We now have the autocratic takeover of democracy that our founders warned us against. America’s founders brilliantly devised three separate and equal branches of government: the legislative, the executive, and the judicial branch. Each branch is charged, among other responsibilities, with keeping the authority of the other two in check.
Constitutional guardrails to keep the three branches of government in balance are meant to protect us from incompetence, corruption, and insurrection. However, during the first eight months of Trump’s second presidency, Republican legislators have jumped all the traditional guardrails to surrender their power to the President.
Our representatives and senators line up to give their authority away, most notably by surrendering their “power of the purse.” They dishonor their responsibilities to the job, to the people, and to the Constitution.
Loyalty, not merit, is what Trump values. But why would he appoint so many spectacularly unqualified loyalists to such important positions?
It is baffling unless the goal is to tear down democracy by deconstructing the public services of the government.
Democratic Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, a retired Army National Guard lieutenant colonel and a combat veteran of the Iraq War, wrote in an op-ed for Fox News: “Installing loyalists at the top of the military is the kind of thing autocrats do when they are trying to seize control of government.”
When constitutional guidelines for the military are ignored, our democracy and the nation’s safety are both at risk. America’s autocratic takeover is unfolding just as outlined in the 900 pages of Project 2025, published before the election. We cannot claim ignorance. Trump’s lie was too obvious when he disavowed Project 2025 after its shocking content went public and began to hurt his chances for reelection.
The military brass and former officials who felt a duty to warn us went unheeded. Now Project 2025’s goal to create a “unitary” executive branch by expanding the power of the presidency is being implemented at breakneck speed.
The lower courts of the judiciary branch have tried to curb these excesses of the executive branch, but their decisions keep being overturned or put on hold by Trump-appointed Supreme Court justices. Even the Supreme Court no longer has the final say of what is against the law. The day Trump ignored a Supreme Court order to halt deportations to El Salvador was the day he stabbed the rule of law through the heart.
We have a duty as decent people to speak out against hurting the most vulnerable, “the least of these.” We must speak out against bulldozing the homeless, revoking the protected status of asylum seekers, ignoring due process for immigrants, cutting services to children, the elderly, and veterans, and using the military to police civilians.
We have a duty to our country to speak out against selling America’s premier public services for profit, destabilizing international relations, crippling American businesses with wild tariff swings, driving small farmers out of business, and redistributing wealth from the working and middle class to the wealthiest Americans.
A society that provides more for the rich and less for working families is not sustainable.
We are already saturated with inequality. Further transfers of wealth to the top one percent—as permitted by what Trump calls the “Big Beautiful Bill,” which Republicans recently rammed through Congress over the objections of Democrats— will tilt the system so far out of balance we may not be able to recover.
Let’s restore the balance, voters. Vote out “unbalanced” Republicans at the next opportunity, and—in the meantime—write, email, and call their offices to express your displeasure with the unfair actions they take.