What we are witnessing is not a government of the people, by the people, and for the people; it is a government over the people.
Call it what it is: political gaslighting—the regime says one thing while doing the opposite, and insists on the citizenry’s trust while dismantling the very checks and balances that make trust possible.
So when the powers-that-be claim to be protecting the Constitution, they’re dismantling it at every turn. In this way, the mechanisms of constitutional government—separation of powers, federalism, due process, and the Bill of Rights—are being hollowed out in plain sight.
Although this dismantling did not start with President Trump, it has accelerated beyond imagining.
What was once a slow bleed is now a hemorrhage—and it is not random. The damage is unfolding on two parallel tracks: a steady, methodical, bureaucratic erosion (rule changes, executive orders, new databases) paired with shock-and-awe surges (National Guard deployments, mass round-ups, headline-grabbing prosecutions).
The words may say “freedom” and “order,” but the deeds smack of tyranny.
Attorney General Pam Bondi vows to punish “hateful” speech even as the administration normalizes hateful rhetoric and violent imagery. Vice President JD Vance promises to “go after” those with a “leftist” ideology while preaching free-speech absolutism for allies.
The Trump administration denounces “hate speech” even as it excuses and downplays the Jan. 6 riots; pledges fiscal restraint while shoveling billions into surveillance, prisons, and domestic deployments; wraps itself in law-and-order while tolerating lawlessness by cronies; sermonizes about faith and morality while normalizing cruelty as governance; and peddles outrage over waste while spending lavishly on the trappings of office.
Rights are framed as absolute for friends and privileges for critics. That is the opposite of constitutional government, which holds everyone—especially those in power—to the same rule of law, applied evenly.
If the government can police ideas, deploy troops at home, run dragnets by algorithm, disappear people into distant prisons, build spectacle cages, and amass power in one office, then no American is safe—including those who cheer these efforts today.
If you believe in limited government, equal justice, and due process—whatever your party—these double standards should alarm you most, because the precedents being cheered today will be wielded against you tomorrow.
What follows is a running ledger of the gaslighting playbook and its constitutional costs.
The Gaslight: “We’re Restoring the Constitution.”
Reality: The “temporary” powers created after 9/11 have hardened into a permanent police-state architecture.
The Cost: A police state.
The Gaslight: “We Value Law and Order.”
Reality: The administration deployed Marines and the National Guard into American streets to police protests protected by the First Amendment.
The Cost: The death of Posse Comitatus.
The Gaslight: “We Defend Free Speech.”
Reality: Dissent is criminalized, expressive conduct is relitigated, and disfavored groups face terror labels and IRS pressure. Fold in Bondi’s vow to target “hateful” speech and Vance’s pledge to eradicate “leftist ideology,” and power slides from punishing unlawful acts to policing ideas.
The Cost: A weaponized First Amendment.
The Gaslight: “We’re Protecting You from Extremists.”
Reality: Speaking truth to power is reframed as a security risk.
The Cost: Dissent rebranded as extremism.
The Gaslight: “We’re Ending Federal Censorship.”
Reality: Trump’s order to “end federal censorship” asserts sweeping control over how agencies interact with media platforms and broadcasters, rebranding ordinary outreach and fact-checking as First Amendment violations.
The Cost: The state as speech referee.
The Gaslight: “We Use Smart Tech, Not Dragnet Surveillance.”
Reality: The administration is fusing government databases and outsourcing “intelligence” to private vendors to create a domestic intelligence system that presumes guilt by data trail.
The Cost: Probable cause replaced by algorithms.
The Gaslight: “We’re Tough on Crime.”
Reality: Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz” detention site whetted the government’s appetite for scaled-up incarceration for anyone accused of a crime.
The Cost: The death of due process.
The Gaslight: “We’re Compassionate, Not Cruel.”
Reality: A July 2025 executive order encourages states to funnel the homeless into institutions and mental-health courts.
The Cost: Bureaucratic coercion over compassion.
The Gaslight: “We’re Streamlining Government.”
Reality: The administration has pressed an aggressive unitary-executive theory to encroach on independent agencies.
The Cost: Checks and balances gutted.
The Gaslight: “We’re Keeping America Safe Overseas.”
Reality: Killing by assassination, not authorization. Twice in recent months, U.S. forces have launched unannounced attacks on Venezuelan boats, killing crews without warning or due process, on the mere assertion that they were drug traffickers.
The Cost: War powers and judicial oversight bypassed.
The Gaslight: “We’re Fixing Wasteful Spending.”
Reality: Having poured billions into surveillance, prisons, and domestic deployments, the “police-state budget” unravels the economy while eroding liberty.
The Cost: A debt-funded police state.
Many who cherish ordered liberty, limited government, fiscal restraint, and constitutional morality would normally recoil at these tactics under any other administration, so why not now?
Principles should not change because the party in power has changed, and yet that’s exactly what continues to drive the double standard.
If there’s a constitutional scorecard, “we the people” are on the losing team right now.
The First Amendment is buckling as protest is chilled, expressive conduct is targeted, opponents are threatened with terror labels, and the Executive Branch expands control over the speech ecosystem.
The Fourth and Fifth Amendments have been weakened by AI surveillance and cross-agency fusion that normalize suspicionless tracking, while offshore detention and coerced commitments compromise due process.
The Eighth Amendment is mocked by harsh, theatrical detention regimes.
Federalism and the Tenth Amendment give way when federal troops step into local policing.
Separation of powers erodes as an inflated unitary-executive theory encroaches on independent agencies.
War powers are skirted by extrajudicial killings abroad. And fiscal responsibility is inverted as surveillance and prison appropriations swell while liberty contracts.
If you wouldn’t trust your worst political enemy with these weaponized tools, you shouldn’t trust your favorite politician with them either.
Our job as citizens is not to trust the government but to bind it down with the Constitution.
This should never be a right-vs-left debate; it’s the State vs. your liberty.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, if we let emergency rule become ordinary rule—military troops as beat cops, protest as crime, data as warrant, assassination as policy, money as politics—there won’t be a Constitution left to defend.
Reprinted with permission from the Rutherford Institute.
