imagined possible, Ainsley and Bigfoot in the City is live on Amazon.

This book began with one very specific request from my granddaughter, Ainsley: she wanted a book about Bigfoot in the city.

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So that is what I made.

Ainsley and Bigfoot in the City is a storybook and coloring adventure for children ages 4–8. It follows Ainsley and her gentle Bigfoot friend as they explore ordinary city places that become extraordinary through imagination: walking through the neighborhood, riding bikes, going to school, visiting the library, cooking, swimming, climbing, and trick-or-treating.

At its heart, it is a book about friendship, courage, curiosity, and the kind of wonder children bring into the world so naturally.

It is also a coloring book, because I wanted children to be able to step into the story themselves - to color the pages, notice the details, and make the adventure their own.

This has been a labor of love, and also a very real learning curve. I learned more than I ever expected to know about page margins, bleed, resolution, cover placement, KDP previews, and why “almost right” is sometimes not right enough when a book is going to print.

But today, it is real.

Ainsley and Bigfoot in the City is live on Amazon.

You can find it here: Ainsley and Bigfoot in the City

Thank you to everyone who has cheered me on, answered questions, offered encouragement, or simply tolerated my obsession with getting Bigfoot’s toes, Ainsley’s sunglasses, and the cover margins just right. A special thank you to my daughter Lindsay who helped me over the finish line.

This book is for Ainsley - and for every child who knows that imagination can turn a city street into an adventure.

Now that Ainsley and Bigfoot have officially made it into the city, and onto Amazon, I will be returning more regularly to the work this Substack was created to do.

There is no shortage of urgent material. The attacks on democratic institutions have not slowed. The corruption has not become less blatant. The authoritarian project has not paused just because I was arguing with cover margins, page bleed, and Bigfoot’s toes.

So in the coming weeks, I will be back to publishing more researched pieces on current events, Project 2025, corruption, Christian nationalism, the courts, and the ongoing fight over the future of American democracy.

For today, though, I am taking one small breath to celebrate a different kind of project: a story about a little girl, a gentle Bigfoot, and the belief that imagination still matters.

Thank you for being here for the democracy work, for the detours, and for this happy moment, too.

America feels fictional right now.

Not politically divided. Not merely dysfunctional.

Fictional.

As though we have wandered into some bizarre mashup of biblical warning, fairy tale, and political satire—except the consequences are real.

We have a president who openly worships wealth, spectacle, and personal glorification.

A political party that increasingly behaves like a royal court.

Institutions designed to constrain power acting as though constraint itself is optional.

And a public watching the procession, wondering if they are the only ones seeing what is plainly in front of them.

A biblical warning, a fairy tale, and a modern psychological phenomenon explain this moment better than most cable news panels.

The Golden Calf.

The Emperor’s New Clothes.

Collective illusion.

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THE GOLDEN CALF

Trump’s obsession with gold has never been subtle.

Long before politics, he proudly displayed his family in the infamous Trump Tower penthouse, a monument to gilded excess that looks less like sophisticated wealth and more like a casino designed by a czar with no editor.” 1

Mar-a-Lago continued the theme: gold trim, gold fixtures, gold ornamentation, theatrical opulence masquerading as taste. 2

Now that aesthetic has crept into the presidency itself.

The White House, historically symbolic of democratic stewardship and institutional continuity, increasingly risks becoming another extension of Trump’s personal branding fantasy. 3

This is not merely décor.

It is symbolism.

Gold has long represented monarchy, conquest, untouchable wealth, and divine entitlement.

Kings project splendor.

Democracies are supposed to project service.

Trump has never seemed to understand the difference.

Or perhaps he understands it perfectly.

What makes the Golden Calf story so unsettling is not the gold itself.

It is the collective act of creation.

The people pooled their own wealth, forged the idol themselves, and then convinced themselves it was worthy of worship. 4

That symbolism feels painfully current.

Some authoritarian figures seize power by force.

Others are assembled—piece by piece—by people who project onto them strength, certainty, vengeance, protection, and success, until the idol takes on a life of its own.

Too much of modern political culture has embraced a grotesque equation:

Rich equals successful.
Successful equals competent.
Competent equals worthy of power.

Never mind ethics.

Never mind public service.

Never mind character.

Just look at the gold.

THE EMPEROR’S NEW CLOTHES

If the Golden Calf explains the worship, Hans Christian Andersen explains the performance.

In The Emperor’s New Clothes, a vain ruler obsessed with appearance is duped by con artists who claim they can weave magical garments visible only to the intelligent and competent. 5

No one sees anything.

But no one wants to appear foolish.

So ministers pretend.

Officials pretend.

The emperor pretends.

The public pretends.

Everyone participates in a lie because everyone assumes everyone else believes it.

Sound familiar?

A president openly embraces royal imagery, even circulating memes depicting himself as a king. 6

Conflicts of interest that would once have triggered bipartisan outrage are shrugged off.

Self-enrichment is discussed as though it were merely unconventional politics.

Cabinet appointments sometimes feel like parody casting.

And yet much of the political establishment proceeds as though this is perfectly normal governance.

Why?

Because authoritarian systems thrive on performance.

Speaking obvious truths becomes risky.

Silence becomes self-protection.

Compliance becomes career management.

And soon the absurd becomes normalized simply because enough people act as though it already is.

COLLECTIVE ILLUSION: THE MODERN EXPLANATION

Political psychologists have a name for this. 7

Collective illusion.

Or pluralistic ignorance.

It describes a situation in which individuals privately reject a belief but publicly conform because they assume everyone else accepts it.

In simpler terms:

No one believes.

But everyone believes that everyone else believes.

That is how entire institutions become detached from reality.

A lawmaker privately calls something dangerous but votes yes.

An official privately expresses alarm but publicly defends the indefensible.

A media outlet normalizes increasingly abnormal behavior in the name of neutrality.

Citizens wonder whether they are overreacting because surely someone in power would stop this if it were truly alarming.

This is how democracies slide into authoritarianism.

Not always through dramatic coups.

Sometimes through accumulated public pretending.

THE ROYAL COURT

Of course, not everyone is pretending.

Some participants are true believers.

Others are opportunists.

And some have fully embraced the role of court entertainers—actively defending, flattering, distracting, and amplifying the spectacle.

Some courtiers are frightened.

Some are calculating.

Some are simply intoxicated by proximity to power.

But the effect is the same.

The procession continues.

THE CHILD IN THE CROWD

Andersen’s story ends when a child says the obvious:

The emperor is wearing nothing at all.

That moment matters because truth often begins not with institutional courage, but with someone refusing to participate in the lie.

The danger in America right now is not simply corruption.

Corruption is sadly familiar.

The danger is normalization.

The gradual social pressure to accept what would once have been unthinkable.

To treat grotesque self-dealing as savvy.

To confuse gaudiness with strength.

To mistake domination for leadership.

To applaud the parade because everyone else appears to be applauding.

America does not need more courtiers.

It needs more children—more citizens—willing to say what they see.

And perhaps, occasionally, a foreign leader who sees the pageantry for exactly what it is.

Xi Jinping may have understood the symbolism better than Trump did. 8

After Trump admired the roses at Zhongnanhai, Xi reportedly promised to send rose seeds for the White House Rose Garden—an almost too-perfect gift for a man who transformed part of that historic garden into a Mar-a-Lago-style hardscape. 9

Whether Xi intended the irony or not, the symbolism was unmistakable:

The emperor who loves gold was handed seeds.

Not flattery.

Not another gilded tribute.

Seeds.

Something alive.

Something rooted.

Something that requires patience, care, and stewardship.

In other words, everything Trump’s golden presidency is not.

Footnotes:

We just heard the heart-breaking news this morning. Here’s what happened and why Virginia Democrats can’t simply do what Republican-led states are doing:

What the Court Ruled

The Virginia Supreme Court struck down the voter-approved Democratic redistricting plan, ruling that the Democratic-led legislature violated procedural requirements when it placed the constitutional amendment on the ballot to authorize mid-decade redistricting. Voters narrowly approved the amendment on April 21, but the ruling renders those results meaningless. The court declared the violation “irreparably undermines the integrity of the resulting referendum vote and renders it null and void.” Spectrum News

Why Virginia Can’t Just Redraw Maps Like Other States

This is the crux of the question, and it comes down to a unique constitutional constraint Virginia created for itself. The case focused not on the shape of the new districts but rather on the process the General Assembly used to authorize them. Because the state’s redistricting commission was established by a voter-approved constitutional amendment, lawmakers had to propose a new constitutional amendment to redraw the districts. ClickOrlando

In other words, Virginia voters in 2020 locked redistricting power inside the state constitution, requiring a multi-step amendment process - not just a simple legislative vote - to change the maps. Republican-led southern states don’t have that constraint; their legislatures can pass new maps through ordinary legislation.

Specifically, a judge found that lawmakers failed to follow their own rules for adding the redistricting amendment to a special session, failed to initially approve the amendment before the public began voting in last year’s general election, and that the state failed to publish the amendment three months before the election as required by law. Wikipedia

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The Bigger Picture

Democrats had hoped to win as many as four additional U.S. House seats under Virginia’s redrawn map as part of an attempt to offset Republican redistricting done elsewhere. That ruling, combined with a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision severely weakening the Voting Rights Act, has supercharged the Republicans’ congressional gerrymandering advantage heading into this year’s midterm elections. ClickOrlando

The decision effectively blocks Democrats from redrawing congressional maps mid-decade, after the state spent $5.2 million on the special election and outside groups raised nearly $100 million to sway voters. Axios

So, in short: Virginia is trapped by its own constitutional reform. The very good-government mechanism voters approved in 2020 to create a bipartisan commission is now preventing Democrats from executing the kind of legislative end-run that Republican states can do freely because their legislatures retain direct map-drawing authority.

What this means for Democrats in Virginia and nationally:

In Virginia Specifically

The impact is stark. Democrats’ redrawn map could have resulted in the party representing 10 of Virginia’s 11 congressional districts after the November midterms, up from the current six. That’s four seats gone. The decision effectively blocks Democrats from redrawing congressional maps mid-decade, after the state spent $5.2 million on the special election and outside groups raised nearly $100 million to sway voters. Virginia will instead go into November with the same court-drawn 6-5 Democratic map it currently has. NBC NewsAxios

Nationally - The Redistricting Scoreboard

Before today’s ruling, the map battles were roughly a draw. Until the Supreme Court’s VRA ruling last week, neither Republicans nor Democrats had gained a clear advantage from their revised maps; projected seat gains in some states roughly offset projected seat losses in other states. Now two things have broken badly for Democrats in rapid succession: losing Virginia and the VRA ruling. Council on Foreign Relations

The mid-decade redistricting battles were a draw until Florida jumped in with a new map, giving Republicans a slight edge. The Supreme Court’s decision could yield many more Republican districts than the individual state-by-state battles did. Republicans stand to gain from new House districts passed in Florida, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio and Tennessee, and could add even more after the VRA ruling, which has prompted some other Republican states to consider redrawing their maps. BrookingsSpectrum News 1

The Bottom Line on House Control

Despite the map disadvantage, Democrats still have a structural tailwind — Trump’s approval ratings. Prediction markets had Democrats at an 83% chance of retaking the House in April 2025, but those odds have since dropped to around 63%, with Republicans rising from 17% to 37% — what looked like a likely Democratic win has become closer to a toss-up, though still slightly leaning Democratic. mediaite

Political science professor Stephen Farnsworth notes that Democrats are “very likely to take over the House,” and that redistricting efforts by both parties will largely cancel each other out — but Republican retirements could also hurt the GOP’s chances of retaining control. iheart

The core tension is this: even with mid-decade redistricting, the public’s assessment of Trump’s job performance will still have a major impact on whether Republicans keep control of the House. Democrats need a net gain of only three seats — a low bar in a hostile political environment for the president’s party — but Republican map-drawing is shrinking the number of competitive seats available for flipping. Council on Foreign Relations

In short, Virginia’s ruling turns what could have been a near-certain Democratic House majority into a genuine nail-biter.

