What on earth is happening to this country?
How, over the course of 250 years, did we go from prizing self-government to allowing a corrupt, self-serving ruling elite to dominate us with terror campaigns, brute force, and psychological warfare?
Don’t be fooled: the madness, mayhem and malice unfolding in America is not politics as usual. It’s not partisan hardball. It’s not bureaucratic overreach.
It’s theft in the gravest sense imaginable: the theft of our nation, the theft of our sovereignty as citizens, the theft of our constitutional republic.
The government is seizing what does not belong to it: our voice, our rights, our power to choose and to resist. It is robbing us of the very tools of self-government—accountability, transparency, representation, free speech, bodily autonomy—and replacing them with coercion, propaganda, and force.
So when the White House threatens to withhold FEMA aid from states that won’t endorse its foreign policy? That’s theft.
When the president attacks the courts for calling out executive overreach? That’s theft.
When the media is muzzled, the police state expands, and new concentration camps rise? All of it—theft.
We are being robbed blind in broad daylight by the very individuals entrusted with safeguarding our rights and our republic.
Despite his assurances to the contrary, Donald Trump never had any intention of draining the swamp. He is the swamp.
Yet make no mistake: this didn’t start with Trump. The groundwork for this theft was laid long before—through successive administrations, both Republican and Democrat—that expanded executive power, hollowed out the Constitution, and normalized the rule of force over the rule of law.
What Trump has done is remove the mask, weaponize the tools of tyranny, and accelerate the dismantling of the republic in full view of the people.
Here are just a few of the many ways the Trump administration—no different than its predecessors in motive, yet far more brazen in execution—is stealing the birthright of the American people and cementing the transformation of the republic into a government of wolves.
- Police, once tasked with serving the people, now act as an occupying force.
- ICE agents, incentivized by massive $50,000 bonuses and shielded from accountability, behave more like mercenaries than law enforcement—operating far outside the bounds of due process.
- Fourth Amendment protections, under constant assault, have become optional.
- Elected representatives enrich themselves through insider trading, while the crises they help manufacture devastate the populace.
- Federal courts are being threatened or ignored outright when they attempt to check executive overreach. Judges who speak out are branded enemies of the state.
- Whistleblowers, journalists, and truth-tellers are prosecuted, surveilled, or silenced—treated as threats to national security. Journalism, once protected as a check on power, is under siege.
- Statisticians, public health experts, and government researchers are being purged or silenced when their data doesn’t support the administration’s narrative. We are living in the shadow of George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, where facts are negotiable, history can be rewritten, and reality is whatever the Deep State says it is.
- Disaster relief, foreign policy, and executive authority have been weaponized to punish dissent.
- The Department of Justice has become a tool of loyalty enforcement—targeting dissenters while shielding cronies.
- Meanwhile, the Epstein files remain sealed. Despite public outcry and compelling evidence of elite involvement in Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking network, the Trump administration has refused to release the full client list or investigative records. In doing so, it continues the bipartisan pattern of shielding the powerful from scrutiny while everyday Americans face ever-expanding surveillance, suspicion, and punishment.
- Public lands are being auctioned off to corporate allies without oversight or accountability.
- Citizenship is no longer a birthright but a privilege granted or revoked by political fiat.
- Digital platforms, pressured by federal agencies, now censor views deemed “inconvenient” to the state.
- Education is being reshaped to discourage critical thought and enforce ideological conformity.
- Government services, once created to serve the public good, are now political weapons—used to reward loyalty, punish dissent, and control the masses through selective aid and ideological enforcement.
- Executive orders have become tools of rule-by-decree, bypassing Congress and obliterating checks and balances.
- Economic chaos is being weaponized strategically. By manufacturing crises, withholding aid, and destabilizing budgets, the Deep State has found a new way to consolidate power, transfer wealth upwards, and condition compliance.
- Corruption is not punished. It’s rewarded—so long as it serves the power elite.
And while all of this is happening, the Trump administration is doing everything it can to keep the citizenry distracted, divided, and demobilized—peddling outrage, manufacturing crises, stoking culture wars and threatening global wars.
Bit by bit, freedom is being caged. And what is emerging in its place is a vast, inescapable prison—walled in not by bars, but by bureaucracy, deception, and brute force.
When “we the people” no longer have a say in how we’re governed—when we have no way to guard against our trust being abused and our rights violated—when we have no way to counter government efforts to silence our voices, manipulate our choices, and erase our rights—what remains is not a constitutional republic.
Yet the government—present and past—is stealing more than just power. It’s stealing the people’s ability to be the government.
This is not just about the loss of freedom. It is the systematic dismantling of self-government—of the people’s role as the final check on power.
This is the theft of a nation in real time by those entrusted with the highest offices of power, who use their power to strip “we the people” of our sovereignty and our rights.
The founders warned us against kings. What we face now is far more insidious: an executive branch that pays lip service to freedom while locking down the nation.
This is not how free people are governed.
This is how free people are ruled.
If the people are no longer allowed to check power, to criticize it, to reform it, to influence it, or even to see it—then we no longer have a government of the people, by the people, or for the people.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we have a government against the people.
The answer, as the Founders understood is that there is power in our numbers if only we would stand united against tyranny.
Reprinted with permission from Rutherford Institute.
