Three Branches, One Lame, One Blind

United States citizens are having a terrible time. Democracy isn’t working. We’ve done everything we were supposed to do, but nothing’s happened. 

To begin with, the voting process went all wrong, and it had nothing to do with election fraud. It had something to do with us. Although elections are the major sinew connecting citizens to their government, many of us decided to abstain this time around because we were fed up. 

A cowpoke has a recalcitrant horse, so what does he do? Teach it a lesson by letting go of the reins? The last of the horse that cowpoke will see is its posterior dorsum. But that is exactly what millions of American voters decided to do in 2024: express their disapproval of the assemblage of posterior dorsa in Washington D.C. by not voting. That would send a clear message to Washington. It did. That Washington could ignore them. Which it is doing now. Surprise.

But voting didn’t work out very well for those of us who did show up at the polls. Things called misinformation and disinformation were out there on social media just waiting to brainwash us, but all the stuff we saw was true. In fact, we saw and heard so much true stuff that we felt rather smug about how well informed we were. We scrolled through a thousand posts a day just to keep up. We reposted the important ones. The picture that emerged was so clear and so urgent that we grew impatient when anyone disagreed with us. We should have known better. Crystal clear pictures indicate distortion. Reality is never crystal clear.

For better or worse, we engaged in our primary citizen action: voting our conscience just as we had always been told to do. But it didn’t seem to matter. The congresspeople begging for our votes in 2024 ignored us in 2025, while newly inaugurated President Donald Trump let it be known that his mandate empowered him to do whatever he wanted. In other words, now that he had gotten back in there, he could ignore us, too.

Juggernaut Trump was acting on his mandate to save the country. Apparently no Congress, constitution, law, or statute was going to keep him from doing it, either.

A surfeit of queer, highly disorienting things began happening right away. Executive orders decreeing sweeping change flew at us thick and fast, not infrequently very late at night. A slew of inspectors general was fired, also late at night. Emergencies were declared no one suspected existed. Tariffs were imposed against stalwart trading partners. Migrants were rounded up from places of work, schools, churches. Juggernaut Trump was acting on his mandate to save the country. Apparently no Congress, constitution, law, or statute was going to keep him from doing it, either.

Part of his mandate involved giving his largest donor, Elon Musk, the keys to the Federal government, its revenues, its processes, and its citizens to rid the country of waste. With presidential authorization, Musk’s Doge boys went right to work dismantling federal agencies and firing staff. When faced with opposition, they were not shy about physically confronting personnel and breaking into offices. They breached computer systems and crawled without embarrassment through the private data of American citizens on the lookout for fishy things. And they were successful. They found so much fishy stuff they realized it all had to go. Elon agreed. The Doge boys were up for that. They were ready. To rid the government of its waste all they had to do was to delete the government records on which millions of livelihoods depended. The Doge boys knew how to do that. It would be quick, easy, fun. 

The country was aghast. Each day, we heard more about the progress of the two madmen intent for some reason on vandalizing, ransacking, and demolishing the bedrock of our lives, our government. We also paid close attention as constitutional scholars, legal experts, former federal higher-ups, and respected pundits let us know that it was “probable” or “likely” that most of the president’s actions were illegal, unconstitutional, or — something new — anti-constitutional.¹

Although highly alarmed, we were law-abiding citizens who respected our government. And we knew to some degree how democracy works. We had been taught to trust it to turn its mighty wheels to right itself. After all, we had just voted. Our part of the bargain was done. It was up to the legislative branch, those lawmakers we had just elected,² to prevent a clumsy, rapacious, or misguided executive (it was irrelevant what Trump’s motives were) from bypassing congressional authority, our statutes, our laws. 

Dutifully we waited. But instead of any action, protest, or objection to the devastation going on, that dyspeptic body began making weird noises that, after a mere week, harmonized into a chorus of praise for a president courageous enough to strip them of their power.

With a lame legislative branch on our hands, we voters kicked into citizen action phase two: phones calls — yes! — that paralyzed the D.C. switchboard;³ letters and email that appeared to drop down a well; and those all-important, real-time, face-to-face town halls to express our dissatisfaction, which . . . Republican lawmakers refused to attend, which told us very clearly that we were right in thinking something was wrong. We also now knew they knew something was wrong, and we knew they weren’t going to do anything about the problem, Juggernaut Trump, who ravaged on. 

Sadly, we had learned during the Biden administration that our civil agitation against, for example, Israel’s assault on Gaza, had zero effect on federal policy.

Citizen action phase three! Participate in public protests and demonstrations all across the country to save, for example, Social Security. Sadly, we had learned during the Biden administration that our civil agitation against, for example, Israel’s assault on Gaza, had zero effect on federal policy. We had also learned that the laws had been tweaked. Protesting for Palestinian rights was no longer civil disobedience, we found out, but terrorism. We got doxxed, arrested, some of us incarcerated. 