To get reliable, up-to-date voting information, visit TurboVote by Democracy Works.

Mad Mother is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

A headline this morning made me stop - but not for the reasons you might think.

Another story. Another lawsuit. Another attempt to untangle who - or what - is responsible when something goes terribly wrong.

This time, the question is whether artificial intelligence can be implicated in acts of violence or self-harm.

It’s a chilling idea. Not because it’s simple. But because it isn’t.

We are living through a moment when tools can talk back to us. They can respond, suggest, nudge, affirm. And for people already standing at the edge—angry, desperate, untethered—that interaction can matter more than we’d like to admit.

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But here is the part we must hold onto, even as the technology evolves:

A tool is not a conscience.

It does not love.

It does not grieve.

It does not feel the weight of consequence.

And yet, people do.

There is a temptation, especially in moments like this, to look for a single place to assign blame. The machine. The company. The system. Something large enough to hold our fear.

But the truth is more uncomfortable.

These tragedies are almost never born in a single moment, or from a single influence. They grow slowly - fed by isolation, mental illness, grievance, disinformation, neglect. Sometimes they unfold in plain sight. Sometimes they don’t.

Technology can amplify.

It can echo.

It can fail to interrupt when it should.

But it does not originate the human capacity for harm.

And so we find ourselves in a strange moral landscape.

We want innovation.

We want connection.

We want tools that help us think, write, create.

But we also want guardrails. Accountability. Intervention. Humanity.

We are, in other words, asking our machines to behave better than we sometimes do.

I find myself thinking less about the technology, and more about the people in these stories.

The families.

The victims.

The individuals whose lives narrowed to a point where harm, to themselves or others, felt like an answer.

That is the real tragedy.

Not that a machine spoke.

But that, somewhere along the way, a human being stopped being heard.

So where does that leave us?

For me, it means choosing where to place my attention.

I am not going to spend my days in the darkest corners of this conversation. Not because it doesn’t matter—but because it cannot be the only thing that does.

Instead, I will keep making things that are rooted in care.

A children’s book where a young girl moves through the world with curiosity and courage.

A recipe that works—especially at 5,280 feet.

A piece of writing that calls out power when it abuses itself.

Small things, perhaps. But human things.

Because in the end, that is what no machine can replicate:

The decision to create something that does no harm.

Call to Readers

Pay attention to the headlines. They matter.

But also pay attention to what you are building, sharing, and nurturing in your own corner of the world.

That still matters more.

A headline this morning made me stop - but not for the reasons you might think.

Another story. Another lawsuit. Another attempt to untangle who - or what - is responsible when something goes terribly wrong.

This time, the question is whether artificial intelligence can be implicated in acts of violence or self-harm.

It’s a chilling idea. Not because it’s simple. But because it isn’t.

We are living through a moment when tools can talk back to us. They can respond, suggest, nudge, affirm. And for people already standing at the edge—angry, desperate, untethered—that interaction can matter more than we’d like to admit.

But here is the part we must hold onto, even as the technology evolves:

A tool is not a conscience.

It does not love.
It does not grieve.
It does not feel the weight of consequence.

And yet, people do.

Subscribe now

There is a temptation, especially in moments like this, to look for a single place to assign blame. The machine. The company. The system. Something large enough to hold our fear.

But the truth is more uncomfortable.

These tragedies are almost never born in a single moment, or from a single influence. They grow slowly - fed by isolation, mental illness, grievance, disinformation, neglect. Sometimes they unfold in plain sight. Sometimes they don’t.

Technology can amplify.
It can echo.
It can fail to interrupt when it should.

But it does not originate the human capacity for harm.

And so we find ourselves in a strange moral landscape.

We want innovation.
We want connection.
We want tools that help us think, write, create.

But we also want guardrails. Accountability. Intervention. Humanity.

We are, in other words, asking our machines to behave better than we sometimes do.

I find myself thinking less about the technology, and more about the people in these stories.

The families.
The victims.
The individuals whose lives narrowed to a point where harm, to themselves or others, felt like an answer.

That is the real tragedy.

Not that a machine spoke.
But that, somewhere along the way, a human being stopped being heard.

So where does that leave us?

For me, it means choosing where to place my attention.

I am not going to spend my days in the darkest corners of this conversation. Not because it doesn’t matter—but because it cannot be the only thing that does.

Instead, I will keep making things that are rooted in care.

A children’s book where a young girl moves through the world with curiosity and courage.

A recipe that works—especially at 5,280 feet.

A piece of writing that calls out power when it abuses itself.

Small things, perhaps. But human things.

Because in the end, that is what no machine can replicate:

The decision to create something that does no harm.

Call to Readers

Pay attention to the headlines. They matter.

But also pay attention to what you are building, sharing, and nurturing in your own corner of the world.

That still matters more.

The constitutional line is not being debated anymore. It is being crossed.

Not by accident. Not quietly. And not in ways we can afford to dismiss as symbolism, trolling, or just another burst of red-meat rhetoric for the base.

It is happening in administration social media. In White House offices. In Pentagon events. In press briefings, interviews, and speeches. What was once packaged as “Christian nation” nostalgia is now being operationalized as governance. The goal is no longer merely to signal religious identity. The goal is to normalize the fusion of sectarian belief with state authority until the boundary itself begins to look optional.
That is the trap.
Because this is not about private faith. It is about public power.

In February, I wrote about the historical fraud at the heart of Christian nationalism: the lie that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and must now be “restored” to that identity. (Project 2025 and the Christian Nation Myth, Feb. 23, 2025). The Constitution was designed to prevent exactly that. The founders did not build a government to enforce theological conformity. They built one to prevent the state from claiming religious truth in the first place. 1

What we are watching now is that safeguard being stress-tested on purpose.

The Myth Moves into Government

This is no longer just a Project 2025 theory problem. It is becoming governing practice.

Trump formally reestablished a White House Faith Office in February 2025 and placed Paula White-Cain, his longtime religious ally, in a senior role. The White House described it as an executive-branch office created by executive order. 2

At the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth pushed further still. Reuters reported that, in May 2025, he led a “Secretary of Defense Christian Prayer & Worship Service” during the workday inside the Pentagon, had it broadcast internally, and said it would become a monthly event. Reuters also reported that Brooks Potteiger, identified there as Hegseth’s pastor, prayed for Trump at the event. 3

That is not neutrality.
That is not pluralism.
That is not constitutional restraint.

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Trump’s own behavior reinforces the pattern. He has repeatedly posted or reposted religiously charged AI images of himself, including as pope and in Jesus-like imagery. Meanwhile, his allies feuded with Pope Leo after the pope criticized the administration’s war posture and the political misuse of religion. 4

These are not random provocations. They are part of a larger spectacle in which Trump is cast, not merely as a politician with religious supporters, but as a leader whose authority is wrapped in sacred imagery and defended in sacred language.

This language did not appear out of nowhere. Business Insider reported in November 2019 that Rick Perry called Trump “the chosen one” and “sent by God,” and that Trump himself had earlier said during the China trade war, “Someone had to do it … I am the chosen one.” What once sounded like grotesque flattery now looks more like a rehearsal for the politics surrounding him today. 5

That spectacle matters because it is backed by real people with real access to power. And, that pattern is not slowing down. This week, Trump is scheduled to read 2 Chronicles 7:11–22 from the Oval Office as part of the April 19–25 “America Reads the Bible” event, a week-long public reading of the entire Bible held in partnership with the Museum of the Bible and involving nearly 500 participants. Organizers said they deliberately reserved that passage for him because of the symbolic weight of 2 Chronicles 7:14, the verse so often invoked in calls for America to return to God and be “healed.” 6

This is not a revival.
It is not religious freedom.
It is the normalization os sectarian power in the state.

Two Paths to the Same Project

Two figures are especially revealing: Brooks Potteiger, the pastor brought inside Pentagon power through Hegseth, and Paula White-Cain, the televangelist restored to formal influence inside the White House.

Their traditions are different.
Their styles are different.
Their routes to power are different.

But they converge on the same destination: a government increasingly comfortable privileging one form of Christianity as a source of legitimacy, authority, and national identity.

Start with Brooks Potteiger.

The scene is the Pentagon: not a church, not a prayer breakfast ballroom, but one of the most powerful military buildings in the world. A workday worship event. A “Secretary of Defense Christian Prayer & Worship Service” broadcast internally while government business continued around it. Reuters reported that Hegseth led the event in May 2025 and brought in Potteiger, his pastor from Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship near Nashville. 7

Potteiger is not a nationally famous celebrity preacher. His influence appears to come not from television fame or a donor empire, but from personal access to one powerful official. That is alarming. It means the religious world entering the Pentagon did not arrive mainly through a media ministry. It arrived through intimacy, trust, and proximity to state power.

A master’s degree in apologetics does not itself mean extremism. Apologetics is formal training in defending Christian doctrine. The degree alone is not the issue.

The issue is the world in which that credential operates.

Pilgrim Hill belongs to the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, or CREC, the archconservative church network the Associated Press linked to Christian nationalism and Christian Reconstructionism. AP reported that Hegseth has publicly embraced that orbit and that the network is associated with patriarchal theology and rigid male authority. 8

That context is important. Potteiger is not simply an ordinary pastor who happened to be invited to a government event. He represents a harder theological-political world, one that sees Christianity not merely as a private faith but as an ordering principle for society.

His path to influence is intimate and direct: one Cabinet secretary, one church network, one public blessing of state power inside the Pentagon. He did not need a television audience. He needed a doorway into power, and Hegseth opened it.

White-Cain’s path is different, but no less revealing.

In March, pastors gathered around Trump in the Oval Office while he sat behind the Resolute Desk. Hands were laid on his shoulders. Heads were bowed. Prayers were offered for guidance, protection, and blessing over both the president and U.S. troops. Paula White, who leads the White House Faith Office, was in the room. 9

The White House is not a church. The Oval Office is not an altar. But this administration keeps staging scenes that blur those lines until the distinction itself begins to erode.

Pastors laying hands on a president in the Oval Office is not just a prayer scene. It is a visual argument about who and what sanctifies power.

White-Cain did not arrive there by accident. She built her prominence through televangelism, charismatic ministry, prosperity-gospel branding, and years of proximity to Trump before returning in 2025 to formal influence inside the White House Faith Office. Her influence is not private or symbolic. It now sits within executive power itself.

Different theologies. Same Political Project

That is the heart of it.

Potteiger appears in a Reformed, patriarchal, Reconstructionist-adjacent world that emphasizes authority, hierarchy, and Christian order across all of life. White-Cain comes out of a charismatic Pentecostal-style world shaped by anointing, divine favor, chosen-leader rhetoric, and spiritual spectacle. These are not identical traditions. But Trumpism has become a meeting ground for both because each offers a different route to the same conclusion: that American government should be guided, legitimized, and symbolically possessed by a favored form of Christianity.

