~~ recommended by newestbeginning ~~
 |
I Wish None Of This Was Happening
I take no pleasure in writing this. I am writing it anyway, because staying quiet is not something I know how to do. Forty years in front of juries, plus a stretch as a judge pro tem deciding other people’s disputes under oath, burn a plain set of truths into you.
Facts matter. Conflicts matter. Ethics matter. Accountability matters. Those truths hold their weight when the courtroom becomes the Capitol, the White House, or a federal agency. What I am about to walk you through is a pattern, plain and documented. Once you see it, you will not look away.
These are serious times folks. And you need to wake up.
A billion dollars in crypto. A spy chief who never worked a day in intelligence. A Fox News host running the Pentagon. A President who tried to erase part of the Constitution with a pen. Day after day, we watch actions from the top that look more like the moves of a dictator than the country we grew up in. This is what a nation looks like when ethics stop meaning anything and no one in power says a word.
As the United States reaches its 250th anniversary this week, many Americans are asking a question that reaches past politics. What kind of country are we becoming?
That question deserves an honest answer. Two hundred and fifty years ago, a group of ordinary men gathered in Philadelphia and signed a document they knew could get them hanged. They pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to build a country where no king would ever again stand above the law.
Now, four days before we mark that anniversary, on June 30, 2026, the current President of the United States filed a financial disclosure running more than 900 pages. In a single year in office, he reported earning over a billion dollars from cryptocurrency alone. His total take for the year topped two billion dollars.
Here is the number I want you to sit with. Barack Obama’s final financial disclosure ran eight pages. Joe Biden’s ran eleven. Donald Trump’s ran 927.
Those pages tell the story of what has happened to your country.
What the Founders Actually Built
Begin with first principles, because everything else grows from them.
The Constitution established a government of limited power, divided authority, and public accountability. Those ideas were never abstract theory. The Founders understood that concentrated power creates temptation, so they split that power apart and set each branch to watch the others. No public official was meant to stand beyond scrutiny. Every person who takes the oath accepts a duty to place the interests of the nation above personal profit and political advantage, above loyalty to any single man.
Public confidence rests on that duty. You expect leaders to tell you the truth. You expect them to avoid conflicts of interest, or at the least to disclose and manage them in the open. You expect appointments to serious positions to reflect competence and sound judgment. You expect Congress to conduct real oversight no matter which party holds the White House. You expect the justice system to apply the law the same way to everyone. Hold those expectations in your mind as you read the rest of this, because the record measures the distance between what you have every right to expect and what you are being handed.
Look at Where the Money Comes From
Start with the money, because the money is the clearest window into everything else.
More than 635 million of it came from a meme coin stamped with his own name, launched days before he took the oath of office. Hundreds of millions more came from a family crypto venture called World Liberty Financial, a company he and his sons founded with a business associate who now serves as a top diplomat in his own administration. Months before the inauguration, that same company took a 500 million dollar investment from a member of the Emirati royal family. Nothing like this has ever happened in the history of the American presidency.
Read the disclosure closely and it gets worse. Ten days after he was sworn in, the President’s investment accounts started buying stock in a private prison company, one of the largest contractors running immigrant detention for his own government. As his administration doubled the number of people held in that detention, from roughly 35,000 to nearly 70,000, the purchases kept coming. He profited from the very policy he was carrying out with your tax dollars.
This is what ethics rules exist to stop. Strip away the technical language and ethics come down to one boundary, the line between public responsibility and private benefit. A judge steps off a case the moment a conflict appears, because even the appearance of a conflict poisons public trust. A lawyer follows the rules of professional responsibility for the same reason. Government belongs to the people who fund it. The people who run it hold it in trust for a season, nothing more. A President who earns a billion dollars from ventures he controls, and who sets the rules those same ventures profit from, has erased that boundary in front of the whole country.
The White House answered all of this with one sentence, a flat claim that neither the President nor his family has ever had a conflict of interest, or ever will. Read that sentence again. Then look at the 927 pages.
