Government dismantled
Our nation’s government is being dismantled at the federal level by President Trump and his supporters. It’s happening very quickly, by executive order and by DOGE, the department hollowed out and repurposed by Trump and Elon Musk, unelected and unappointed advisor/government official and apparently best ally of Trump. What’s more, the supporters of Trump are cheering and helping him undermine the rule of law, because what he has stated he wants to do appeals to their sense of what needs done. Basically, he’s scraping off the cruft tacked on by years of New Deal and expansionist government departments, regulations, and systems. He’s trying to get back to the Constitution, with or without Congress’s approval, and with a favorable Supreme Court. He’s waving the flag and saying he’ll get us out of our treaty obligations to send money and troops abroad; he’s encouraging eliminating legal abortions and getting rid of federal control of education and many other things. The FCC and the Department of Education are being upended; government funding of equality programs, the Americans with Disabilities Act, affirmative action, and efforts to support the underprivileged, are all on the chopping block. And he’s doing it in the name of Christianity and making America great again.
Christians generally supported him in the election. Poor people and straight people and people who wanted less regulation all supported him. The thing is, he’s right that the federal government has grown far beyond what the Constitution says. The federal Department of Education doesn’t need to exist. Government should not be spending trillions in aid to other countries and military training for other nations’ soldiers and food for other nations and defending other countries while their own resources go to trade with us. He wants to do a large number of things that genuinely need done, and he’s willing to do them quickly and without fuss. He doesn’t care that the media and academics and many elites hate him and fear him. He doesn’t care that people are being hurt by it. He has the guts to do it anyway.
The problem is: he’s dishonest, he’s cutting open the laws and taking out their guts, refusing to back off even when federal circuit courts try to rein in his efforts, saying they contravene the laws. He doesn’t care except to overwhelm and disobey those judges who are trying to hold him to some standard. He has followers who follow orders, who separate families, who are actively deporting people he claims are gangsters and foreign nationals here illegally—without any opportunity to present their own defense or any other opinion. Some of them deserve to be deported, no doubt, back to the nations they came from. But many of them are being swept up because they’re gay or trans, because they spoke up in protest against Trump’s policies, because they squealed. They’re being kicked out or imprisoned without any defense, no habeas corpus, no self-defense, no day in court.
The Constitution does say: give each person their day in court. Produce the body, listen and judge righteous judgment. It doesn't limit this to citizens born here or people not born here. It doesn't say, only listen to the arguments you like. The Founding Fathers were intimately familiar with tyranny's use of force to justify all kinds of aggression; they specifically said, allow people to defend themselves, in court or if necessary, by force of arms.
That’s where the problem lies. If our leaders refuse to be restrained by laws, they will not be restrained except by force. And that means civil war.
