Some years chip away at freedom. Others tear the mask off.
2025 was the year the government stopped pretending it was constrained by the Constitution—when executive power expanded openly and unapologetically, surveillance became ambient, dissent became dangerous, and the machinery of militarized government embedded itself into daily life.
Under Trump 2.0, the erosion of civil liberties gave way to something more brazen: the dismantling of constitutional government itself.
What made 2025 different was not any single abuse of power, but the relentless accumulation of them. The losses mounted week by week, crisis by crisis, executive order by executive order, until exhaustion itself became a political condition.
Outrage no longer led to accountability; it simply rolled into the next emergency.
What follows is not a list of grievances or a catalogue of partisan disputes. It is a record of the year freedom lost its guardrails—and of a nation torn apart from within by the very individuals and institutions entrusted with preventing such tyranny.
Donald J. Trump entered his second term promising revenge, retribution, and sweeping transformation. In that regard, he has been utterly successful.
Where he has failed—spectacularly—is in honoring his oath of office to protect and defend the Constitution. He has failed to represent all of the people, opting instead to serve only those interests that inflate his ego and advance his personal and financial ambitions. He has failed to unite the country behind any shared civic vision, choosing instead to deepen divisions through rhetoric and policies that inflame hatred, entrench discrimination, and normalize cruelty. Racism was emboldened, bigotry encouraged, misogyny amplified, and corruption reframed as governance. Authoritarian instincts were no longer masked; they were embraced.
From the outset, Trump treated the Constitution not as a governing framework but as an obstacle—something to be maneuvered around, ignored, or rewritten by executive fiat. Indeed, he signed more executive orders in his first month than any other president had signed in their first 100 days.
The warning signs appeared immediately.
Within days of his inauguration, the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights disappeared from the White House website. While the administration later insisted the documents would be restored, the timing and symbolism were impossible to ignore—especially as executive orders poured out at a pace designed to bypass the very rule of law those documents exist to preserve.
Almost immediately thereafter, Trump declared two national states of emergency, announced his intention to disregard the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship, established new federal agencies without congressional authorization, and pushed for an expansion of the death penalty.
Constitutional boundaries were not merely tested; they were treated as optional.
At the same time, the presidential pardon—intended as a tool of mercy—was transformed into a currency of loyalty. Political allies and insiders were shielded from accountability, signaling that allegiance to the president now mattered more than fidelity to the law.
Economic governance followed the same pattern. Trump unilaterally launched tariff wars against longstanding trade partners, seizing Congress’s power of the purse and throwing already fragile markets into turmoil.
Constitutional process was no longer a prerequisite for national policy; presidential will was sufficient.
Immigration enforcement soon revealed just how far the rule of law had eroded. Despite campaign promises to target violent offenders, Immigration and Customs Enforcement expanded dragnet-style raids that swept up undocumented immigrants with no criminal history. In a calculated effort to evade judicial review and human rights obligations, detainees were secretly flown out of the country to foreign prisons beyond the reach of U.S. courts. Kilmar Garcia, a Maryland man with deep family and community ties, became the public face of the government’s approach to immigration that treated due process as expendable and exile as administrative convenience.
As public opposition mounted, the government’s response was not restraint but force. The National Guard was deployed first to Washington, D.C., and then increasingly to states across the country, under the pretext of addressing crime and unrest. Civil liberties organizations warned that the line between civilian law enforcement and military occupation was rapidly disappearing.
The administration pressed on regardless.
By this point, the nation was teetering on the brink of a constitutional crisis. The president openly embraced the notion that “I have the right to do whatever I want as president.” The vice president echoed the belief that the executive should be effectively unaccountable to the other branches. Meanwhile, a Republican-controlled Congress appeared willfully blind—ceding its constitutional responsibilities in the face of brazen executive overreach.
Abroad, constitutional limits collapsed just as readily.
The United States, favoring Israel, carried out preemptive military strikes against Iranian nuclear sites without congressional authorization. Drone strikes escalated in Yemen. Civilian boats were targeted under the banner of counterterrorism and drug interdiction. Trump openly threatened land invasions of Venezuela.