Loyalty Over Competence, and Your Safety Pays for It
The corruption is only half of the damage. The other half is who he puts in charge.
You have a right to expect that the most serious jobs in government go to people with the experience and judgment to hold them. Watch what happens to that expectation. This spring, the President named Bill Pulte the acting Director of National Intelligence. That title carries one job above all others. You brief the President on every threat to American lives. Bill Pulte has never worked a single day in intelligence. He has never served in the military. His background is running the federal housing finance agency and giving away money on social media. He holds a degree in broadcast journalism. Trump handed him the keys to America’s spy network anyway, and structured the appointment so the Senate never has to vote on it for months.
The same story wrote itself at the Pentagon. To run the Department of Defense, the largest organization on earth, with close to three million people in uniform and behind desks, Trump chose Pete Hegseth, a weekend host from Fox News. Hegseth wore the uniform himself and deployed overseas, and that service is real. The Pentagon demanded something his career had never asked of him, the judgment to command that force and run the machinery of war. The Senate saw the gap and nearly turned him away. He squeaked through by a single vote, 51 to 50, with the Vice President breaking the tie, after senators raised detailed accounts of heavy drinking and other misconduct that he brushed aside.
Then he showed you why the worry was earned. Within weeks, Hegseth typed the timing of an American military strike into a group chat on a commercial messaging app, hours before the jets took off, in a thread a journalist had been added to by accident. He ran a second chat about the same strike that pulled in his wife and his brother. The Pentagon’s own inspector general, after an eight month review, found that he put classified information onto an unsecured phone and app and could have handed our adversaries the takeoff times of the pilots flying that mission. He has spent this year pushing decorated generals out the door, blocking the promotions of women and Black officers, and boasting that he held total command of the skies over Iran days before Iran shot down an American fighter jet. People inside his own administration say he does not tell the President the truth.
Republican and Democratic senators on the Intelligence Committee said out loud that Pulte and Hegseth have no business in their jobs. The President gave it to them regardless. This is the tell. Devotion replaces competence, over and over, in the offices that hold your national security, your savings, and the safety of the air you breathe and the water you drink. Fill the most sensitive offices in government with people whose only credential is loyalty to one man, and you have built a royal court full of subjects.
The Pardons Told You Who He Answers To
On his first day back in office, before he did one thing to lower your grocery bill, Donald Trump signed a proclamation that freed roughly 1,500 people convicted or charged in the attack on the United States Capitol. Fourteen more, leaders of the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, walked out of prison on commuted sentences. Enrique Tarrio, sentenced to 22 years for seditious conspiracy, went home. Stewart Rhodes, sentenced to 18 years, went home. More than 600 of the people he freed had been convicted of or pleaded guilty to assaulting or obstructing the police officers who defended that building. Around 140 officers were hurt that day.
Ask yourself why he did this.
You watched it happen on live television. You saw the mob crush officers in a doorway. Federal prosecutors spent four years building those cases, one of the largest investigations in the history of the Justice Department. Grand juries indicted. Trial juries, ordinary Americans pulled from their daily lives, listened to the evidence and returned verdicts of guilty. Judges, including judges Trump himself appointed, looked at the proof and handed down the sentences. More than 1,100 people were convicted or pleaded guilty. Many admitted their crimes in open court under oath.
He erased all of it with a signature. Then he ordered his Justice Department to throw out the cases still pending, including hundreds that involved attacks on police. Reporting later described his private words as he made the call. Release them all.
Here is the answer to why. A man who tells violent supporters that the law does not apply to them is building an army. He is teaching every follower a lesson. Break the law for me, and I will make the consequences disappear. That same lesson runs through the rest of his clemency record, where he wiped out more than a billion dollars in fines and restitution owed to fraud victims and to taxpayers. The pardon is his signature move, and it tells you exactly who holds his loyalty. The people who serve him hold it. You never did.
