What Tyranny Looks Like Now: No Crowns, No Coups Just Unchecked Power
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
In January 1776, Thomas Paine published Common Sense, a pamphlet that gave voice to the discontent of a nation struggling to free itself from a tyrannical ruler who believed power flowed from his own will rather than the consent of the governed.
Paine’s warning was not theoretical.
Two hundred and fifty years later, we find ourselves confronting the same dilemma—this time from inside the White House.
When asked by the New York Times what might restrain his power grabs, Donald Trump did not point to the Constitution, the courts, Congress, or the rule of law—as his oath of office and our constitutional republic require. He pointed to himself.
According to Trump, the only thing standing between America and unchecked power is his own morality.
If our freedoms depend on Donald Trump’s self-proclaimed morality, we are in dangerous territory.
Over the course of his nearly 80 years, Trump has been a serial adulterer, philanderer, liar, and convicted felon. He has cheated, stolen, lied, plundered, pillaged, and enriched himself at the expense of others. He is vengeful, petty, unforgiving, foul-mouthed, and crass. His associates include felons, rapists, pedophiles, drug traffickers, sex traffickers, and thieves. He disrespects the law, disregards human life, is ignorant of the Bible, illiterate about the Constitution, takes pleasure in others’ pain and misfortune, and is utterly lacking in mercy, forgiveness, or compassion.
Christian nationalists have tried to whitewash Trump’s behavior by wrapping religion in the national flag and urging Americans to submit to authoritarianism—an appeal that flies in the face of everything the founders risked their lives to establish.
That whitewashing effort matters, because it asks Americans to abandon the very safeguards the Founders put in place to protect them from men like Trump.
Trump speaks in a language of kings, strongmen, and would-be emperors advocating for personal rule over constitutional government. America’s founders rejected that logic, revolted against tyranny, and built for themselves a system of constitutional restraints—checks and balances, divided authority through a separation of powers, and an informed, vigilant populace.
All of their hard work is being undone. Not by accident, and not overnight.
The erosion follows a familiar pattern to any who have studied the rise of authoritarian regimes.
Trump and his army of enablers and enforcers may have co-opted the language of patriotism, but they are channeling the tactics of despots.
This is not about left versus right, or even about whether Trump is a savior or a villain. It is about the danger of concentrating unchecked power in any one individual, regardless of party or personality.
This should be a flashing red warning sign for any who truly care about freedom, regardless of partisan politics.
The ends do not justify the means.
History shows that once the machinery of oppression is built—surveillance systems, militarized enforcement, emergency authorities—it does not care who operates the controls. The only question is who will be targeted next.
All presidents in recent years have contributed to the rise of the American police state with executive overreach, standing armies, militarized policing, war without consent, mass surveillance, and concentrated power.
But Trump 2.0 has done more to dismantle the nation’s constitutional guardrails than at any other time in history.
Rather than adhering to the script provided by America’s founders, it’s as if the Trump administration took the grievances leveled against King George III in the Declaration of Independence and adopted them as a governing playbook.
They are unfolding now through emergency declarations, warrantless raids, speech-based detentions, unaccountable surveillance, and military actions launched without consent or constitutional authority.
With every passing day, the American police state with Trump at its helm gets more unhinged.
Consumed with visions of global conquest and military expansion, Trump has treated sovereignty as negotiable and international law as an inconvenience. He has threatened, coerced, or destabilized nations including Venezuela, Greenland, Cuba, Nigeria, Iran, and others—not through diplomacy or lawful process, but through dominance, spectacle, and unilateral force.
This is not leadership. It is lawlessness carried out by mercenaries and thugs on the government payroll.
Not content to wage war abroad, the government has systematically worked to transform America into a battlefield, setting its sights on the American people.
That transformation is almost complete.
ICE agents have been battering down doors, ramming into private homes, and carrying out warrantless militarized raids that treat constitutional protections as inconveniences and human beings as expendable obstacles.
This is the reality of Trump’s America: moral collapse, thuggery, violence, greed, and dehumanization.
Due process has become optional. Restraint has vanished. Violence has been normalized.
A government that recognizes no moral limits will recognize no legal limits.
And a nation that places its faith in the “morality” of unrestrained power will soon discover that morality—like liberty—cannot survive where law no longer rules.
Unchecked power does not protect its supporters—it eventually turns on them, too.
This is what happens when the rule of law gives way to rule by force.
Nothing about Trump’s behavior is rational or sane, even by his own standards: he’s bulldozing the White House, blitz-bombing boats, threatening to seize foreign lands by force, and plastering his name and face on every available surface.
Yet as diabolical as these distractions are, they are a sideshow to keep us from seeing the long-term plans to lock down the country being put in place by an unaccountable shadow apparatus operating behind the scenes for whom the Constitution means nothing.
We ignore them at our own peril.
Americans are being trained to accept what would have once been unthinkable: law enforcement that kills without consequence, presidents who operate above the law, wars launched without consent, and power exercised without accountability.
That normalization is the true danger.
The founders did not risk everything to replace one tyrant with another. They did not reject monarchy only to embrace executive supremacy. They did not enshrine checks and balances so that future generations could shrug and hope that those in power would restrain themselves.
They understood that freedom requires moral courage, not blind loyalty; that resistance to tyranny is not treason, but duty; and that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance—not eternal trust.
As I make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, history has already told us what happens next: when government becomes destructive of liberty, it is not only the right of the people to resist—it is their duty.