One tells followers that Christians must reclaim institutions.
The other tells followers that God raises up chosen leaders for national battles.
One speaks in the language of order, hierarchy, and authority.
The other speaks in the language of prophecy, blessing, and spiritual warfare.

Both can be used to sanctify executive power.

That is why this moment cannot be brushed aside as harmless religious expression. The administration’s defenders will say this is just free exercise, just prayer, just symbolism, just a president who likes attention and supporters who like spectacle.

No.

When government offices are built around favored religious actors, when a defense secretary brings his own pastor into a government worship event, and when presidential performance is increasingly wrapped in sacred imagery, we are no longer talking about private devotion
We are talking about a state increasingly willing to perform religious hierarchy in public.

And hierarchy is the point.

Christian nationalism has always depended on a lie about the founding. But historical fraud was never the endgame. Power was.

The myth of a Christian nation is useful because it turns pluralism into decline, equality into grievance, church-state separation into persecution, and constitutional restraint into an obstacle to be removed. It transforms one group’s hunger for dominance into the language of victimhood and “restoration.”

That is why none of this is trivial.
Not the imagery.
Not the offices.
Not the prayer services.
Not the biblical language wrapped around war and power.

Symbols build legitimacy. Repetition creates normalcy. And once the state begins to speak in the language of one religion, everyone outside that favored framework becomes more conditional in their own citizenship.

The founders understood where that road leads. When the state claims religious truth, dissent becomes disloyalty. Conscience becomes suspect. Power begins to speak in God’s name and punish those who refuse to kneel.

That is the line being tested now.

Not a revival.
Not religious freedom.
The danger is not only that they believe it.
The danger is that they are building it.

Footnotes:

After more than 21 hours of marathon negotiations in Islamabad, Pakistan, Vice President JD Vance boarded Air Force Two on Sunday and told reporters the obvious: no deal. “I think that’s bad news for Iran much more than it’s bad news for the United States,” he said.

A telling statement from a man who just failed to end a war his administration started.

I’ve been watching Donald Trump’s relationship with Iran for years. Long before he became president the first time. Long before he blew up the JCPOA. Long before the February strikes that killed Iran’s Supreme Leader and plunged the region into open war. And I’ve come to a conclusion that I think the record now fully supports: Trump doesn’t want a deal with Iran. He wants Iran.

Let me show my work.

The Pattern: Trump Doesn’t Negotiate, He Acquires

Before we can understand what’s happening in the Iran conflict, we have to understand how Trump thinks about geography and power. This is not, at heart, a foreign policy thinker. This is a real estate developer who became president.

Trump has publicly floated “acquiring” Greenland, going so far as to send his son there and refuse to rule out military action. He has repeatedly spoken about “taking” the Panama Canal. He effectively coerced Panama and Denmark with economic and military threats. He proposed “owning” Gaza, displacing its population and turning it into a “Riviera of the Middle East.” He has used tariffs as a cudgel to extract economic submission from allies and adversaries alike.

The pattern is consistent and commercial: identify a valuable piece of geography or resource, manufacture or exploit a crisis, apply overwhelming pressure - financial, military, diplomatic - and then position the United States (and by extension, himself) as the indispensable power over what follows.

Venezuela is the clearest proof of concept, and the case that makes the Iran argument hardest to dismiss. Venezuela sits on the largest proven oil reserves in the world. Under Trump, the United States recognized a parallel government, imposed crushing sanctions specifically designed to strangle oil revenues, and manipulated Chevron’s operating license there as a lever of economic coercion. The logic was never subtle: comply with American terms, or watch your oil economy collapse. There was no serious diplomatic framework, no multilateral process, no interest in Venezuelan institutions or democratic development for its own sake. There was oil, and there was pressure. When critics argue that Trump’s Iran policy is really about nuclear weapons or counterterrorism, Venezuela is the answer, because Venezuela has neither, and it got the same treatment.

What Iran Has That Trump Wants

Let’s be direct about what’s at stake geographically and economically.

Iran sits on the fourth-largest proven oil reserves in the world and the second-largest natural gas reserves. It controls - or can choke - the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly 20% of the world’s oil supply passes. Its closure since late February has already sent global energy prices into turmoil.

Iran is also positioned at the intersection of Central Asia, the Persian Gulf, and the broader Middle East - a strategic location that major powers have competed over for centuries.

Trump himself has never been shy about his view that the United States should extract economic value from military engagement. “To the victor belong the spoils” is not a metaphor for him; he said it literally about Iraq’s oil. The same logic, I would argue, underlies his approach to Iran.

This is inference, but it is inference with a paper trail. Trump’s public statements about oil, his transactional view of military force, and his history of leveraging conflict to extract economic concessions make it reasonable to conclude that Iran’s resources are a motivating factor - not a peripheral one.

The JCPOA: Destroying What Was Working

To understand Trump’s Iran policy, you have to start with 2018, when he did something that had no strategic logic unless you were trying to destabilize rather than contain.

The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action - negotiated by the Obama administration, the European Union, Russia, China, France, Germany, and the UK - was not a perfect agreement. But it was a working one. International monitors from the IAEA verified Iran’s compliance. Uranium enrichment was curtailed. The path to a nuclear weapon had been blocked, at least temporarily.

Trump withdrew the United States from the agreement in May 2018 - one of his first major foreign policy acts of his first term. He replaced it with what his administration called “maximum pressure”: the reimposition of crippling sanctions designed to force Iran to the table on Trump’s terms.

The effect was predictable and has been widely documented: Iran began enriching uranium again, steadily increasing its stockpile and the purity of its enrichment toward weapons-grade levels. The crisis that Trump inherited - a contained nuclear standoff - became the active weapons-development emergency that now requires a war to address.

If the goal was preventing a nuclear Iran, withdrawing from JCPOA was a catastrophic goal. If the goal was manufacturing a more acute crisis that would justify more dramatic action - that’s a different story.The February Strikes: Intimidation as Strategy

On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched a coordinated air campaign against Iran. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed, along with the Minister of Defense, the head of the Revolutionary Guard, and numerous other senior officials and military commanders.

This was unprecedented. The United States killed a head of state.

The stated rationale was Iran’s nuclear program and its support for regional proxies. But the timing and scale also fit a pattern of using overwhelming force - not to conclude a conflict but to break a government’s will to create conditions for submission rather than negotiation.

It didn’t work. Iran responded with missile strikes against Israel and US bases throughout the region, closed the Strait of Hormuz, and demonstrated that decapitating its leadership did not end its institutional capacity to fight. The war has now stretched past six weeks with no end in sight, at least 1,700 Iranian civilians are dead, including hundreds of children, and global energy markets are in disarray.

Trump, meanwhile, lurched from one contradictory message to another. On March 6, he demanded “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER.” On March 9, he falsely declared, “The war is very complete, pretty much.” By March 30, he was threatening to destroy Iran’s power plants, oil wells, and desalination plants. During that same period, he also claimed Iran had “agreed to most of our demands” - a claim Iran flatly disputed.

This is not the communication pattern of an administration trying to close a deal. It is the pattern of one trying to intimidate.

The Negotiating Team: What the Choices Reveal

Judge a negotiation by who you send to it.

Iran arrived in Islamabad with a delegation of more than 70 people, led by Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, an experienced career diplomat, and Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, a former Revolutionary Guard commander who understands both the military and political dimensions of the conflict. These are people who have spent their careers navigating the intersection of Iranian domestic politics, international law, and strategic competition.

The United States sent JD Vance, a politician with limited diplomatic experience who warned Iran not to “play us” before the talks began. Alongside him: Steve Witkoff, a real estate developer who serves as Trump’s special envoy, and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and another real estate figure who has previously used back-channel diplomacy in the Middle East for purposes that critics argue served his personal business interests as much as American policy goals. Veteran diplomats have publicly criticized this team composition, noting that the administration “has leaned on trusted allies with business ties instead of experienced foreign policy professionals.”

What does it mean to send a real estate developer and a hedge fund manager to negotiate the end of a war with a nation of 90 million people?

It means you’re not primarily thinking about what kind of country Iran should be. You’re thinking about what kind of deal you can extract, who controls what assets, and who gets to be the victor.

The Alignment With Israel: Whose War Is This?

Any honest analysis of Trump’s Iran policy has to grapple with Israel.

Trump’s alignment with Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is deep, personal, and well-documented. His first term included moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and withdrawing from JCPOA - all major Israeli government priorities. The Abraham Accords, his signature foreign policy achievement, were designed in part to build a regional coalition that isolated Iran.

The February strikes were a joint US-Israeli operation. Netanyahu has publicly called the destruction of Iran’s nuclear program and military infrastructure a generational achievement. He has also made clear, repeatedly, that he will not allow a ceasefire to constrain Israeli operations in Lebanon against Hezbollah, even when doing so directly undermined the fragile truce that Pakistani mediators had constructed.

This creates a dynamic worth naming plainly: the United States is fighting a war in which one of the key operational decisions - whether to extend the ceasefire to Lebanon - is being made by a foreign government whose interests do not perfectly align with American ones. Netanyahu didn’t mention the Islamabad talks in a major public address while they were happening. He said only that “the battle is not yet over.”

Speculation with supporting evidence: it is reasonable to ask whether the United States is conducting a war primarily in American interests, or whether the Trump-Netanyahu alignment has created conditions in which Israel’s desire to permanently neutralize Iran - and specifically Hezbollah - is driving decisions that American diplomats are then left to justify. US intelligence assessments have reportedly raised doubts about Netanyahu’s own claims about how much damage has actually been done to Iran’s nuclear program and military.

The Racist and Anti-Muslim Dimension

This is the part of the analysis where I want to be careful, not because the evidence is thin, but because the claim deserves precision.

Trump’s rhetoric about Muslim-majority countries has a long record. The Muslim travel ban was one of his first acts in office during his first term. His language about Middle Eastern countries has consistently othered and dehumanized. His approach to Gaza - proposing to displace its population, describe it as “a demolition site,” and rebuild it as a resort - treats Arab Muslim lives as obstacles rather than as the lives of people with political rights and human dignity.

In the case of Iran, the framing has been similarly dehumanizing. Trump wrote, mid-negotiation, that the only reason Iranian officials were “alive today is to negotiate” - as though their right to exist was contingent on their usefulness to him. He threatened to send Iran “back to the Stone Ages.” He has shown no detectable interest in the 1,700 Iranian civilians, including 254 children, killed since the war began.

I am not claiming Trump has articulated a policy of eliminating Muslims. I am claiming the consistent pattern - who gets dehumanized in his rhetoric, which lives he shows no interest in counting, which populations he proposes to displace or control - reflects something more than strategic calculation. It reflects a worldview in which certain people’s lives count less, and in which Muslim-majority populations are consistently in that category.

What Iran Keeps Getting Right

One of the underreported stories of this conflict is how consistently Iran has outmaneuvered the United States diplomatically.

Iran has successfully internationalized the conflict, drawing in Pakistan as a credible mediator and enlisting Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and China as supporting actors. It presented a structured 10-point negotiating framework with clear demands. It held the Strait of Hormuz - the world’s most critical oil chokepoint - as genuine leverage, not merely a threat. It managed to make nuclear enrichment the central issue, not regime change, which forced the US to negotiate on terms that stopped well short of the “unconditional surrender” Trump had demanded in March.

The two sides entered Islamabad with, as one reporter observed, “vastly different approaches” - the US looking for a quick resolution, Iran negotiating with the patience of an institution that has been under sanctions for 45 years and knows how to wait.

This is not a coincidence. This is what happens when you send a real estate developer to negotiate with a civilization.