By the middle of this year, at least 97 of the people he freed had been arrested again on new charges, some for crimes as serious as they come. Child molestation, assault and battery, and one woman he pardoned was back in a courtroom nine days later, sentenced to ten years for killing someone in a drunk driving crash. You were told these were patriots. The record tells you something plainer.
He Tried to Erase Part of the Constitution With a Pen
Now walk with me to the part that should worry you most, because it reaches past this President and into the country your grandchildren will inherit.
On his first day back in office, Donald Trump signed an executive order declaring that certain babies born on American soil are no longer citizens. He tried to erase a promise written into the Fourteenth Amendment after the Civil War, a promise that no politician gets to decide who counts as an American. On June 30, the same day as that financial disclosure, the Supreme Court struck the order down six to three. The Chief Justice, appointed by a Republican president, wrote that these children are citizens at birth, full stop. Trump lost. He responded by demanding that Congress finish the job he could not.
This is what checks and balances look like when they still work. One branch reached past its limits. Another branch pushed it back. Think about how close the call came. Analysis filed in that case estimated the order would have stripped citizenship from nearly five million American born children over the next two decades. One president, with one signature, came within a single vote of creating a permanent underclass of stateless kids born in your hometown. The system held this time. Barely.
The same Supreme Court, on the same day, handed down a second ruling that shows you where the money leads. In a case called NRSC versus FEC, the Court struck down the limits on how much a political party can spend hand in hand with its candidates. Democratic leaders called it what it is, an invitation for billionaire donors to buy even more influence over the people who write your laws. The dissenting justices warned that a single donor now routes far more money to a candidate through a party than the law ever allowed. Set that next to the billion dollar crypto haul and the picture snaps into focus. Money flows to power. Power protects the money. You are standing outside the room.
One Man, One Signature, and a Tax on Your Kitchen Table
The Constitution gives one branch of government the power to tax. Congress. Article One, first section, spelled out in the plain language the Founders chose on purpose, because they had lived under a king who taxed them without their consent and they meant to end that forever.
Donald Trump decided the rule did not apply to him. In the spring of 2025 he signed a set of executive orders and imposed sweeping tariffs on nearly every country that trades with the United States, allies and rivals alike. No vote in the House. No vote in the Senate. One man, one signature, a tax laid on the whole economy by decree.
You paid for it. A tariff is a tax, and the cost lands on you at the register. The average tariff rate climbed to about 17 percent, the highest since the early 1930s. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that American families and businesses absorbed roughly 90 percent of the bill. Independent analysts put the added cost at more than a thousand dollars per household in a single year. The promised factory boom never arrived. The trade deficit grew. American manufacturing shed tens of thousands of jobs. Around the world, markets shook and allies scrambled to make sense of a trade war that lurched on and off, run out of one office.
On February 20, 2026, the Supreme Court ended the charade. In a six to three ruling, the Court held that the emergency law Trump leaned on gives the president no power to impose tariffs at all, because the power to tax belongs to Congress and to no one else. Both the House and the Senate had already voted to disapprove of what he did. Hours after he lost, he reached for a different statute and slapped new tariffs on the world anyway.
Sit with the pattern. He taxed you without a vote. The courts told him he had no authority to do it. He did it again through another door. This is what it looks like when one person treats the Constitution as a suggestion.
He Took the Country to War and Told You He Does Not Think About Your Wallet
The Founders handed the power to take the nation to war to Congress, not to any single person, for the same reason they guarded the power to tax. One man should never be able to send a country’s sons and daughters into combat on his own say so.
On February 28, 2026, the United States went to war with Iran. Donald Trump ordered it. He never asked Congress. The War Powers law gives a president sixty days to wage a conflict without a vote from the people’s representatives. The sixty days came and went. Trump then wrote to Congress and claimed the clock had stopped, because a shaky ceasefire meant the fighting had ended. Legal experts across the spectrum called that claim what it was. A naval blockade enforced by force is a continuing act of war. He told reporters that seeking approval from Congress would be unconstitutional, and he was wrong about that too.