The Founders’ fear of a standing army turned inward—and war powers exercised without consent—was no longer theoretical. It had become standard operating procedure.
Domestic tragedy did nothing to slow this consolidation of power. Crisis after crisis was folded into an ever-expanding rationale for centralized control, rather than prompting accountability, restraint, or reflection.
By midyear, even the machinery of government itself was being dismantled. Under the banner of “efficiency,” the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) began shuttering agencies and hacking away at public services. In practice, the initiative cost taxpayers more than it saved, hollowed out institutional expertise, and left Americans with fewer protections and fewer remedies.
The government became less capable of serving the public—and more capable of policing it.
At the same time, the surveillance state reached a new level of sophistication and reach. Government agencies consolidated financial records, biometric identifiers, communications metadata, travel histories, and online behavior into centralized intelligence systems, often facilitated by private contractors such as Palantir. Artificial intelligence tools generated risk scores and predictive profiles, flagging individuals not for crimes committed, but for behaviors, associations, and speech deemed suspicious.
The presumption of innocence gave way to the logic of pre-crime.
Courts increasingly refused to intervene. Again and again, constitutional challenges were dismissed on procedural grounds, with judges ruling that Americans lacked “standing” to challenge secret surveillance systems precisely because the government refused to disclose how those systems worked. Rights that cannot be challenged are rights in name only.
What became unmistakably clear in 2025 was that presidential misconduct is no longer treated as an aberration, but as an occupational hazard the system has learned to tolerate. Once in office, presidents are functionally insulated from meaningful accountability—shielded by partisan loyalty, procedural delay, and judicial deference.
The message could not be clearer: the higher the office, the lower the likelihood of consequences. This is not a failure of any single investigation or prosecutor. It is a structural failure that has trained executive power to act with impunity, confident that the law will bend, stall, or look away.
Due process eroded accordingly.
Habeas corpus—the oldest safeguard of liberty—lost meaning as Americans were detained first and forced to justify their innocence later. Political speech itself was increasingly treated as a public-safety risk.
Incarceration, meanwhile, became national infrastructure. The administration advanced a $170 billion expansion of the prison system, including new megafacilities such as “Alligator Alcatraz.” Predictive policing systems fed people into the system at the front end, while bureaucratic cruelty defined life inside it.
Justice became mechanical, impersonal, and deliberately unforgiving.
Federalism collapsed in parallel. Local police forces were federalized in practice if not in name. National Guard units were commandeered. Federal enforcement authority expanded into states and cities once shielded from centralized power. The balance between local self-governance and federal authority—one of the Constitution’s most important safeguards—was steadily erased.
Oversight mechanisms fared no better. Inspectors General were sidelined. Congressional subpoenas were ignored. Whistleblowers were punished rather than protected. Transparency collapsed as Freedom of Information Act requests were delayed, denied, or buried. Routine documents were classified. Internal communications vanished.
A government that hides everything cannot be trusted with anything.
Much of this power was exercised indirectly. Core government functions—surveillance, incarceration, border enforcement, data analysis—were outsourced to private corporations immune from constitutional constraints. This corporate shadow state allowed the government to violate rights by proxy, then disclaim responsibility by insisting the Constitution did not apply.
By year’s end, even the machinery of democracy itself showed visible strain. Extreme gerrymandering, voter-roll purges, selective enforcement of election laws, and the targeting of political opponents weakened the people’s ability to choose their representatives.
The Constitution guarantees every state a republican form of government. In 2025, that promise rang hollow.
None of this happened overnight. That is the point.
The damage was cumulative, calculated, and exhausting by design. The goal was not merely to expand power, but as I make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, to normalize its abuse, to wear the public down until resistance felt futile.
2025 showed us what unchecked power looks like when it no longer feels the need to pretend.
The question for 2026 is not whether this trajectory will continue, but whether the American people will reassert the constitutional limits that make freedom possible—before those limits disappear entirely.
Source: https://tinyurl.com/5dbxwj4r
ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at [email protected]. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.
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