What Comes Next

Vance left Islamabad on Sunday, threatening a “full naval blockade” of Iran. Trump has threatened to destroy Iran’s power plants, oil wells, and desalination plants. The ceasefire is now in doubt.

None of this looks like the endgame of a president who wants a genuine diplomatic resolution. It looks like the behavior of a president who wanted terms that amount to submission, didn’t get them, and is now escalating again.

The question that I cannot answer with certainty, but that the pattern of evidence increasingly raises, is whether there is any version of a negotiated settlement that Trump would actually accept, or whether the goal was never a deal.

Because if it was never a deal, then everything else - the JCPOA withdrawal, the strikes, the negotiating team, the maximalist demands, the threats - snaps into focus.

Not strategic incoherence. Strategic clarity about an objective that could not be stated publicly.

Control. Extraction. Dominance.

The art of the deal, applied to a nation of 90 million people.

The question is not whether Trump can close a deal.

The question is how much of the world he is willing to set on fire trying to prove he owns the table.

Sources: AP, Reuters, NPR, Time, CNN, PBS, Al Jazeera, Wikipedia (2025–2026 Iran–United States negotiations). All factual claims are cited from published reporting. Where the author speculates, it is labeled as such.

Trump and Iran have agreed to a two-week ceasefire. 1 Or, perhaps more accurately, those around the president who are still willing to challenge him have managed, at least temporarily, to interrupt a cycle of threats that Iran has shown little reason to take seriously. Reuters and AP both report that the truce is fragile, its terms are still murky, and key issues remain unresolved.

From the beginning, the administration has failed to articulate a coherent objective. The rationale for attacking Iran has shifted repeatedly, contradicted itself, or gone unexplained altogether. That confusion has produced predictable results: allies pushed away, supporters left grasping for a rationale, and Iranian leadership no more willing to bend than before. Reuters reports that Vice President J.D. Vance described Trump as “impatient” and said the ceasefire depended on progress in negotiations, while AP described the deal itself as tentative and unclear.

The real cost of war is never what officials announce at the beginning. It reveals itself afterward—slowly, cumulatively, and often too late to reverse.

The first numbers are always the easiest to present: destroyed aircraft, expended munitions, carrier deployments, logistics, maintenance, replacement costs. Those figures can be estimated, budgeted, and discussed as though war were a problem of inventory management.

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But those are only the costs we can count most easily. They are not the ones that matter most.

The economic effects are already moving through the system. Instability in the region immediately affects shipping and energy flows. Even after the ceasefire announcement, major shipping firms remain cautious about resuming normal operations through the Strait of Hormuz.2 Disruption and added costs do not disappear simply because officials change their language.

There is also the quieter cost borne by military families: the dread that comes with deployments, uncertainty, and the knowledge that political impulse can become personal danger in an instant. That burden does not appear in official cost estimates, but it is part of the total price all the same.

Then there is the damage that cannot be quickly repaired once lost: credibility.

The United States entered this confrontation without meaningful allied participation. The broader international response has centered on de-escalation rand diplomacy rather than enthusiastic support for American escalation. 3 Even the moral standing of the United States has taken a visible hit. When Pope Leo publicly condemned Trump’s threat to destroy Iranian civilization as “truly unacceptable,” it underscored how far American conduct had damaged its moral standing. 4

What may be most revealing, however, is the backlash from within Trump’s own political coalition. AP reports that criticism of Trump’s rhetoric came not only from Democrats, but from Republicans and former allies as well, with some warning that the language veered toward illegality and war-crime territory.

That is the deeper concern running through all of this. The attack on Iran does not look like the product of a clearly defined strategy. It looks like an impulsive act by a president driven by ego, grievance, and the need to project dominance, without a clear understanding of either the objective or the consequences.

Which leads to the most basic question: What, exactly, did we gain?

No territorial advantage. No negotiated concessions. No coalition support. No meaningful stabilization of the region.

Now the administration is trying to present the ceasefire itself as proof of success. Vice President J.D. Vance argued that Iran’s agreement to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, combined with a halt to U.S. attacks, amounts to a win. But that claim falls apart on contact with the facts. Reuters reports that the ceasefire was tied to Iran allowing safe passage through the strait if hostilities ceased. In other words, the administration is presenting a return to baseline conditions as a strategic achievement.

That is not victory. It is an attempt to rebrand reversal as success.

After the destruction, the cost, the global disruption, and the diplomatic fallout, the United States appears to have ended up where it began - except weaker, less trusted, and more exposed than before. We gained nothing and lost much. Even now, shipping firms remain wary, and some attacks have continued. Core disputes over Iran’s nuclear program, missile capabilities, and regional conflict remain unresolved. 5

And if this continues, the costs will deepen.

Escalation in the Middle East does not remain neatly contained. It spreads through retaliation, proxy conflict, miscalculation, and political pride. AP reports that attacks have continued despite the ceasefire and that the truce does not cover every front, including Israel’s operations against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Reuters likewise reports that the U.S. military says it is prepared to resume fighting if diplomacy fails. 6

The domestic effects will continue as well. Economic instability will not disappear because officials change their messaging. Allied distrust will not vanish because the White House declares a pause. And each new threat that disregards the laws of war lowers the threshold for even more dangerous conduct to follow.

This is how limited conflicts become prolonged ones: not always through a formal declaration or a single catastrophic decision, but through a series of reckless choices made without a clear end point.

This is the point where clarity matters more than alignment. Those closest to the president must recognize that asking direct questions is not disloyalty, but responsibility—and that silence carries consequences of its own.

If decisions of this magnitude are being shaped by impulse rather than strategy, then the implications extend far beyond a single conflict. They define a governing approach, one that carries a cost far greater than any line item currently being discussed.

Footnotes:

A familiar phrase has been echoing more frequently in American political life: “doing God’s work.”

It is offered as reassurance. As conviction. As justification.

But it raises a deeper question - one that is less often asked: What happens when political authority begins to describe itself, not just as accountable to voters, but as aligned with divine will?

That question sits at the center of Margaret Atwood’s novel, The Handmaid’s Tale. And it is what makes the novel feel less like distant dystopia and more like a framework for understanding how certain systems evolve.

Gilead did not begin with handmaids. It began with language - about authority, morality, and purpose.

In The Handmaid’s Tale, the Republic of Gilead is a theonomy: a system in which law is derived from religious interpretation and enforced by the state. It is also explicitly patriarchal and totalitarian. Rights are not universal. They are assigned based on gender, status, and perceived moral value.

But what makes the novel enduring is not its extremity. It is its sequence.

Gilead emerges through steps that, taken individually, can be framed as orderly, necessary, even moral. Constitutional norms are suspended. Institutions are reshaped. Language shifts. Authority consolidates. Only later does the full structure become visible.

Atwood’s warning is not that societies leap into oppression. It is that they can move toward it while still believing themselves justified.

The United States is not Gilead.

There are still elections. Courts still function. Civil society remains active. Competing religious and secular perspectives continue to shape public debate. But, acknowledging that reality does not end the inquiry. It sharpens it.

Because the more relevant question is not whether we are there. It is whether certain developments reflect similar structural tendencies.

And some of them do.

Start with the use of religious language in governance.

When political leaders such as House Speaker Mike Johnson invoke faith in the context of governance, or figures like Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth frame political and military action as aligned with divine purpose, the issue is not personal belief. It is the elevation of policy into moral certainty.

If a policy is aligned with God’s will, disagreement is no longer just political; it risks being cast as moral failure. That is a subtle but significant shift. It moves authority away from democratic negotiation and toward moral finality.

In Gilead, that shift is complete. Law is not debated. It is declared.

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Language, however, is only part of the shift. Practice matters too.

In recent years, religious expression has moved beyond political rhetoric and into visible practices of governance itself.

During the Trump administration, that shift has become more explicit. A White House Faith Office has been established, alongside faith-based initiatives and evangelical gatherings in which participants “lay hands” on political leaders in prayer. Structured prayer practices within government institutions, along with longstanding events such as the National Prayer Breakfast, reflect a growing normalization of explicitly religious activity within the government.

The issue is not whether public officials hold religious beliefs. Of course they do. The issue is whether those beliefs are being translated into the functions of government in ways the Constitution was designed to prevent.

The First Amendment does not prohibit religion in public life. It prohibits the establishment of religion by the state - a boundary the founders considered essential to both religious freedom and democratic governance.

That boundary was not an afterthought. It was designed to guard against systems in which political and religious authority are fused, and dissent can be punished as disobedience to both.

When organized religious practices become embedded within government, when leaders are affirmed through ritual, and policy is justified as divinely sanctioned - the line the First Amendment draws is not blurred. It is erased.

The question is no longer whether individuals believe. It is whether the state itself is beginning to operate with a preferred religious framework.

What is different is the visibility and institutional framing of these practices, not simply as personal devotion, but as part of the governing environment.

When prayer moves from private observance to organized, leadership-centered ritual within state institutions, it raises a different kind of question: Is religion being expressed within government—or is it being integrated into how government legitimizes itself?

In The Handmaid’s Tale, ritual is not incidental. It is structural. Ceremonies reinforce hierarchy. Public acts of devotion signal alignment. Religious practice is not separate from governance. It is one of the mechanisms through which governance is maintained.

The comparison here is not equivalence.

The United States does not mandate religious observance, nor does it formally require participation. But when organized religious practices are embedded within political institutions, they can become signals of belonging. In a system where loyalty to leadership is expected, participation is not compelled; yet non-participation becomes increasingly difficult to separate from dissent.

Consider the reshaping of education.

Efforts to redirect public funds toward private religious schools are often framed in terms of parental choice. But they also raise a structural question: is the goal pluralism, or the expansion of a preferred worldview through state-supported channels?

In The Handmaid’s Tale, education is not neutral. It is a tool of reinforcement. It teaches hierarchy, obedience, and the legitimacy of the system itself.

Modern policy is not equivalent. But it exists on a continuum that asks the same question: who shapes the worldview of the next generation, and with what authority?

Look also at gender.

Policies affecting reproductive rights, healthcare access, and legal autonomy are often debated as discrete issues. But taken together, they can signal a broader redefinition of women’s role within the legal and social order.

Gilead enforces that role with brutal clarity. Contemporary policy does not approach that level of control. But it does reflect an ongoing struggle over whether rights are fully individual or partially conditional. That tension is not theoretical. It is unfolding in real time.

Then there is the question of democratic participation.

Restrictions on voting access, shifts in election administration, and efforts to concentrate executive power are frequently justified as procedural or protective measures. But historically, the erosion of participation is one of the earliest indicators of systemic change.

Gilead did not eliminate democracy overnight. It narrowed it, constrained it, and ultimately replaced it. The parallel here is not outcome. It is trajectory.

None of this means the United States is becoming a theocracy.

But it does mean that elements associated with theonomy - religious justification of law, moral framing of authority, and the elevation of a particular worldview - are increasingly present in political discourse.

The distinction that matters is this:

Religious influence in politics is not new. It is part of American history.

Religious authority as the basis of law and policy is something else entirely.

One is compatible with pluralism.

The other is not.

The power of The Handmaid’s Tale lies in its refusal to present Gilead as an abrupt transformation. It is a system that develops through language, policy, and incremental shifts in legitimacy.

It begins when leaders claim not just to govern, but to interpret a higher will.

It deepens when institutions align around that claim.

It solidifies when dissent is no longer treated as disagreement, but as deviance.

We are not living in Gilead.

