Declaration of Lawlessness

In the last 24 hours, Trump’s regime has lost all semblance of a constitutional government.

The Trump regime has crossed the final threshold: it now openly declares itself above the law—domestically and internationally. In the last 24 hours, Trump turned the White House into a royal court, threatened Chicago with military assault, and his heir apparent renounced the Geneva Conventions.

American Hofstaat

Last night, Donald Trump debuted his new “Rose Garden Club” at the White House for his most loyal sycophants and gave an unhinged speech that provided no illusions about Trump’s cognitive and psychological decline or his determination to create a full personalist dictatorship.

“We call it the Rose Garden Club. And it's a club for senators, for Congress people…”

“I want to reward the people that have confidence in their president, have confidence in you and vote for us.”

The Rose Garden Club is not just political cronyism, it is a psychological feeding tube—an engineered space where Trump can harvest loyalty to sustain his collapsing psyche.

This is open quid pro quo for fealty to the leader in the Rose Garden, a symbol of American democracy for decades. It represents a total inversion of the “People’s House,” a phrase used for more than two centuries to describe the White House, into a royal, monarchist court.

Hitler’s Hofstaat—Hitler’s Court—was his personal circle of friends that he invited to the Reich Chancellery or to his personal retreat in Berghof. Invitations to be part of Hofstaat events were a sign of power for his inner circle, and a way for Hitler to control those around him. If you were left off the list, your prospects were dim.

Trump’s takeover of the White House includes closing the East Wing, including canceling all public tours of the building—so he can create a gilded ballroom. By contrast, here is what Michelle Obama said about the White House.

2014: “The White House is known as ‘The People's House’—and since 2009, the Obama administration has made that nickname truer than ever before for millions of guests by opening the White House to as many Americans as possible.”

2015: “While our family might live upstairs, the president and I know that the White House **is truly the People's House. It belongs to all of us, and it should reflect and celebrate the very best in us.”

Donald Trump’s psyche is in full narcissistic rupture. He is failing at nearly everything, including silencing the Epstein survivors with a military flyover. The “Rose Garden Club” represents another source of narcissistic fuel in a world increasingly horrified by his behavior.

Chipocalypse Now

In the “Rose Garden Club,” Trump said this about his federal takeover and militarization of Washington DC, and plans to invade Chicago and other cities.

“So we have the safest place, Washington, DC and we'll be going to other cities to help out. Preferably, we'd like to be asked, but in some cases that just won't happen…

You're safer there than you are in Chicago at night. But we're going to make Chicago like this... A couple of headaches like murders, a lot of little murders going on, and we're not going to stand for it. And we're going to come in, we're going to clean it up. You're going to be safe within two weeks. That's going to be the safest place.”

Buoyed by his fresh supply of sycophantic praise, this morning Trump posted this on Truth Social—perhaps his most sadistic, lawless and unconstitutional message yet.

Drawing from the 1979 Francis Ford Coppola war film Apocalypse Now, Trump equates himself with the secondary antagonist in the film, Colonel Kilgore, “an amoral warmonger who actually enjoys the war and calls it home.”

Robert Duvall’s infamous quote “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” is a line designed to show the inhumanity of war. Nevertheless, Trump embraces this image as identity—casting himself as a maniacal warmonger wreaking death on civilians from above.

But perhaps the most dangerous part of his post is his open declaration of war on an American city by the newly renamed “Department of War.” This is a betrayal of everything America was founded on, a confession that Trump intends to execute an unconstitutional and illegal invasion of an American state with US Armed Forces. It is performative tyranny designed to pave the way for the real thing.

War Crime? “I don’t give a shit what you call it”

After Donald Trump openly flaunted the American constitutional order and rule of law domestically, JD Vance ran full speed into the waters of international lawlessness.

After Pete Hegseth murdered 11 people on a speedboat in international waters, the allegation by the regime that they were “narco-terrorists” has been deeply questioned, especially considering drug runners always maximize space for drugs, not people.

In the former official's opinion, it was more likely that the vessel was carrying migrants on a human smuggling run. It would be impossible to know for sure, however, given that any evidence of drug smuggling was destroyed in the attack.

