Listening to Democrats and legacy media (and the bot swarm on social media) over the last several weeks, I’ve been told that Donald Trump is changing America to fit his vision. He is, according to yet another rogue judge, attacking law firms he “doesn’t like.” US District Judge Beryl Howell (DC) just issued a permanent injunction barring the enforcement of any part of Trump’s order targeting the law firm Perkins Coie on the grounds that it constituted “an unprecedented attack” on the US judicial system. Such actions make Trump an authoritarian, and his presidency a cult of personality.
They never say that Trump is changing America to fit the vision of tens of millions of Americans who voted for him (rhetorical question: does the popular will mean anything?)—who moreover stand on the shoulders of the hundreds of millions of Americans who came before them who wanted an America based on this vision. They don’t admit that, after a coordinated judicial effort—an unprecedented instance of lawfare against the leader of a broad and diverse social movement—to throw a former president in prison for his natural life and that it was the electorate who reelected him to a second term as President.
In many ways, what Trump is doing, as Abraham Lincoln before him, is restoring the founding vision of America, embodied in our Constitution and its Bill of Rights. What is that vision? Limited government rooted in democratic-republicanism and classical (deontological) liberal principles.
Abraham Lincoln first appeared as a presidential candidate in 1860. He was nominated by the Republican Party and went on to win the election and become the sixteenth President of the United States. His campaign focused heavily on halting the expansion of slavery into new territories. After Democrats, representing the slavocracy, attacked the Union, Lincoln and Republicans went to war with Democrats. Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus to deal with Confederate sympathizers and threats to the Union. Lincoln signed legislation that expropriated the property of slave owners.
Lincoln is not the only president to suspend habeas corpus. Ulysses S. Grant, a Union general in the Civil War, suspended the writ of habeas corpus to suppress violence in South Carolina, allowing federal troops to arrest Democrats engaged in terrorism without judicial review. Moreover, Grant continued and expanded on expropriatory policies initiated under Lincoln after the war. He used federal power to suppress Democrat resistance and protect the rights of formerly enslaved people, which necessitated arrests, military intervention, and property seizures.
Can you hear Southern Democrats, representing the slavocracy, saying that Lincoln wanted to change Americas to fit his vision? Can you hear them saying that this made him an authoritarian and his presidency a cult of personality? I can. Of course I can. So can you. Democrats didn’t say that Lincoln and Grant were representing the will of the people who wanted to see an end of slavery and the enlargement and entrenchments of civil rights embedded in the Constitutional scheme. Why would they make their opponents’ arguments for them? They could only be expected to portray Lincoln and Grant as authoritarians and personality cults.
“The past is prologue.” Ever heard that powerful phrase? It originates from Shakespeare’s The Tempest (Act 2, Scene 1). It’s etched into the base of the National Archives Building in Washington, DC, there symbolizing that understanding history is essential to informed citizenship and governance. In the context of Lincoln, Grant, and the suspension of rights during national crises, the phrase conveys past uses of executive power sets precedents for future actions—patterns of federal intervention echo in modern policy debates and political struggles. The purpose of federal authority reverberates in American law and politics today.
In Ancient Greece, in the tradition of Hippocratic medicine, the term crisis (krisis) was used to describe the turning point in a disease—the turning point when the patient would either recover or die. It was a moment of critical decision in the body. We have reached a turning point. It’s not the first in our history. The Civil War was a critical decision in the body politic. Either the America Republic recovered or died. The actions Lincoln took during the crisis saved the Republic.
Lincoln’s actions serve as a template for resolving the present crisis. The President’s authority affirmed the Founder’s wisdom in creating a strong national government with an Executive whose Article II powers gives the office wide latitude to act to preserve the republic and represent the Will of the People. Trump’s election represents the popular will that Democrats and the legacy media obscure, decrying his actions as authoritarian, and his popularity a cult of personality.
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency was transformational, reshaping the role of the US government and its impact on American society. His New Deal programs—Social Security, the WPA, the FDIC—addressed the economic devastation of the Great Depression, creating a social safety net and regulatory framework that continue to influence the nation today. FDR also expanded the power of the presidency, using emergency powers during both the Depression and World War II, thus setting new precedents for federal involvement in domestic and international affairs.
Roosevelt’s leadership during WWII, which transformed the US into a global superpower, solidified his legacy as one of the most influential presidents in American history. Democrats will tell you this themselves. Indeed, they celebrate it. In their eyes, Roosevelt was no authoritarian. And although he transformed the country in a way the Founders would not have accepted, he nonetheless represented the popular will in that moment, albeit deranged by world economic crisis.
The President’s constitutional authority properly exercised is not an expression of authoritarianism. To characterize appropriate actions as a cult of personality is a propagandistic effort to delegitimize the office. When this effort is aggressive and comprehensive, carried out by a judiciary exceeding their constitutional authority, the administrative apparatus (and its deep state), and the Fourth Estate, it tells us that a fraction of the capitalist class, the corporate oligarchy and its transnationalist ambition, is at war with the People. That’s the real source of the crisis the body politic must overcome.
Perkins Coie commissioned the Steele dossier during the 2016 presidential campaign. Hired by Perkins Coie on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, the research firm Fusion GPS, and subsequently former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, compiled a dossier alleging connections between Trump and Russia. Howell supervised federal grand juries for the Mueller special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections, an investigation initiated on the basis of the Steele dossier.
The Steele dossier, ridiculous on its face, an obvious instance of lawfare waged not only against Trump but the American people, has been widely discredited. The dossier absurdly claimed links between Donald Trump and the Russian government, including allegations of collusion and compromising material. Investigations by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the Department of Justice Inspector General—found that many of its core claims were unverified or false. The DOJ’s Inspector General found that the FBI relied on the dossier when seeking surveillance warrants. Thus we have the Democratic Party and the deep state, working with Perkins Coie, engaged in a disinformation campaign to derail an American president.
In March 2025, Trump issued Executive Order 14230, revoking the security clearances of attorneys at Perkins Coie, barring them from federal buildings, and seeking to terminate government contracts with its clients. The order accused the firm of “dishonest and dangerous activity,” including undermining democratic elections. The factual basis of the EO is accurate. Perkins Coie challenged the order in federal court, arguing it was an unconstitutional act of retaliation against the firm’s representation of clients opposing the administration.
The Trump administration is the democratically elected government of the United States. By issuing a permanent injunction against Trump’s EO, Judge Howell is once again performing a central role in defending agents working to undermine American democracy. It is not in only these two instances that Howell has performed this role. Howell also supervised investigations into alleged attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election. These alleged attempts were in fact efforts to determine the integrity of the US elections, which are widely viewed as fraudulent. Howell needs to be removed from office.
freedom and reason 