But we are living in a moment where fundamental questions about authority, rights, and the role of religion in law are being actively contested.

And those questions deserve to be examined with clarity, not dismissed with slogans. Because Gilead did not arrive fully formed.

It was built, step by step, through language, policy, and the steady consolidation of authority - by people who believed they were restoring order, defending morality, and, above all, doing what they understood to be right.

The question is not whether that story is repeating itself. The question is whether we recognize the language - and the direction it points - before it becomes the structure we live under.

The language a society accepts is often the clearest signal of the future it is willing to build.

Sources

All claims in this piece are drawn from publicly available primary documents and mainstream reporting, including White House materials on faith-based initiatives; Associated Press, Reuters, and New York Times coverage of religious rhetoric and practice in governance; U.S. Supreme Court decisions including Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization; Brennan Center analyses of voting law changes; and academic research on Christian nationalism and theonomy.

(aircraft carrier USS George Washington)

Editor’s Note: This piece examines recent statement by Donald Trump about the war with Iran and the historical meaning of the phrase “unconditional surrender.” The analysis draws open reporting from NBC News, Axios, Military Times, CNBC, USA Today, CBC, and the historical records from the U.S. State Department and Congressional Research Service.

Donald Trump keeps demanding Iran’s “unconditional surrender.”

He says it the way someone might demand a refund at a hotel desk - as if repeating the words loudly enough makes the outcome inevitable.

But “unconditional surrender” is not a slogan.

It is one of the most extreme demands ever used in warfare. The last time the United States insisted on it, the world was in the middle of World War II and entire governments were about to be dismantled under military occupation.

Trump appears to believe it means something much simpler. That if Iran stops fighting. or if he decides they have stopped fighting, then the war will be over and victory can be declared. History suggests that is not how wars work. And the fact that the President of the United States appears to believe otherwise is more than a rhetorical curiosity.

It is a warning. Now that belief is shaping a war.

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Operation Epic Fury

Around March 1, 2026, the United States and Israel launched a large-scale military campaign against Iran known as Operation Epic Fury.

The opening phase of the operation was dramatic.

According to military reporting cited by Military Times, U.S. and Israeli forces struck roughly 2,000 targets inside Iran and destroyed approximately thirty Iranian naval vessels. Officials also reported that Iranian ballistic missile attacks dropped by roughly ninety percent after the first day of the campaign.

Then came the most explosive development of all. Iranian state media later confirmed that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had been killed in a joint U.S.–Israeli strike. The assassination of the leader of a sovereign state during wartime is an extraordinarily escalatory step - one that historically transforms wars rather than ends them.

But Trump immediately framed the event as the beginning of a political transition he intended to manage. He told reporters that he expected to play a role in selecting Iran’s next Supreme Leader.

That statement alone revealed a breathtaking misunderstanding of Iranian politics, nationalism, and history.

The Phrase Trump Keeps Using

Trump soon escalated his rhetoric further.

Iran, he said, must offer “unconditional surrender.”

The phrase has a specific historical meaning.

It was made famous during World War II when President Franklin Roosevelt announced that the Allied powers would accept nothing less from Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

Unconditional surrender meant the complete defeat of the enemy government, the occupation of its territory, and the reconstruction of its political system by foreign powers.

Germany experienced this outcome in 1945. Japan experienced it as well. Outside of those extreme cases, wars rarely end that way.

The Definition Keeps Changing

Trump’s own definition of the phrase appears to shift depending on the interview.

In one conversation with reporters, he suggested that unconditional surrender could simply mean Iran losing the ability to continue fighting “when they don’t have anyone or anything to fight with.”

Soon after, the White House adjusted the definition again. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt explained that Iran would effectively be considered to have surrendered when Trump determines the country no longer poses a threat to the United States.

In other words, surrender does not require Iran to surrender.

It requires Trump to say they did.

Why Iran Is Unlikely to Surrender

Iran has already rejected the demand outright. Its foreign minister has said the country is not seeking a ceasefire and is prepared even for a potential U.S. ground invasion.

That response reflects political reality. Iran is a nation of roughly ninety million people with a powerful national identity built partly around resisting foreign domination.

It is also one of the oldest continuous civilizations on earth. Persian states existed more than two thousand years before the United States was founded. That long historical memory matters politically. Nations with deep civilizational identities tend to interpret foreign military pressure not as a reason to surrender, but as a reason to resist.

Modern Iranian politics cannot be separated from the 1953 coup, when the CIA helped overthrow Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh after he nationalized Iran’s oil industry.

The 1979 Islamic Revolution itself was fueled by resentment toward Western influence. A formal surrender to the United States would be seen inside Iran as a humiliation so profound that any successor government would begin its life politically crippled. Countries built around revolutionary resistance rarely capitulate in that way.

Military historians often note that demands for unconditional surrender tend to prolong conflicts rather than end them, because they remove any incentive for the opposing leadership to negotiate or de-escalate

When Leaders Misjudge How Wars End

History offers many warnings about what happens when leaders misunderstand the limits of military power.

Vietnam is the most obvious example.

For years American leaders insisted that victory was just around the corner if pressure increased slightly more. The United States deployed over half a million troops and conducted one of the most intense bombing campaigns in modern history. The war still ended in withdrawal.

Afghanistan tells a similar story.

The United States toppled the Taliban government within weeks in 2001. But destroying a regime proved far easier than building a stable replacement. The war continued for twenty years before ending in a negotiated withdrawal and the Taliban’s return to power.

Iraq provides another warning.

The 2003 invasion removed Saddam Hussein quickly, but the collapse of the state produced years of insurgency and sectarian conflict.⁹

In each case the initial military success created the illusion that the conflict itself had been solved.

It had not. It had simply entered a different phase.

The People Whispering in His Ear

Trump’s historical ignorance would be dangerous under any circumstances. It becomes more dangerous when paired with advisers who appear to share the same instincts.

Many of the people surrounding Trump today are not seasoned foreign policy professionals. They are political loyalists, media personalities, or ideological allies whose experience lies far from the cautious world of diplomatic strategy.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is a revealing example. Hegseth has frequently presented himself as an enthusiastic advocate of aggressive military action and has suggested that traditional rules of engagement should not constrain U.S. operations.

Rules of engagement are not bureaucratic niceties. They exist to protect civilians, maintain discipline among troops, and prevent actions that escalate conflicts or violate international law. When leaders signal that those rules are optional, the consequences rarely stay theoretical.

Earlier operations in the Caribbean involved U.S. forces destroying small fishing vessels suspected of drug trafficking and, according to reports, without attempts to intercept or detain the crews first. Under normal maritime law, suspected smuggling vessels are intercepted, boarded, and inspected. The people aboard are arrested and prosecuted.

They are not simply blown up at sea.

The Oil Question

There is another layer to this conflict.

Oil.

Iran sits beside the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s petroleum supply normally moves each day. Since the war began, shipping through the strait has largely collapsed as tankers avoid the conflict zone, effectively choking off a major artery of global oil traffic. Energy markets reacted immediately. Oil prices surged above $100 per barrel and spiked much higher at points as traders feared a prolonged disruption to supply.

That kind of shock reverberates through the global economy. Higher oil prices drive inflation, strain national budgets, and reshape geopolitical alliances. But they also produce enormous profits for oil producers.

That does not mean this war was launched for economic reasons. But it does raise an uncomfortable question that rarely appears in official statements. Who benefits from rising oil prices? Because in geopolitics, as in business, incentives matter.

A Familiar Pattern of Power

There is also a broader pattern here.

Project 2025 and the political movement surrounding Trump are built on a theory of executive power that concentrates extraordinary authority in the hands of the president.

Institutions weaken.

Professional expertise is sidelined.

Loyalty becomes the primary qualification for influence.

Foreign policy conducted under that model begins to look very different.

Decisions become more personal.

Goals shift rapidly.

And the guardrails of institutional debate begin to disappear.

War, in that environment, risks becoming something else entirely. Not the carefully weighed decision of a constitutional system. But the impulse of a single leader.

Words Matter

Sometimes the most revealing moments are the smallest ones.

During one recent exchange about the conflict, Trump referred to a military “excursion” when he clearly meant “incursion.”

• An excursion is a trip.

• An incursion is a military operation in which armed forces enter hostile territory.

On its own, the mistake might seem trivial. But language matters in war.

Military terminology reflects decades of doctrine and legal frameworks governing how armed forces operate. When leaders repeatedly misuse that language, it raises an uncomfortable question.

Is the mistake simply a slip of the tongue? Or does it reveal something deeper; unfamiliarity with the concepts themselves?

And that is where rhetoric collides with reality.

Trump believes wars end when he says they end

History suggests otherwise. Wars end when exhausted soldiers stop fighting, when economies buckle under the strain, or when political realities force leaders to accept outcomes they once insisted were impossible.

They end slowly, painfully, and often in ways no one predicted at the beginning.

History has ended many wars. None of them ended because a president declared victory at a press conference.

If this piece helped clarify what’s happening, consider restacking it so others can read it too. Clear information travels only when readers carry it.

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Sources

1. Military Times reporting on Operation Epic Fury and early strike results.

   https://www.militarytimes.com

2. U.S. State Department Office of the Historian – Casablanca Conference and the Allied demand for unconditional surrender.

   https://history.state.gov/milestones/1937-1945/casablanca

3. Axios reporting on Trump’s comments redefining “unconditional surrender.”

   https://www.axios.com

4. USA Today reporting on White House press secretary statements regarding surrender definition.

   https://www.usatoday.com/videos/news/2026/03/10/white-house-clarifies-what-trump-means-by-unconditional-surrender/89087548007/

5. NBC News reporting on statements from Iran’s foreign minister regarding ceasefire and invasion readiness.

   https://www.nbcnews.com/world/iran/irans-foreign-minister-rejects-calls-ceasefire-continue-fighting-rcna262291

6. U.S. State Department historical record on the 1953 Iranian coup and Mossadegh overthrow.

   https://mohammadmossadegh.com/news/us-state-department/iran-documents/

7. U.S. National Archives – Statistical information on the Vietnam War.

   https://www.archives.gov/research/military/vietnam-war

8. Congressional Research Service – U.S. Military Operations in Afghanistan, 2001–2021.

   https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R45122

9. Congressional Research Service – The Iraq War: Background and Issues for Congress.

   https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/RL31339

10. CBC reports on “Cascading effects’ of Strait of Hormuz blockage.

    https://www.cnbc.com

“They have no money, they have no oil.” (Donald Trump, Doral resort, March 7, 2026.)

I watched the clip on MS Now. Every outlet is covering his disparaging remarks about women and foreign languages. Nobody is talking about the four words that explain his entire foreign policy: "They have no oil."

No oil. That’s the key. Because the country that did have oil - Venezuela, sitting on the largest reserves in the Western Hemisphere - didn’t get a blockade and a patient wait. It got a midnight military operation, a captured president, and an announcement that American oil companies would be moving in immediately to “fix the infrastructure.”

Cuba gets Marco Rubio. Venezuela got the U.S. military. The method differs. The logic is identical.

Let’s run the timeline, because it tells its own story.

• April 2024: Trump meets privately with oil company executives and tells them to give him a billion dollars. In exchange, he promises to gut environmental regulations, open federal land to drilling, and kill renewable energy. They donate. He wins.

• January 2025: Trump takes office and immediately begins delivering. Hundreds of Biden-era green energy projects canceled. The $7.5 billion federal EV charging program: gone. $625 million invested in coal. Hundreds of millions of acres opened to oil and gas.