But the strangeness of this new administration worsened beyond anything we had ever experienced.

Mahmoud Khalil was disappeared by federal agents on the evening of March 8, a Saturday evening. It took over 24 hours for his family to find out he was being held in a privately owned ICE detention center in Louisiana noted by human rights organizations for its medical neglect and incidents of physical and sexual assault.⁴⁵ They learned he had been slated for deportation because of his engagement in pro-Palestinian protests in 2024, which the White House maintained had “adverse foreign policy consequences.” Yes, Trump had just blitzed his way across another battlefield in his crusade to save the country as we all watched, clueless about what was really going on.

Sadistic stuff started happening. The Trump team snuck hundreds of migrants off to a maximum security prison in El Salvador, releasing clips showing the men shackled, getting their heads shaved, and shuffled off to places where things would happen we would never hear about. When challenged, Trump team couldn’t even tell us who the men were, except that they were dangerous gang members, something those aware of their family member’s abduction vigorously denied. One of the disappeared turned out to be a professional soccer player. Oh, well . . . 

Things were going too fast now. Trump had reached ramming speed. Our heads were spinning. Mild-mannered citizens were choking on their impotence. There was talk of disappearing the Department of Education. What to do? Was there a citizen action phase four? Form militias? Take up Tasers? Slingshots? Spitballs?

In swept, thank God, the blind branch of government, the judiciary. Yes, all these miserable issues had been grinding their way slowly through the courts, with judges finding the executive branch at fault time after time and courts issuing temporary restraining orders, injunctions, demands that planes be turned back, requests that documentation and explanations be presented, and an order that a kidney transplant specialist not be deported.⁶ All ignored. It was just so many sparks flying between Trump’s blade and his whetstone.

Rather than heed the judiciary, Trump crossed swords with more executive orders, this time targeting law firms, attorneys, the courts themselves. One wayward judge should be impeached for ruling against Trump’s Venezuelan maneuver, the president posted. He called out individual lawyers by name as being threats to the American public.⁷ In airing his ire, Trump knew full well that his boys were standing back and standing by. Anyone he might name exposed them to uncertain dangers from his unpredictable, wrathful loyalists. If something awful didn’t happen to those vulnerable professionals, at least they’d be soaked in sweat waiting, a consideration that assuaged to some degree our frenetic chief executive.

We are watching the chase. We see the widening gap between hare and tortoise.

We citizens have yet to see if the judiciary will persist in its defiance of Trump’s lawlessness, undaunted by his attacks. But to what purpose? We are watching the chase. We see the widening gap between hare and tortoise. Unhampered by shame or moral compunction, hard-bitten Trump scampers ahead, trampling everything in his path while the scrupulous courts lumber further and further behind. A democracy with rules and processes, procedures and conventions, with due process, for heaven’s sake, cannot keep up. 

Should the legal system finally prevail, what will be left to save? Our venerable federal agencies, delicate honeycombs of legislation, real estate, funding, knowledge, expertise, intellectual property, procedures, databases — not to mention the trust of the people they once ministered to and the dedication of the professionals who served — will be as irretrievable as the soul of the porcupine caribou currently being sacrificed to another Trump emergency, a national energy emergency declared in order to invade the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to save the country. As we pick through the wreckage years from now, what will haunt us forever is the echo of saucy El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s mocking post: Oopsie. Too late.

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1. “An anti-constitutional act is one that rejects the basic premises of constitutionalism. It rejects the premise that sovereignty lies with the people, that ours is a government of limited and enumerated powers and that the officers of that government are bound by law.” https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/19/opinion/trump-musk-constitutional-unconstitutional.html ↩︎
2. Chevron Corporation and Charles Koch may have millions to donate to political campaigns, but we provide the single and necessary element to put them in office, the votes, God help us. ↩︎
3. It is questionable whether paralyzing the switchboard is an effective way to go since it means our calls don’t get through. The government could easily attribute the onslaught of calls to overzealous carpetbaggers. ↩︎
4. https://rfkhumanrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Cortes-De-La-Valle-Daniel_FTCA_Redacted.pdf ↩︎
5. https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/trump-arrest-detention-mahmoud-khalil/ ↩︎
6. “[Customs and Border Protection] questioned Dr. Alawieh and determined that her true intentions in the United States could not be determined,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Sady wrote in a court filing Monday. https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/17/rasha-alawieh-deportation-026038 ↩︎
7. “The lawyer Marc Elias was singled out by President Trump in a new memorandum that threatens to use government power to punish any law firms that, in his view, unfairly challenge his administration.”
   https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/22/us/politics/trump-memo-lawyers.html ↩︎