A Tip from the President Will Do
A rose is a rose is a rose, said Gertrude Stein. In other words, what you call the rose is irrelevant. The rose remains immutable. Not so with justice. Justice is abstract. We capture justice in words, use those words to compose laws, then administer justice based on those laws. But lawmakers can change the words. Judges interpret the words. And lo and behold, justice changes.
The law — and hence justice — is highly mutable. Our laws are subject to the discretion, wisdom, and honesty of those who write and apply them. We must be very careful whom we elect to the offices with authority to write our laws and appoint our judges.
We have not been careful.
In November 2024, we elected an untrustworthy man — a felon convicted just five months earlier of cheating1 — to be U.S. president. Since that time, we have been dismayed to learn what power a felon can marshal as president of our country to adulterate the administration of justice throughout the land.
The list is long. President Donald Trump commits violations daily. But one offense stands above them all. Impeached for it in 2021, he continues to pick away at it now: gutting American democracy. He failed on January 6, 2021, but we reelected him, didn’t we?, and gave him another chance. He’s been hacking away at democracy, truth, justice, and the rule of law ever since.
The more wayward the government, the less likely it will be to heed criticism or tolerate its expression.
Democracy is rule by majority.2 The primary tool of majority rule is the vote. When that fails, citizens have other means to influence a wayward government. They may march, demonstrate, hand out leaflets, conduct vigils, create protest art, sing protest songs, raise community consciousness, impose boycotts. The democratic agency to engage in these activities is guarded in the Bill of Rights, which guarantees not just U.S. citizens, but all U.S. residents the right of free speech and peaceful assembly. Those who disapprove of the government’s conduct or policies may say so publicly and gather with like-minded fellows to thunder their dissent to the skies.
At the heart of any protest, its impetus and raison d’être, is the desire to achieve social or political change. To have any chance of doing so, a protest must be organized. To be effective, it must advance an alternative course to what government policy is pursuing. What is nonnegotiable is how protests are conducted. They must be peaceful, they must be law abiding.
We live in a world of contrary symmetry. The more wayward the government, the less likely it will be to heed criticism or tolerate its expression. To quash criticism, it need merely exercise the authority granted it by the consent of the governed to tweak the legal framework that defines “peaceful” and “law-abiding” to transform protesting citizens into terrorists. For a U.S. president, it’s simple. Trump is doing it now.
As chief executive and commander-in-chief, President Trump instructs a workforce of 4.2 million on how to execute the law of the land his way.
The POTUS47 plan to pilot the country solo, plunder the treasury, tear down the White House, and channel tax revenues to himself and his family got exposed early on by critics. Though inconvenienced by their accusations, Trump had no intention of changing his modus operandi. Instead, he accused them of a traitorous attempt to destroy democracy by attacking him. As chief executive and commander-in-chief, he could make his accusations stick.
President Trump instructs a workforce of 4.2 million3 on how to execute the law of the land his way. To do so, he has two powerful tools: executive orders and presidential memoranda. Should confusion arise over just exactly how to do things Trump’s way, career civil servants can ask their agency’s General Counsel, who will translate Trump’s order into step-by-step procedures for them to follow. Baffled cabinet secretaries can turn to the Office of Cabinet Affairs for clarification. Questions about the legality of an order can be addressed to the Office of Legal Counsel. However, whether low-level employee or agency head, doubters who refuse to follow the president’s directive can be fired.
Of course the president’s orders must conform to the law and the Constitution. And to block what is considered an illegal or unconstitutional executive order someone can sue the administration. Because the hurdle of proving legal standing4 is so high, plaintiffs are often state attorneys general or civil rights groups. But even the scope of a successful suit is limited nowadays. After lower federal judges were stripped of authority to issue nationwide injunctions in June 2025,5 a local federal judge can block an illegal presidential order only for the party suing, allowing Trump to enforce his disputed orders everywhere else.6 Nationwide injunctions can be invoked only by Trump’s favorite body of judges, the Supreme Court, to whom he frequently appeals.
We watched Trump flip presidential levers to turn law-abiding critics of his policies into domestic terrorists, and we are smarting from it.
Before Trump’s return to office, we had no visceral fear of what a U.S. president might do with the levers of power we present to our top executive. Now we do. We watched Trump flip those levers to turn law-abiding critics of his policies into domestic terrorists, and we are smarting from it.