• September 2025: U.S. military airstrikes begin hitting boats in the Caribbean. The administration calls it a drug war. About 150 people die - fishermen, laborers, a motorcycle taxi driver, according to AP investigations. No public evidence of drug trafficking is released. The UN calls it extrajudicial killing. Fentanyl experts note these boats have nothing to do with fentanyl, which isn’t produced in Venezuela and isn’t smuggled through the Caribbean.

• I wrote in December 2025 that blowing up fishermen had nothing to do with drugs. Venezuela’s seizure and Cuba’s blockade have since made the real agenda impossible to ignore. (Mad Mother Writes, Blowing Up Fishermen For Oil, December 4, 2025.)

• January 3, 2026: U.S. forces capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro overnight. Hours later, Trump announces America will "run" Venezuela and send in American oil companies to take over the oil infrastructure.

• March 7, 2026: At a hemispheric security summit held at his own Doral resort, Trump announces Cuba will fall next. He will send Secretary of State Rubio to govern it. “That’ll be an easy one,” Trump says. “They have no money. They have no oil.”

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But, punishment is only half the model. Cooperation has its rewards.

To understand Venezuela and Cuba, it helps to look at what happens when countries do play along.

• Vietnam approved a $1.5 billion Trump Organization golf resort near Hanoi while facing a 46% tariff and negotiating desperately for relief. Eric Trump attended the groundbreaking while Vietnamese trade negotiators were simultaneously in Washington. The tariffs were paused.

• Qatar received a favorable 10% tariff rate and a $5.5 billion Trump Organization luxury resort announcement. Qatar gifted the President a new Air Force One. No one in Washington found this unusual enough to investigate.

• Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and the Gulf states broadly? Also 10%. Jared Kushner’s private equity firm received $2 billion from the Saudi Public Investment Fund. A UAE-linked firm completed a $2 billion deal using Trump’s own family stablecoin, earning the Trumps tens of millions annually. Trump Tower Dubai is under construction.

The watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, has documented at least 22 overseas Trump developments underway - at least five announced since Inauguration Day. Their conclusion: a Trump development may now function as a bargaining chip for any foreign government negotiating with this administration.

Venezuela didn’t build Trump a golf course. Cuba hasn’t cooperated in sixty years. Neither got a tariff break.

They got something else.

One more thread to follow.

While Trump seizes oil in the Western Hemisphere, he has started a war in the Middle East that closed the Strait of Hormuz - the narrow passage through which more than 20% of the world’s oil supply travels. Oil prices surged above $90 a barrel almost immediately.

Who benefits from that? Not consumers. The same donor class of American oil executives who paid Trump a billion dollars in April 2024 - the ones who now enjoy gutted environmental regulations, open federal land, and canceled renewable energy programs - also benefit enormously from spiking global oil prices. Higher prices, higher profits.

In the Western Hemisphere, Trump seizes oil directly for American companies. In the Middle East, he starts a war that drives up the price of oil those same companies sell. The method differs. The logic is identical.

“They have no money, they have no oil.”

He thought he was talking about Cuba.

He was describing his entire foreign policy.

“I run the country and the world. Because it’s the world I’m trying to save.” (Donald Trump, The Atlantic, April 2025.)

Saving it!? He is saving nothing! He is selling everything - our democracy, our institutions, our alliances, our credibility - to the highest bidder. And the bidders are billionaires and oil companies. That’s it. That’s the whole story.

Sources: All claims in this piece are documented. Primary sources below.

1. Trump, “I run the country and the world” — Jeffrey Goldberg, Ashley Parker, Michael Scherer, The Atlantic, April 28, 2025. https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5270899-trump-i-run-the-country-and-the-world/

2. Trump’s billion-dollar meeting with oil executives — Josh Dawsey & Maxine Joselow, The Washington Post, May 9, 2024. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/05/09/trump-oil-industry-campaign-money/

3. Green energy projects canceled, EV charging program eliminated, coal investment, federal land openings — U.S. Department of Energy and EPA announcements, January–February 2025. https://www.energy.gov

4. U.S. military boat strikes beginning September 2025, expanding to Eastern Pacific October 2025 — Associated Press.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_strikes_on_alleged_drug_traffickers_during_Operation_Southern_Spear

5. Death toll of at least 151 from boat strikes — CBC News / Associated Press, February 23, 2026.https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/us-military-strike-alleged-drug-boat-9.7103366

6. AP investigation identifying victims as ordinary working men — Ben Finley & Konstantin Toropin, Associated Press, via PBS NewsHour, November 7, 2025. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/trump-has-accused-boat-strike-targets-of-being-narco-terrorists-the-truth-is-more-nuanced-ap-investigation-finds

7. UN bodies declaring strikes extrajudicial killings — UN High Commissioner for Human Rights; Inter-American Commission on Human Rights; UN Special Rapporteurs, reported by Al Jazeera, February 23, 2026.https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/23/another-us-boat-strike-in-caribbean-sea-kills-three-pentagon-says

8. Boat strikes have zero effect on fentanyl — Adam Isacson, Washington Office on Latin America, via NPR, January 27, 2026. https://www.npr.org/2026/01/27/nx-s1-5688765/boat-strikes-us-cocaine-venezuela-fishermen

9. U.S. capture of Nicolás Maduro, January 3, 2026; Trump announces U.S. will “run” Venezuela and deploy American oil companies — PBS NewsHour / AP, January 9, 2026. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-is-meeting-with-oil-executives-to-seek-investments-in-venezuela

10. Vietnam $1.5 billion Trump Organization golf resort approved during tariff negotiations — Fortune, May 16, 2025.https://fortune.com/2025/05/16/trump-organization-vietnam-golf-resort/

11. Eric Trump at Vietnam groundbreaking while trade negotiators were in Washington — Reuters via NBC News, May 21, 2025. https://www.nbcnews.com/world/asia/trump-organization-breaks-ground-15-billion-golf-club-vietnam-rcna208169

12. Qatar $5.5 billion Simaisma resort announcement — Newsweek, April 30, 2025. https://www.newsweek.com/new-trump-golf-course-55-billion-beachside-project-announced-qatar-2066482

13. Qatar gifts Trump a Boeing 747 to use as Air Force One — NBC News, May 12, 2025.https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/business/money-report/trump-poised-to-accept-qatar-jet-gift-as-air-force-one/6259570/

14. Kushner $2 billion Saudi Public Investment Fund investment — Newsweek, May 11, 2025.https://www.newsweek.com/trump-reportedly-getting-luxury-qatari-jet-gift-sparks-fury-2070672

15. UAE-linked firm used Trump family stablecoin for $2 billion deal — ABC News, February 2, 2026.https://abcnews.com/Politics/white-house-faces-questions-uae-royals-investment-trump/story?id=129774262

16. CREW: 22 overseas Trump developments, $430 million overseas income, UAE income increase from $2.7M to $27M — Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, 2025. https://www.citizensforethics.org/reports-investigations/crew-reports/trump-foreign-property-income-is-set-to-explode-in-his-second-term/

17. CREW: Trump development as bargaining chip for foreign governments — Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Foreign Development Tracker, 2025. https://www.citizensforethics.org/reports-investigations/crew-reports/trump-foreign-development-tracker/

18. Strait of Hormuz closure during Iran conflict; oil prices surge above $90 — Reuters, 2026. (Grab current URL from Reuters)

19. More than 20% of world oil supply passes through Strait of Hormuz — U.S. Energy Information Administration.https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61002

A powerful historical rewrite is underway.

For months in this Substack, I have traced how Project 2025 seeks to consolidate executive power, purge institutional independence, and reengineer federal governance. But beneath the bureaucratic blueprints lies something even more consequential: a theological claim about the nation itself.

Project 2025 is not merely a plan for administrative restructuring. It is animated by the belief that the United States was founded as a Christian nation - and that restoring that identity requires reshaping the Constitution - in practice if not in text.

That claim demands a history lesson. Because if we are going to watch constitutional guardrails bend in real time, we should at least know what they were built to prevent.

The Founding Design: Enlightenment, Not Theocracy

The founding generation lived in the Age of Enlightenment, when debates about conscience, reason, and religious coercion were central to political thought. Many founders were influenced by Deism, generally believing in a Creator but skeptical of church authority, miracles, and state-enforced doctrine. They leaned on reason and natural law more than revelation.

Others were personally religious, some devout. But the constitutional system they built together was intentionally nonsectarian - a structure designed to prevent any national church from capturing the machinery of government.

The founders were united on one crucial principle: civil rights and public office do not hinge on religious orthodoxy. Government has no authority to declare theological truth.

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The design was written plainly into law

• Article VI of the Constitution declares that “no religious test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” That single line bars the federal government from conditioning political authority on membership in any faith. 1

• The First Amendment reinforces the same structure: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” 2

In other words, the federal government has no mandate to choose a favored church, enforce doctrine, or reserve citizenship for people with approved beliefs.

• The 1797 Treaty of Tripoli makes the point unusually explicit. Ratified unanimously by the Senate and signed under President John Adams, it states that “the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion.” 3

• Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom declares that civil rights do not depend on religious opinion and forbids compelled support for religious worship. 4 In his 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists, Jefferson described the First Amendment as building “a wall of separation between Church & State.” 5

• James Madison’s Memorial and Remonstrance argued that religion is a matter of reason and conviction, “wholly exempt” from civil authority. 6

• George Washington, writing to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport in 1790, declared that the government of the United States “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” 7

This is not vague rhetoric. It is constitutional architecture. The founders did not build a Christian state because they had watched Christian states punish dissenters. They deliberately constructed guardrails.

Departure, Not Defense

Today’s “Christian nation” and increasingly “white Christian nation” rhetoric is not a defense of the founding. It is a departure from it. It seeks to replace constitutional equality with religious gatekeeping. It reframes pluralism as decline. It recruits history as propaganda to make theological hierarchy sound inevitable.

If “real Americans” must be Christians - and the “right” kind of Christians - then religious liberty ceases to be a constitutional right held by everyone and becomes a privilege granted to favored groups.

From Blueprint to Power

This is not an academic debate. Christian Nationalist architects of Project 2025 now hold federal authority. 8

Russell Vought, a principal architect of the Project 2025 framework, has written about the need for government rooted in a distinctly Christian understanding of national identity. As a federal budget director, he influences which programs are expanded, defunded, or dismantled — including immigration enforcement, detention infrastructure, and civil rights oversight.9

Stephen Miller, another architect of the Project 2025 agenda, has shaped immigration policy through rhetoric centered on demographic preservation and civilizational threat - language long associated with white Christian nationalist ideology. 10

The executive branch now operates a White House “Faith Office,” formalizing religious outreach within executive governance. Members of Congress increasingly use prayer events not merely as private observance, but as political alignment signals. 11

“In a move that pushes the boundaries of Constitutional prohibition against a state religion, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth hosted an evangelical prayer service in the middle of the day at the Pentagon in which a pastor praised President Donald Trump as "sovereignly appointed." A program for the event called it the "Secretary of Defense Christian Prayer and Worship Service." It was held at the Pentagon's auditorium and was broadcast throughout the building on its internal cable network. 12

When senior defense officials encourage or normalize sectarian gatherings within the armed forces, then religious pressure enters one of the most constitutionally sensitive institutions in American life. This is not symbolism. It is proximity to power.

When religious identity becomes intertwined with enforcement authority, budget machinery, immigration policy, and executive structure, the constitutional guardrail against religious establishment is no longer theoretical. It is being stress-tested in real time.

