They Changed the Rules While You Were Watching the News
The Quiet Coup - Part 1 of a 3-part series
The Supreme Court has handed the President powers the Founders explicitly refused to. Here’s what happened, who wrote the blueprint, and whether any of it can be undone.
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!
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