Despite this, JD Vance asserts without evidence that they were “cartel members” who “poison our fellow citizens” and praises the killing. When it is correctly pointed out to the Vice President of the United States that this constitutes a war crime, Vance says:

To say the behavior of the military and the White House is lawless is one thing, but when they openly admit to ignoring the Geneva Convention in public, we’ve reached a different place. We are witnessing a full rupture of both the American constitutional order domestically—and a complete disavowal of the international order established after WWII.

The federal government is at war with the world and the citizens it’s supposed to protect, respecting no boundaries, rules, norms or laws.

We Didn’t Keep It

Ben Franklin famously said after the Constitutional Convention that America was “a republic, if you can keep it.” Unfortunately, we didn’t.

There is no real sense in which the federal government is a legitimate constitutional body anymore. Donald Trump’s regime has consistently transgressed the boundaries of the Constitution to punish those who attempt to enforce the law, and to reward those who would break it in his name.

The spectacle in the Rose Garden, the open declaration of war on a US city by the president and the military, and the flouting of international humanitarian law represents a complete rupture in America’s legitimacy. The government represents a threat to the world and to the American population which in many ways exceeds the threat from the Confederacy in 1860—simply because the Confederates did not control the federal government.

The Confederacy seceded from the Union; this regime has seized the Union itself.

Revolution

As I wrote, John Locke was thought of as the “Philosopher of the Revolution” because he provided the reason for the rule of law, constitutional order, and government.

“the end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom: for…where there is no law, there is no freedom.”

There is no sense in which this government is fulfilling this basic promise. Indeed, Trump’s regime is systematically doing the opposite by reducing freedom through dismantling of the rule of law.

When there is no rule of law, tyranny nearly always fills the void, and this scenario is no different. The liberal democratic order that dominated the world for 80 years has been destroyed by a small group of elites who see democracy as an impediment to their hoarding of power, and a political party that decided to help them in their project because their own ideas had become irrelevant.

The response to such an act of national treason should be nothing short of revolutionary. This is no longer a theoretical or a political situation, it is a matter of national existence.

All three branches of the federal government are corrupt at the very highest levels. The nominal Speaker of the House, theocratic sycophant Mike Johnson, was at the debut of the “Rose Garden Club.” Theocratic Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney-Barrett said two days ago that America is “not in a constitutional crisis” and we should stop worrying so much.

In a way, Coney-Barrett is right, we aren’t in a constitutional crisis. That happened months ago. Now we simply don’t have an operational Constitution—because of the open dismantling of checks and balances by a radical, antidemocratic Roberts Court. The infiltration of SCOTUS has destroyed its legitimacy as an institution by making Donald Trump a king, taking away the rights of Americans, and legitimizing plainly unconstitutional actions.

The Show Goes On

The strange place most Americans find themselves in is that they still live a normal life with no imminent reason to fear—while the federal government has declared war on the Constitution. The lawlessness of the federal government has not yet trickled down to chaos in the streets. This dissociation from what’s going on in the world by most people is understandable. We all have jobs, families, obligations.

Nevertheless, this is coming for all of us. They will intrude on everyone’s lives eventually. It is nothing less than an effort at complete destruction of the American way of life in favor of a fascist dictatorship that only benefits those who get invites to the “Rose Garden Club.”

I have felt this lawlessness on a personal level. The now-Director of the FBI Kash Patel sued me for defamation in Nevada in 2023 as additional harassment to Mike Flynn’s frivolous lawsuit, but never served me with it. I learned online that the case had defaulted to a $250,000 judgement last month, so I hired an attorney in Nevada to move to set the judgement aside and dismiss the case on several grounds, including the fact that everything I said was true.

Kash Patel is a symptom of a disease. A clownish performer in the larger scheme of things but nevertheless a dangerous antidemocratic foreign asset who is dismantling and weaponizing the largest federal law enforcement agency. The fact that he continues to go after an independent journalist is an indication that he’s still worried about the truth.

I choose not to fear these people. I choose to exercise my free speech rights in the face of their attempt to silence and financially destroy me. I choose to wage my own personal revolution against this threat. But talk and legal filings are not going to be enough in a regime that wears its lawlessness on its sleeve.

If law is gone, then only free people remain to act. It will be up to us—together—to end this illegitimate, lawless regime.

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