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The American Bill of Rights (picture that I took of a copy of the Bill of Rights, not the original)
Independence Hall in Philadelphia, PA
"Our constitution, written by our founders, is intended to protect us against a threat identical to Donald Trump.”
~ Former Vice President Al Gore, speech during San Francisco Climate Week, April 2025
It feels a bit bizarre right now. The United States is about to celebrate the 250th anniversary of independence, or the birth of the nation.
Yet, we now have a government that looks and feels more tyrannical than the one which that the rebels/patriots declared independence from in the first place a quarter of a millennium ago. Indeed, much of the language used in describing tyrants in the Declaration of Independence seems to fit our current president with astonishing and eerie accuracy.
In fact, the Founding Fathers seem to have predicted that an all-American, homegrown tyrant would be inevitable at some point in our history. Indeed, the provisions which they wrote to try to prevent one - and to try and get rid of one if such a tyrant did gain power - betrayed this seeming vision of a potentially dangerous future.
Now here we are. We have a filthy rich and incompetent man-child in charge, with a false sense of entitlement and an insatiable appetite for both displays of appreciation to honor his own greatness and attempts to forever grab more power and more power and more power. To those ends, this man has basically acted as if the Constitutional restrictions on the office of the president and the traditional balance of powers between the branches of government are merely suggestions, as opposed to laws with consequences for violating them. In short, he seems to rule as if he were immune from any kind of checks and balances on his power and actions.
Steve Schmidt, who has become quite a vocal critic of Trumpism and the Mindless MAGA Moron cult, recently wrote an interesting piece. In it, he suggests that the Founding Fathers saw the threat of someone like Trump as far back as 1776.
That is why they broke free from one tyrants and then tried to design a system of government to minimize the risks of falling under another untrustworthy tyrant. Reflecting on some of the words of the Declaration of Independence, Schmidt writes:
Overgrown rich men will be improper to be trusted.
This sentence escapes the confines of its own time.
Not trusting "overgrown rich men" with tremendous power?
What a concept, eh?
If only we remembered our history before giving away so much of our power - and our country - to men like Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
Schmidt continues:
The founders understood something that modern America has forgotten.
Liberty isn’t threatened first by foreign armies. It’s threatened by concentrations of power. By fortunes that become governments. By wealth that purchases obedience. By ambition unrestrained by virtue.
They knew that republics die when public office becomes private property.
Look around.
The overgrown rich men have smashed through every restraint they once denounced.
We live in a strange age. If our society was perhaps a bit too gullible and believed in government officials too much in the 1950's and early 1960's, during an age of conformity, we seem to have gone to another extreme altogether these days. But this one feels more extreme, and it is fixated on cynicism.
Yet, many people themselves seem also to prove that there really is something to the Dunning-Kruger effect. Because these people are cynical about the wrong things, while conveniently turning a blind eye to a hell of a lot of things which they should be paying attention to and expressing extreme cynicism towards.
Like the blatant corruption of the Trump administration, the naked grab for power and the raw violations of the Constitution and the rule of law which they have made so routine as to effectively normalize them.
Yes, on some level, I can understand laughing off dire warnings when they seem overblown. But by now, if you fail to see tyranny and dictatorial leanings in Trump's governing style, you simply are either not paying attention, not being honest, or not being objective. Or, frankly, perhaps you are just too stupid to see it.
The criminality, frankly, of this administration is off the charts. We have seen controversies and violations of norms and even laws with other presidential administrations of the past. But this administration makes things like Watergate and the Iran Contra Scandal and Whitewater and Enron look like amateur hour. This current administration so systematically goes to the most brutal extremes in blatant corruption and criminal conduct and presidential overreach that it can figuratively make your head spin.
Again, here is what Schmidt says:
They’ve knocked down parts of the White House to satisfy vanity. They’ve vandalized the National Mall in service of spectacle. They’ve treated the public treasury as though it were their inheritance. They’ve sold public lands held in trust for generations. They’ve replaced public service with self-enrichment. They’ve desecrated nearly every understanding of liberty, while mocking the sacrifices that preserved it.
They’ve transformed patriotism into branding. Citizenship into consumption. Government into grievance — and they’ve demanded applause while doing it.
This isn’t merely corruption. It’s desecration.
Yes, this current version of patriotism feels like it is designed specifically as a test to see whether or not you are on board with Dear Leader President Donald Trump. It feels like a test of sorts. And you can bet that they mean to follow up on that test. If you fail, they will go to whatever lengths they can to get back at you. After all, this man campaigned, at least in part, on vengeance against his political opponents. And he has also made a point of cutting funding to blue states which did not vote for him. The fact that this has been done in a breathtakingly petty manner only serves as a distraction, because it makes all of this feel unreal.
Unfortunately, all of this really is happening.
As Schmidt tells us, it should serve as a warning. This feels like a cycle, with some clear patterns repeating. Schmidt continues:
Their warning has reached us.
The question is whether we will finally listen.
The Republic has never belonged to overgrown rich men.
It belongs to free citizens — if they can keep it.
Indeed.
Let us remember that while all of this may feel new to us, the issues most certainly are not. What we are seeing is abuse of power, tyranny, undermining average citizens in favor of a new, ruling elite class. Elites who do not apparently appreciate that there are documents which legally limit their power, and which they are wiping their feet on.
We are no powerless, even if it sometimes feels hopeless. To that end, we can do worse than turn to those in 1776 who also famously fought a real struggle to rid themselves of tyrannical rule.
It is time for us to remember the lessons from our own history.
Below are the links to the Steve Schmidt piece which got me on this topic, as well as an article about Al Gore's speech, when he warned that Trump poses exactly that kind of threat that the Founding Fathers were warning the country about. The two articles seemed related in some ways, and so I kind of used them both, to a degree. Take a look for yourself:
1776 saw Trump coming Steve Schmidt Jun 26, 2026 June 26, 1776. A broadsheet circulated through the streets of Philadelphia. It was a warning. It was a demand. It was an argument about power before America had become America.
https://steveschmidt.substack.com/p/1776-saw-trump-coming?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=836444&post_id=203701699&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=k1e0a&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
1776 saw Trump coming - The Warning with Steve Schmidt
Al Gore Attacks Trump in Fiery Speech, Says He Sees Parallels to Early Nazi Germany for This Reason "Our constitution, written by our founders, is intended to protect us against a threat identical to Donald Trump,” the former vice president said in a pointed speech at San Francisco Climate Week Meredith Kile Wed, 23 April 2025 at 4:39 pm GMT-4
https://sg.news.yahoo.com/al-gore-attacks-trump-fiery-203945768.html
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