How Erosion Happens

The Constitution does not vanish overnight. It erodes. First, religious language becomes policy framing. Then policy preferences become enforcement priorities. Then dissent becomes recast as hostility to faith.

If national belonging is defined through religious identity, millions of Americans — Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, atheist, Catholic, evangelical, or simply the “wrong” kind of Christian become conditional participants in their own country. Pluralistic democracy narrows.

Church-state fusion does not produce moral clarity. It produces hierarchy. And hierarchy enforced by the state is no longer faith. It is power.

A Line That Cannot Be Crossed

The founders understood something simple and dangerous: when the state declares religious truth, dissent becomes disloyalty. That is why they refused to fuse church and government.

If the machinery of federal authority is guided by an ideology that insists America must be reclaimed for one faith, one cultural lineage, one civilizational identity, then exclusion will not remain rhetorical. It will be enforced.

That is not revival. It is state-backed identity hierarchy. That is not a culture war. It is a constitutional crisis unfolding in plain sight.

Christian Voices Rejecting Christian Nationalism

It is both historically inaccurate and theologically misleading to treat Christian nationalism as synonymous with Christianity. Many Christian leaders and organizations argue the opposite: that Christian nationalism is a political ideology that distorts the Christian faith and threatens constitutional democracy.

Christians Against Christian Nationalism, a campaign founded in 2019 by Amanda Tyler of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, defines Christian nationalism as “a political ideology that seeks to merge Christian and American identities - distorting both the Christian faith and America’s constitutional democracy.” 13

The campaign emerged in response to increasing violence against houses of worship by white supremacists and the growing fusion of religious rhetoric with nationalist politics. Its statement of principles emphasizes that “America has no second-class faiths” and calls on Christians to reject Christian nationalism as a corruption of the gospel and a danger to pluralistic democracy.

As of February 22, 2026, the campaign reports dozens of affiliated local groups across multiple states and a growing network of Christians committed to defending both religious freedom and constitutional order.

This matters. Because the defense of church-state separation is not hostility toward Christianity. It is a defense of the Christian conscience as well as the Jewish conscience, the Muslim conscience, the atheist conscience — every conscience.

When faith is fused with state power, faith itself becomes political currency.

Resistance

The answer is not hostility toward religion.

It is fidelity to the Constitution. It is insisting that citizenship carries no religious test.It is defending the principle that government does not adjudicate theology. It is protecting the full and equal standing of every American under law.

We do not need a state religion. We need civic courage. That means naming historical revisionism when we see it.

• Showing up at school boards and city councils when sectarian instruction is proposed.

• Calling and writing representatives when enforcement power is misused.

• Supporting faith leaders who reject Christian nationalism.

• Refusing to normalize rhetoric that equates religious identity with national worth.

The American experiment was not designed to enforce theological conformity. It was designed to protect freedom of conscience. Those guardrails were built deliberately, and they are now being tested deliberately.

History is not only something we teach. It is something we defend. And this moment demands that we do exactly that.

Footnotes:

There was once a firewall built into American democracy - a system designed to stop discriminatory voting laws before they ever reached voters. When the Supreme Court dismantled that protection, it didn’t just change election law; it changed who carries the burden of protecting the right to vote.

There can be no democracy without the right of every citizen to vote without prejudice. That right rarely disappears in one dramatic moment. It erodes in small administrative decisions most people never see; a polling place moved, a district line redrawn, an ID rule tightened - each one small enough to defend, but powerful enough to shape who gets heard.

I learned what voter suppression looks like long before I ever read a Supreme Court opinion about it. I saw it standing on a street in Houston in 2018, canvassing for Beto, holding a clipboard and a list of voters who wanted to participate in their democracy - if they could.

Primary voters told us where they had voted earlier that year. Churches. Schools. Community centers. Familiar places they had used for years. So that’s where they planned to go on Election Day. That’s what they trusted.

Except when Election Day came, many of those locations weren’t voting sites anymore.

The new locations weren’t always far as the crow flies. But Harris County is enormous. If you work hourly, if you rely on a ride, if you’re voting between shifts, if you have kids in tow - “not far” might as well be impossible. And many voters didn’t even know the location had changed until they showed up to vote and found locked doors or a sign pointing somewhere miles away.

When I asked why there hadn’t been clearer notice, I was told - quietly, matter-of-factly - that confusion was part of the point. That moving locations could shave turnout in communities already facing transportation barriers, work schedule constraints, and long lines.

I can’t prove what was in anyone’s heart when those decisions were made. But I saw the result. I saw voters who wanted to participate in democracy lose their window to do it.

I didn’t understand then that there had once been a system designed to stop exactly this kind of change before Election Day ever arrived.

For decades, there was a federal backstop designed specifically to stop exactly that kind of last-minute election change. Under the Voting Rights Act, jurisdictions with a documented history of racial discrimination in voting couldn’t just move polling places, redraw districts, or change voting procedures and hope no one noticed. They had to prove, in advance, that the change would not harm minority voters. 1

That process was called preclearance, and it flipped the burden where Congress believed it belonged: on governments with a history of discrimination, not on individual voters scrambling to fight back after an election was already over.

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What Preclearance Actually Stopped

Alabama

Preclearance blocked multiple redistricting plans that would have diluted Black voting power in majority-Black areas. It also blocked changes that would have reduced minority electoral influence by splitting communities across districts.

Texas

Preclearance initially blocked Texas’s 2011 voter ID law after courts found it would disproportionately burden minority voters. It also blocked redistricting maps found to weaken Latino and Black representation. 2

Georgia

Preclearance blocked polling place changes and election rule changes in several counties where federal reviewers found minority voters would be disproportionately affected.

Mississippi

Preclearance blocked attempts to weaken minority voting strength in local election district changes.

Louisiana

Preclearance locked redistricting and voting rule changes that risked diluting Black voting strength in parishes with documented discrimination history.

When the Supreme Court’s Shelby County v. Holder decision gutted the formula that made preclearance possible, it didn’t just strike a line of statutory text. 3 It shifted the country from a system designed to prevent discrimination before ballots were cast to one that forces voters to prove discrimination after their votes have already been diluted, delayed, or denied. 4

Once you understand that shift, moments like Houston stop looking like isolated confusion and start looking like exactly the kind of scenario pre-clearance was built to prevent.

If the pre-Shelby Voting Rights Act system had still been fully functioning, Harris County would not have been able to simply change voting locations and let voters discover the change on Election Day. Because Texas was one of the states covered by the Voting Rights Act oversight system, local officials would have had to submit the change to the federal government first. They would have had to explain why the change was happening, who it would affect, and - most importantly - prove it would not make voting harder for minority communities.

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Federal lawyers would have reviewed data:

• How many voters used the old location?

• Who lived nearby?

• Was public transportation available to the new site?

• Would the change increase wait times or travel distances in neighborhoods with large minority populations.

If federal reviewers believed the change risked suppressing minority voting, they could block it before it ever touched an election. Voters would never show up to locked doors. Campaign volunteers would never be scrambling on Election Day trying to redirect people across a county the size of a small state.

That is what the “formula” made possible. It told the federal government where to look - where history showed discrimination had been repeated enough times that extra review was justified. Without that formula, the review system didn’t just weaken. It stopped operating entirely.

So, when I stood in Houston helping voters figure out where they were supposed to go, I wasn’t just seeing local election logistics. I was seeing what voting rights enforcement looks like when it happens after the fact instead of before. I was seeing the real-world version of what happens when the burden shifts from government proving fairness to voters trying to prove discrimination after they’ve already lost their chance to vote.

Since the Shelby decision, partisan map manipulation and restrictive voting policies have accelerated in many states. In many cases, legislatures now draw districts designed to protect incumbents or dilute opposing voting blocs, often affecting communities of color that tend to vote Democratic. 5 At the same time, repeated claims of widespread illegal voting by undocumented immigrants have been made by influential politicians, including by our president and members of Congress, despite a lack of evidence showing large-scale noncitizen voting. 6 These claims are often used to justify restrictive voting laws or aggressive enforcement proposals that risk intimidating lawful voters. 7

The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act - legislation designed to restore modernized preclearance protections - failed by just two votes in the Senate in 2021. 8

That failure wasn’t just legislative gridlock. It was the moment the country chose, at least for now, to live without the firewall that had protected voting rights for generations.

A firewall only works if it exists before the fire starts. For nearly half a century, the Voting Rights Act forced governments with histories of discrimination to prove their voting changes were fair before they could reshape an election. When that protection was dismantled, the burden shifted to voters; to recognize suppression, to fight it in court, to overcome it in real time. If we want a democracy where the right to vote is protected instead of negotiated, the firewall must be rebuilt. And that will only happen if voters demand it - at the ballot box, in their communities, and from the people they send to Congress.

I apologize that it’s been longer than usual since Lindsay or I published a new SubStack. After successfully dodging COVID for years, we finally caught it, and the past two weeks have been a blur of exhaustion and recovery.

In that short time away, the administration’s immigration crackdown has escalated again - more aggressive tactics, more fear, and more open defiance of basic legal restraint. Across the country, communities report masked, armed federal officers conducting enforcement operations that feel designed to intimidate as much as to arrest. And the widening net has not stopped at undocumented immigrants: it has swept up refugees, visa holders, and U.S. citizens.

Minneapolis became the most stark example. In January, two U.S. citizens - Renée Good 1 and Alex Pretti - were shot and killed by federal immigration agents during the surge of enforcement and the protests that followed. 2 In both cases, the administration’s public claims about what happened were quickly contested by bystander video and subsequent reporting. The pattern is familiar: violence first, narrative control second, accountability last. 3

While I was convalescing, a friend sent me a link to a document preserved in the Internet Archive. (Thank you, Cyn.) It is a War Department “Army Talk” Orientation Fact Sheet- Number 64 -issued March 24, 1945, titled simply: FASCISM! 4

Reading it felt like stepping into a time machine - only to discover we have circled back to the same warnings.

One paragraph in particular could be describing the conduct and ambitions we are watching now:

“Fascism is government by the few and for the few. The objective is seizure and control of the economic, political, social, and cultural life of the state… They permit no civil liberties, no equality before the law. They make their own rules and change them as they choose.”

That is the part too many Americans still struggle to name: fascism is not only a symbol or a slogan. It is a method. It is the systematic conversion of government into a private weapon—used to punish enemies, reward allies, and silence resistance.

The pamphlet also describes how fascism comes to power: not as a sudden coup that everyone recognizes, but through propaganda, deception, and the recruitment of insecure people—backed quietly by powerful economic interests. That is not ancient history. In the United States, the movement that won the 2024 election took power in January 2025 with a blueprint already written - Project 2025 - built to concentrate authority, dismantle constraints, and replace a rights-based democracy with a loyalty-based regime.

In our case, the coalition is not subtle. The Heritage Foundation assembled a governing network of ideological operatives and wealthy backers, including powerful figures across technology, media, and fossil fuels. A second pillar is Christian nationalism: a movement that supplies religious justification for political domination through ideas like “Manifest Destiny” and the Seven Mountains doctrine. Project 2025’s program is not simply conservative policy. It is a redesign of the state to make resistance futile. 5

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The regime’s consolidation has been accelerated in two decisive ways.

