President Donald Trump and his administration -- especially with the help of Elon Musk -- are creating an inflection point in the centuries-old ebb and flow of freedom and tyranny.
What makes Trump’s barrage of action since even before taking office as America’s 47th President so brilliant -- and effective -- is that he and the team of patriotic disruptors he has assembled are using government power for good to combat government power for corruption.
We are privileged to be watching in real time a moment when the forces for freedom fight back and defeat the growth of tyranny, at least for a while.
There have been several significant moments in our history of Anglo-American law based in Judeo-Christian principles that inform us about what’s happening.
When we hear people talk about the rule of law, our American system of law begins with a fundamental and paramount law governing government itself, the Constitution. Sure, the rule of law applies to people, but without a rule of law over government itself we have tyranny.
Our treasured history of liberty dating back to Magna Carta shows that the law was best used to control government. Magna Carta is celebrated precisely because it is a law over government itself, implemented for “our salvation” because it protected individual liberty by governing government.
Now, for over 100 years since the rise of the Progressive movement American government has used its power to grow government. With that growth and the aggrandizement of power in government came not merely incidental corruption and graft, but institutionalized lawbreaking by government.
Trump and his team of patriotic disruptors know this.
In 2011, Richard A. Viguerie and I wrote The Law That Governs Government, which is the Constitution. Trump is addressing the very same problems (and now worse!) we identified, but is using a tactic that far exceeds our humbler solution.
We conservatives should applaud his approach, even as we monitor it for potential or eventual abuses by the Left.
Here’s how we opened The Law That Governs Government:
Government is the oldest, largest and most pervasive lawbreaker in America.
Lawbreaking by government in terms of cost and the number of people victimized is of a scale unmatched by any other organization or group -- leaving nothing as a close second.
Government has injected itself into nearly every aspect of private affairs, and has taken an excessive, intrusive and omnipotent view of what are public matters. Given the vast and unilateral authority it claims to have over so much of society and property, government has unmatched opportunity for lawbreaking. It makes and rigs the rules in its favor. It cloisters and covers up its lawlessness, and makes it almost impossible to challenge its lawbreaking when exposed.
Government lawbreaking is bringing down the greatest and fairest engine of prosperity in history -- the American economy. Political establishment lawbreaking is economically and morally rotting America from within.
The political establishment is now openly contemptuous and arrogant in its high-profile lawbreaking. After all, who’s going to prevent the government from breaking the law? The government has more resources, and is bigger and more powerful than any of its victims. Plus, it has what private lawbreakers do not have: the power to control and change the rules of the game, and with penalties of law on its side.
Government has become a bully to the very people it is supposed to protect and keep free.
In addition to its lawbreaking that takes place in the open, there is the cloistered lawbreaking done by anonymous bureaucrats and in backroom deals by public officials. Government transparency is mostly a fiction. We see and know only what government wants us to.
The irony is that government lawbreaking is done mostly under the guise and misnomer of the rule of law. The law has become one big slap in the face to all Americans.
Trump is fighting fire with fire, using government power to attack government power, and it is sheer joy to witness. Meanwhile Democrats and the corrupt Administrative State are learning that if you live by the sword, you can die by the sword.
Trump’s actions have made Democrats defend the corrupt status quo. Activist Democrat judges hearing injunctive challenges are taking the “conservative” (small “c”) approach of slowing down the change. This will eventually lead to some landmark Supreme Court decisions about the separation of powers, the role of the courts, the constitutional authority of the executive branch, and how to tame and put the Leviathan Administrative State in its proper place.
Constitutionalists are swooning.
All the while, Trump and his 21st Century band of Runnymede battlefield knights and keyboard warriors continue to expose the rot and lawbreaking within American government at dizzying speed.
Nearly at age 250, America still has some discovering to do about liberty and its rule of law over government, it seems.
2024 Election
government shutdown
Democrats
DOGE Department of Government Efficiency
FACA
Deep State
Mass deportation
tariffs
U.S. trade
trade partners
trade agreements
free trade
labor and environmental practices
foreign subsidies
manufacturing goods