A Head for an Eye: The Government’s War on the American People
.JPG)
We have been ambushed.
We should be talking about the dangerous, destabilizing things being done to this country.
We should be talking about the data centers spreading across the landscape, draining electricity and water, straining local infrastructure and expanding the technological machinery needed to track, profile and control the population.
We should be talking about the government’s growing network of detention centers and its family-separation policies, which have resulted in an estimated 145,000 American children experiencing the detention of at least one parent—including more than 22,000 U.S.-citizen children whose entire household of co-resident parents has been detained.
We should be talking about license-plate readers, facial recognition, government databases and artificial intelligence capable of turning our movements and associations into a digital dossier on every person in America.
We should be talking about masked government agents, endless war, disappearing constitutional safeguards and an imperial presidency accountable to no one.
Instead, we are trapped in a vicious loop of nonsense, mania, political demagoguery and manufactured spectacle while the country goes to hell in a handbasket.
Every day—sometimes every hour—brings another outrage, another threat, another vulgar display of power, another self-glorifying meme, another political provocation and another distraction demanding our attention.
Before we can fully comprehend one assault on the Republic, another takes its place.
That is not merely the chaos surrounding this government.
It is one of the ways this government maintains power.
Keep the public angry, exhausted, frightened and distracted. Force everyone to chase the latest outrage. Crowd out serious scrutiny with political theater. Then push past another constitutional boundary while no one is able to keep track of what has already been lost.
This is how every crisis appears fleeting and every constitutional violation merely the latest controversy in an endless political spectacle.
Taken together, however, these are not isolated events.
They are tests.
Donald Trump is not defending the Constitution. He is testing how much of it he can violate before anyone stops him.
He is testing whether a president can wage war without Congress. He is testing whether federal power can be turned into personal power. He is testing whether dissent can be punished without formally outlawing speech. He is testing whether masked government agents can operate as a secret police force beyond public scrutiny and constitutional accountability. He is testing whether the government can watch, track and profile everyone without meaningful limits. He is testing whether the Twenty-Second Amendment, which limits a president to two terms in office, means what it says.
Most of all, he is testing how much abuse the American people will tolerate before exhaustion, fear, distraction and partisan loyalty wear down their willingness to resist.
That is the real constitutional crisis confronting America.
Trump has turned constitutional government into a continuous test of submission: He pushes beyond a boundary and waits. Will Congress resist? Will the courts intervene? Will government officials refuse? Will the public object? Or will everyone retreat, rationalize, delay and adjust?
If no one stops him, the violation becomes precedent. Then he pushes farther.
This is how a republic is dismantled—not necessarily through one dramatic declaration of dictatorship, but through a succession of constitutional violations that go unanswered long enough to become the new normal.
The administration’s approach to war offers a revealing glimpse into the instincts driving much of its conduct.
Asked about Iran’s promise to retaliate according to the principle of “an eye for an eye,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared that Trump’s policy is “a head for an eye.”
Not proportionality. Not restraint. Vengeance to the maximum.
The impulse behind that doctrine—to retaliate when challenged, punish when criticized, escalate when restrained and push harder when the law says no—is not confined to the battlefield. It runs through the administration’s approach to political opponents, dissent, immigration enforcement, executive power and constitutional limits.
“A head for an eye” may be Trump’s philosophy of war, but it is also a warning about the kind of government that philosophy produces. The result is a government at war not only with foreign enemies but with dissent, privacy, due process, constitutional limits—and ultimately with the American people.
Meanwhile, as the administration tests how much damage it can inflict and how many boundaries it can cross without consequences, the public is being overwhelmed by a relentless barrage of noise, spectacle and manufactured outrage.
And the costs of the government’s recklessness continue to mount.
The war with Iran continues to consume lives, military resources and tens of billions of taxpayer dollars.
Critical munitions are reportedly running low. Military commanders are being forced to make difficult decisions about which weapons must be preserved. American service members have been killed and hundreds more injured. Disruptions to global oil supplies threaten higher prices, shortages and further economic instability.
Yet even as the administration demands billions more to replenish the weapons expended in its war, it is preparing to end a Medicare subsidy program that has helped hold down prescription-drug-plan premiums for millions of older Americans.
The government can find billions for bombs but tells senior citizens to brace for higher costs. It can also spend public money on enormous banners bearing Trump’s face and regilding statues while ordinary Americans struggle to afford food, medicine, housing and fuel.
This is what government without constitutional limits looks like: war without accountability, policing without transparency, surveillance without warrants, propaganda without shame and power without restraint.
The question is no longer whether the Constitution is welcome in America. The question is whether the government still considers the Constitution binding at all.
By all indications, the answer is no.
Trump will keep testing the limits of the Constitution until someone stops him.
Unfortunately, Congress has largely abandoned its duty to check presidential power. The courts increasingly allow constitutional controversies to be resolved through delays, procedural maneuvers and doctrines that shield government officials from accountability. Federal agencies resist transparency, police investigate themselves, and private contractors help the government evade constitutional limits.
And the American people are encouraged to treat every abuse as a partisan question rather than a constitutional one.
That is the trap.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, constitutional limits mean nothing when the institutions entrusted with enforcing them refuse to act.
The greatest danger is not that Trump keeps testing the limits.
It is that the institutions entrusted with enforcing those limits keep failing the test.
