All Rights & Liberties are at Risk
After winning less than 1/3 of the vote, Trump moves to use extralegal authority to consolidate power; erosion of checks and balances puts rights at risk, including for those who supported Trump.
Roughly 32% of eligible voters chose Donald Trump; 68% denied him their support. Only 22% of Americans voted for Trump. Nearly 80% of Americans have never voted for him to be President. Trump has nothing resembling a “sweeping mandate” to dismantle the government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
That system of self-government has been developed carefully and lawfully over more than two centuries, under Congressional and Executive leadership from both major parties. The extremists who rant against government “waste”, when taxpayer money is invested in public services, want the same taxpayer money to go to themselves and their friends and favored industries. Trump said as much in writing in his executive order declaring a (baseless) energy emergency.
Presidents are not kings. The President has no authority not granted specifically by law. He has no authority to make Elon Musk, the head of an informal advisory panel, into a shadow president with authority to unilaterally overrule Congress, the courts, or contract law, much less the Constitution.
In these early days of the Project 2025 terror, we have a limited window of opportunity to understand that attacks on any person's rights are the beginning of the end of all of our rights.
Detentions without warrant and the unilateral creation of mass detention camps to hold people without charge or due process directly violate the Constitution and threaten to void all of our rights to personal freedom and due process.
Trump’s attempt to overrule the 14th Amendment with the stroke of his pen is an attempt to strip all of us of the rights guaranteed by the Constitution. If Trump can selectively strip Americans of their right to citizenship, he can selectively strip Americans of other rights as well.
The effort to strip Americans of core rights guaranteed by the Constitution is also evident in Trump’s war on free speech. He has ordered the unilateral defunding of any program, including law enforcement and cancer research grants, that uses words such as ‘justice’, and has asked the Attorney General to consider charges against private companies that talk about justice, accessibility, and the rights of women.
(Note: The Constitution says the republic was created “to establish Justice”, it grants all people equal protection of the law, and it specifically protects women against political discrimination. And yes, sadly, there is an effort to roll back women’s access to the vote.)
His illegal removal of inspectors general and prosecutors, either without cause or as retaliation for their law enforcement work, demonstrates overt hostility to the very idea that he works in service of the People and the Constitution.
The new Director of the Office of Management and Budget is a co-author of Project 2025, who stated that his goal is to put dedicated civil servants “in trauma”, to terrorize them out of resisting the violation of their rights. A report on the known plans for an authoritarian takeover urges those loyal to democracy to “Protect the first targets, and arrange now to advocate for the most vulnerable.”
Prosecutors in the famously independent Southern District of New York, including conservatives who worked with Justice Scalia, have resigned in protest rather than follow an unlawful order to drop charges against the Mayor of New York City in what has been acknowledged tacitly to be a quid-pro-quo.
The scathing letters written by resigning federal prosecutors in New York reveal that what they are resisting is an overt attempt to corrupt the entire system of federal law enforcement, to turn it into a kind of political protection racket. Imagine what it means for your rights and liberties, if no part of federal law enforcement is free from corrupt political control.
Trump’s firing without cause of the Archivist of the United States puts at risk the lawful functioning of the entire system of self-government and is, by his own admission, an act of illegal retribution.
The Archivist instructs, oversees, and ensures the integrity of the Electoral College voting process, supports and manages the process of amending the Constitution, and ensures the secure system of classification to protect national security is not breached.
The Archivist also ensures accurate records are available and properly released to the press and to citizens under the Freedom of Information Act.
Trump despises the Archivist and the agency she leads, because of the fallout he experienced from his own decision to unlawfully abscond with and repeatedly conceal from investigators hundreds of classified documents, for reasons that have still not been adjudicated.
His attempt to corrupt the management of the National Archives puts at risk the integrity of the entire democratic process and could make it impossible for the People to defend their rights and exercise actual self-government.
We need to understand that when laws are broken by the President, all of our rights and liberties are at risk. There are clear examples where direct and intolerable harm to people is front and center:
The attempted dismantling of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau leaves tens of thousands of defrauded consumers without redress and millions more unprotected from criminal fraud and abuse.
The unlawful seizure of private financial and health data by Elon Musk and his DOGE team, resulting in transferring of that data to commercial AI servers, directly violates federal rights guarantees protecting all Americans.
The blanket order to freeze federal grants threatens to steal from the states an average of 1/3 of their entire annual budgets, undermining public services from schools to police and fire departments, to roads, infrastructure, health services, and emergency medical response.
The attempt to rip apart the staffing of the Department of Veterans Affairs is telling: Many are veterans themselves, and their work is to serve others who have sacrificed for the defense of the rest of us.
The attempted dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) puts millions of lives at risk around the world, stealing from starving children, creating immediate risk of new epidemics, and destroying a core expression of the good will and devoted alliance of the American people. Republican senators from Kansas have pushed back, noting the seizure of funds for USAID cut off revenue to farmers.
Defunding of USAID and withdrawal from the World Health Organization not only undermine global standing and negotiating power; both actions directly undermine the global capacity for novel pathogen detection and increase the likelihood of new pandemics. DOGE seizure of health agencies and freezing of funds for research also increase the risk of outbreaks and reduce pandemic preparedness.
There is evidence emerging that DOGE is engaging in illegal acts of political harassment and retaliatory firings. PBS reports one disturbing example:
“The official DOGE Facebook page started harassing me on my personal Facebook account after I criticized Tesla and Twitter,” Spitzer-Stadtlander wrote. “Less than a week later, I was fired, despite my position allegedly being exempted due to national security.”
Top Trump emissaries have fanned out across Europe suggesting he will try to force Ukraine to surrender territory to Putin, while getting nothing for the future of Ukraine or the free world. Trump himself has talked about a deal with Putin to slash U.S. military spending, baffling allies and his own supporters.
In a resounding rebuke to Trump’s apparent desire to dismantle American influence and security alliances, veteran CBS and NBC reporter Marvin Kalb warned:
“A deal leaving Ukraine in a ditch would mean America’s role as a trusted global leader would now be a thing of the past.”
The early days of Trump’s second term have given us dozens of examples of a President operating outside the law. The Constitution distributes power between the Congress, the Executive, the Judiciary, the States, the Press, and the People. The President owes genuine service and accountability to all of the others. Republican allies of the President need to act now, before checks and balances are eroded beyond repair.
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