First, the Supreme Court’s embrace of sweeping presidential power has helped normalize the idea that the executive can act beyond meaningful restraint—an architecture that mirrors the “unitary executive” vision central to Project 2025. Second, a compliant Congress has too often surrendered its own constitutional role: tolerating lawlessness, confirming unqualified loyalists, and behaving as if oversight is optional. Russell Vought’s return to lead the Office of Management and Budget is not a bureaucratic footnote; it is the installation of a key Project 2025 architect in one of the most powerful levers of government. Meanwhile, Stephen Miller’s central role in immigration enforcement signals exactly what the administration views as both a target and a test case.

At this point, it helps to be precise about what we are seeing, and what we must prove. If you want to use the strongest language without giving critics an easy escape hatch, apply a simple four-part test: Target (who is being removed), Territory (from where), Intent (what officials say they want, and what the policies reliably produce), and Coercion (what makes the “choice” non-voluntary). Under that framework, the administration’s actions fit “forced removal,” even when cloaked in the vocabulary of “law enforcement.” The intent is removal; the target is immigrants (and, in practice, disproportionately non-white immigrants); and the coercive machinery is detention, raids, transfers, fear, and intimidation at scale. What remains to be argued - case by case, with evidence - is when “forced removal” crosses into the international concept of “ethnic cleansing,” which turns on the goal of making particular places demographically “clean” through intimidation and expulsion, or even massacre.

History matters here because fascist regimes do not always “ignore” the law in a crude sense. They do something more insidious: they rewrite the law, hollow it out, invent emergency authorities, or create special systems where normal rights no longer apply. Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy both turned scapegoating into state policy, then turned policy into removal, and removal into mass killing. Imperial Japan built its own machinery of terror, forced labor, and group-targeted violence across occupied Asia. Different systems, same logic: the state defines a target group as a threat, then claims that any measure used against that group is “necessary.”

That is why Minneapolis matters so much. When U.S. citizens can be killed in the public streets during immigration operations - and when official accounts are contradicted by video and reporting - the question is no longer whether the Bill of Rights is being “tested.” The question is whether it will be enforced at all.

And immigration enforcement is not the only arena where the rule of law is being treated as optional.

At the Pentagon, Secretary Pete Hegseth imposed new reporting rules so restrictive that most major outlets rejected them and surrendered their credentials rather than sign away independent journalism. That is not “normal friction” between government and press. It is a demand for control - an authoritarian insistence that the public may only know what the state approves. 6

Beyond our borders, the administration’s expanding use of force has raised even more serious alarms. Families have filed suit over a Caribbean boat strike campaign they call unlawful - an operation that, according to reporting and legal filings, has killed large numbers of people, including fishermen, and includes alleged incidents in which survivors were struck after an initial attack. 7 Reporting has also raised questions about aircraft used in these strikes being painted to resemble civilian planes—an allegation that, if true, would represent an extraordinary breach of basic norms. 8

And then there is Venezuela. Congress has already tried - and failed - to rein in presidential war powers related to military actions there, an effort that only exists because lawmakers themselves are warning that the administration is using force without constitutionally required authorization. 9 Legal analysis has been blunt: whatever name the administration gives it, regime-decapitation by bombing is war, and the power to initiate war belongs to Congress. 10

This is why that 1945 War Department pamphlet hits so hard. Its authors were not speculating. They had watched fascism destroy legal systems from the inside. They understood that the point is not merely to defeat a foreign enemy - it is to recognize the method before it takes root at home.

The pamphlet’s final question was simple: “How to stop it?”

Its answer is even simpler: by making democracy work. By actively defending civil rights, resisting discrimination and prejudice, insisting on equality before the law, and cooperating to preserve peace and security. The authors warned that freedom cannot be maintained in isolation. If we allow prejudice to strip anyone of democratic rights, all democracy is threatened.

Those values shaped the postwar world: alliances, human rights norms, the civil rights movement, expanded voting access, and the long - unfinished - work of making democracy real for everyone. That is the America this regime is trying to end. Constitutional limits replaced by loyalty; independent institutions replaced by obedient ones; rights replaced by permissions.

For those of us who warned - when Project 2025 was posted online, long before the election - that this was the plan, the speed of implementation is horrifying but not surprising. The time for euphemisms is over. Fascism is not a distant threat or an academic debate. It is a governing method -and it is here.

So here is the call to action: name what is happening, out loud, without apology. Document it. Support legal defense organizations and local mutual aid networks protecting immigrants and targeted communities. Demand that elected officials use every tool they still have—hearings, subpoenas, funding constraints, state and local non-cooperation policies that are lawful, and litigation that forces constitutional review. Show up in public, peacefully and persistently. Attend a No Kings protest on March 28. Authoritarianism depends on silence, isolation, and exhaustion. We defeat it by staying visible, connected, and unafraid.

Remembering a Different Democracy

It’s hard to remember a time before dark money and corporate influence saturated every election. I personally wasn’t clued into the ins and outs of American politics, which looked vastly different, in prior decades. On January 21, 2010, a conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court delivered a decision in Citizens United v. FEC that tilted the trajectory of American democracy. The Court’s ruling declared that corporate political spending was a form of protected free speech, paving the way (whether unwittingly or not) for a flood of unprecedented political spending and influence.

Then, on the heels of Citizens United, came the ruling that ignited the political reality we know today, marked by extreme polarization and brazen authoritarianism.

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Citizens United and Surrounding Events

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010) was a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling that allowed unlimited corporate and union spending on elections, dramatically altering the American political landscape.

Are Corporations People?

One of the most controversial legacies of Citizens United is the idea that corporations have the same First Amendment rights as individuals when it comes to political speech. This logic, rooted in earlier court precedents, was cemented by the Court’s ruling that corporations and unions can spend unlimited money on political advertising, just like people can.

Critics argue that this principle warps democracy, giving artificial legal entities (with vastly more resources) the same rights as human citizens, without the same accountability.

This is where the phrase “corporations are people” entered the public lexicon. While it oversimplifies the legal theory, it captures the public’s outrage over the elevation of corporate influence in civic life.

Timeline of Major Events

March 2009: Citizens United case initially argued in Supreme Court.

January 21, 2010: Supreme Court issues 5–4 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission

• Majority:

  • John Roberts (remains Chief Justice today)

  • Antonin Scalia (d. 2016)

  • Anthony Kennedy (r. 2018)

  • Clarence Thomas (still serving)

  • Samuel Alito (still serving)

• Dissenting:

  • Justice John Paul Stevens (wrote primary dissent, r. 2010, d. 2019)

  • Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (d. 2020)

  • Justice Stephen Breyer (r. 2022)

  • Justice Sonia Sotomayor (still serving)

March 26, 2010: SpeechNow.org v. FEC decided by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. Supreme Court later declined to hear the case (more on this below)

July 27, 2010: SpeechNow.org v. Federal Election Commission, conservative advocacy group SpeechNow.org becomes first Super PAC

2012 Election Cycle: $609 million spent by Super PACs

2014 McCutcheon v. FEC: Supreme Court removes aggregate limits on individual contributions

2016 Election Cycle: Super PAC spending exceeds $1 billion for the first time

2020 Election Cycle: In just four years spending more than doubles to a record-breaking $2.6 billion spend by Super PACs

2021-2024: Rise of authoritarian rhetoric in mainstream politics, intensified by wealthy donors and dark money groups

The Original Super PAC

The less-remembered legal milestone, SpeechNow.org v. Federal Election Commission (decided March 2010), is arguably more significant than Citizens United in terms of practical political impact. It didn’t come from the Supreme Court, but rather from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. That ruling created the legal foundation for what we now call Super PACs—independent expenditure-only committees that can raise and spend unlimited funds, and which wealthy donors can hide behind, as long as they do not coordinate with candidates. Not even corporations have that little oversight.

If Citizens United was the kindling that sparked corporate and dark money entering elections, SpeechNow.org was jet fuel.

Background on the Case

SpeechNow.org was a conservative nonprofit formed to independently run ads supporting political candidates. They challenged FEC rules that limited how much money individuals could contribute to political committees, arguing that these restrictions violated their First Amendment rights to free speech. Though the case was filed before the Citizens United decision, by the time the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals issued its ruling in March 2010, Citizens United had been decided just two months earlier. Citing that precedent, the court held that contribution limits to independent expenditure-only groups were unconstitutional. The court also ruled that groups like SpeechNow.org must register as political action committees per federal law. SpeechNow.org became the first ever Super PAC.

What Changed After SpeechNow.org?

Here’s what happened when the rules changed and the billionaires moved in. Between the 2008 and 2012 election cycles, independent political expenditures skyrocketed from approximately $144 million to over $1 billion.

The results were immediate and staggering.

Source: OpenSecrets.org

If current trends continue, outside political spending in the 2028 election cycle could reach $6 billion, setting yet another record, and tightening the grip of concentrated wealth on American democracy.

Connection to the Rise of Authoritarianism

Citizens United and its lesser-known sibling, SpeechNow.org, didn’t just tip the scales, they kicked down the doors to a new era of political spending. Billionaires and corporate interests were quick to seize the opportunity, throwing open the floodgates and pouring unprecedented sums into Super PACs and dark money groups. The almost immediate and seismic power shift fueled polarization, supercharged misinformation, eroded public trust, and created even more avenues for the ultra-wealthy to entrench their influence and profit from policy.

With limitless resources and political influence, ultra-wealthy individuals and corporations effectively own public opinion, drown out opposition, and embolden authoritarian-minded politicians who prioritize donor loyalist interests over public accountability.

Factors Contributing to Authoritarianism Post-Citizens United:

• Increased political extremism funded by wealthy interests.

• Growth of misinformation and propaganda via dark money groups.

• Suppression of grassroots activism due to financial dominance.

Campaign Finance Best Practices

Overturning Citizens United alone won’t be enough to break big money’s grip on our political system. That decision lit the match, but decades of legal and legislative erosion have allowed corporate and billionaire influence to engulf our elections. To truly restore transparency, accountability, and public trust, we can’t simply reverse the damage, we need to rebuild from the ground up.

Successful reforms in other democracies:

🇨🇦 Canada

Spending caps and donation limits.

Canada enforces strict caps on how much parties and candidates can spend, and bans corporate and union donations altogether. Individuals can give only in small amounts. Public subsidies help offset campaign costs, reducing dependence on private money.

• No corporate or union donations

• Individual donation limits

• Partial public reimbursement for campaign costs

🇬🇧 United Kingdom

Ban ads and shorten campaigns.

In the UK, elections last just a few weeks, not years. Candidates and parties operate under legal spending caps, and no one can buy TV or radio ads. Instead, all parties get free airtime, keeping the focus on policies, not who can pay for the most coverage.

• No paid political TV or radio advertising

• 4–6 week campaign periods

• Strict legal spending caps

🇫🇷 France

Reimburse all viable candidates.

France provides public funding to major parties based on prior election performance and also reimburses costs for candidates who reach minimum vote thresholds. This approach helps break the two-party system while maintaining high accountability.

• Full or partial public financing for parties

• Reimbursement for qualified candidates

• Strict spending limits

🇩🇪 Germany

Ban anonymous donations.

Germany blends public subsidies with transparency requirements. All donations above a modest threshold must be disclosed, and anonymous contributions are not allowed. Public funding is tied to actual voter support to ensure fairness.

• No anonymous donations over €500

• Mandatory disclosure of large contributions

• Public subsidies tied to vote share

Reclaiming Our Power

Across our feeds the temperature is rising. We, the American people are outraged, and a good number of us are not about to let this frog-in-boiling-water situation be the downfall of American democracy. The path to overcoming authoritarianism begins with remembering democracy belongs to us, not just those with a golden boot on our faces.

Overturning Citizens United is possible, necessary, and urgent.