Part of the horror was to see how easily it was done. Trump merely handed down instructions to his 4.2 million-strong workforce: go after the people he dislikes, label them domestic terrorists, and treat them accordingly: prosecute them, seize their assets, claim self-defense when necessary to shoot them down in the street. Trump’s millions had no recourse but to obey or lose their jobs. Obey him, and Trump had their backs. That they knew.
To identify the large and varied group of nondescript people he wanted shut down, Trump started by issuing an executive order that created a domestic terrorist organization group. He called the organization “Antifa” and exposed its heinous objective: pursue a campaign of nationwide terrorism to overthrow the U.S. government. He revealed that Antifa operations include “armed standoffs” and “violent assaults” against law enforcement and connect with other organizations to advance political violence. Trump then unleashed the unique power of the presidential EO: notwithstanding its slew of inaccurate statements and baseless allegations, he directed his workforce to focus its resources on investigating, disrupting, and dismantling exactly the Antifa operations the EO described. They were also to investigate and prosecute any group or individual suspected of funding those operations and freeze their assets, a measure that could swiftly bankrupt an individual or group.
That was Monday, September 22, 2025. On Thursday, Trump identified the Antifa operatives, that is to say, the multitude of domestic terrorists his workforce was to target. Distributed to them in his National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, the information carries the force of command. From that date, Trump’s troops were to act on the knowledge that domestic terrorists are people who espouse anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, or anti-Christianity views; portray “foundational American principles” as fascist; violently assault “democratic institutions, constitutional rights, and fundamental American liberties”; or show “hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.” Context for Trump’s instructions did the heavy lifting. Trump had been railing against his enemies for too long for his workforce to mistake the target. They knew exactly who he meant. An Antifa operative was anyone who opposed Trump.
Trump slyly recast two core pillars of any effective peaceful protest as deadly attributes of terrorism: being organized and advocating a change in government policy. He then demonized Antifa operatives for engaging in activities characteristic of members of any modern society: using social media, joining anonymous chat forums, meeting in person, and gathering at educational institutions, maybe studying there? Their purpose, Trump stated, was to isolate and dehumanize political opponents in order to set them up for targeted assault. Based once again on unfounded and unsubstantiated claims of activities he declared to be “criminal and terroristic conspiracies,” Trump’s NSPM-7 provided detailed instructions to the National Joint Terrorism Task Force, the Secretary of the Treasury, the Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, and all federal law enforcement agencies with investigative authority to root out the Antifa operatives he had just fingered.
And now it’s done. Trump’s instructions made it crystal clear. Peace is violence. Tolerance is hate. Whistles are tools of terrorist conspiracies. Denouncing genocide is an attempt to undermine a pivotal U.S. ally. Releasing tortured sows from breeding crates is grand larceny. Fighting to save the forests is a traitorous obstruction of American progress. And those who object to Trump’s ways or whims risk getting detained by Trump’s troops, who are getting fitted up as we speak with electric-shock gloves than can bring Trump’s opponents into compliance in three seconds.7
- Donald Trump was criminally convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in New York on May 30, 2024. ↩︎
- A bad idea, opines Henry David Thoreau in his 1849 essay Civil Disobedience. “The practical reason why, when the power is once in the hands of the people, a majority are permitted, and for a long period continue, to rule is not because they are most likely to be in the right, nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the strongest.” ↩︎
- About 2.1 million civilian federal workforce, 1.3 million active-duty military, and 800,000 selective reserve and National Guard personnel. ↩︎
- To prove legal standing is an exceedingly high hurdle for an individual. They must prove they have or are about to suffer actual, tangible harm from the executive order, must show that harm is a direct result of the order, and that an injunction would fix or prevent their injury. ↩︎
- A result of the June 2025 Supreme Court ruling in Trump v. CASA, Inc. ↩︎
- So far in his second administration, Trump has issued 275 executive orders and 84 presidential memoranda. The 225 executive orders he issued in 2025 marks the highest single year total for any year since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration. Dozens of Trump’s directives are currently tied up in over 850 administration-wide lawsuits. “In more than 500 cases, the courts have let the administration’s policies stay in effect even as they remain in active litigation. In more than 150 cases, however, the courts have at least partially halted the administration’s policies either through temporary restraining orders or preliminary injunctions.” https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/us/trump-administration-lawsuits.html?smid=url-share ↩︎
- https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/11/ice-electric-shock-gloves ↩︎