Now look at what the war did to your life. Gas climbed past $4.50 a gallon, and across much of the country past $5. Diesel ran to $6. Mortgage rates pushed higher as inflation fears spread. The Strait of Hormuz, the channel that carried a fifth of the world’s oil before the shooting started, seized up, and global shipping seized with it. The International Monetary Fund warned that the disruption could tip the world into recession. Families overseas lived through blackouts and fuel shortages.
A reporter asked the President whether the financial pain Americans were feeling weighed on him as he searched for a deal. His answer, in his own words. Not even a little bit. He said he does not think about your financial situation.
Read that again on the Fourth of July. He took the country to war without the vote the Constitution requires. The war reached into your gas tank and your grocery cart and your monthly house payment. The pain you felt did not register with him at all.
The Epstein Files He Does Not Want You to Read
Congress passed a law last November that told the Justice Department to release everything it holds on Jeffrey Epstein. The vote was nearly unanimous. Trump had fought the measure for months. Public pressure grew so heavy, even from his own supporters, that he signed it. The law set a hard deadline and wrote in a line that leaves no room for games. The department cannot withhold any record to protect someone from embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity.
Watch what his administration did with a law he signed.
The Justice Department blew past the deadline. When it finally released files, it buried them under heavy redactions, and it quietly added new redactions to documents already public, with no notice and no explanation. His Attorney General, Pam Bondi, promised the public a full accounting, then stonewalled Congress and refused to answer basic questions under oath. When a House committee subpoenaed her, five Republicans joining the Democrats, Trump fired her, and she skipped the deposition. His acting Attorney General, Todd Blanche, admitted in court that he is holding back millions of pages he calls privileged or irrelevant.
A federal judge has now found that the acting Attorney General conceded he is breaking the law. The judge ordered him to hand over the material he hid or explain himself by July 2, this week. Among the records the department tried to keep from you sit the FBI’s notes from an interview with a woman who says Trump abused her when she was a teenager, after Epstein introduced them. The President denies it. The law he signed forbids hiding a document like that to spare a public figure embarrassment. His own Justice Department hid it anyway.
Ask the obvious question. When a man fights this hard, breaks a law he signed, burns through two Attorneys General, and defies a federal judge to keep documents in the dark, what is he protecting, and who?
He Turned the Free Press Into a Government Enemies List
The United States government now keeps a public list of journalists and brands them offenders. Let that sit for a second.
Go to whitehouse.gov and you will find a page called Media Offenders. The building your taxes pay for runs it. The banner reads Misleading. Biased. Exposed. Below it sits a rotating Offender of the Week, where the government prints a reporter’s name, prints the story it dislikes, and stamps its own version of the truth on top. There is a Hall of Shame. There is a leaderboard that ranks newsrooms by what the White House calls their lies. The named outlets read like a roll call of American journalism. The Associated Press. Reuters. The New York Times. CNN. CBS. Even Fox News lands there on the days a story displeases the President.
This past June the page grew a new section. It started naming private citizens. Independent commentators who post their own analysis online now sit on a federal website branded as offenders. The same page runs a tipline and asks your neighbors to report journalists to the government. Read that again. A government office collects the names of reporters and invites the public to turn in more.
The insults come straight from the top. The President called a New York Times reporter a third rate reporter who is ugly, both inside and out, after her team reported that he looked tired on the job. When a Bloomberg reporter asked him about the Epstein files, he told her, quiet, piggy. The oldest press association in the country wrote to the White House and asked for the page to come down, warning that this is how authoritarian governments treat the press. The page stayed up.
And then there’s this. Watch how the press corps answers. A reporter gets called a pig on live television, and the room moves to the next question. A newsroom lands on a government offender list, and the anchor reads the teleprompter that night as though nothing happened. They absorb the insult and keep playing the game on his terms. Plant your feet instead. Ask the question, then ask it again, until the President answers to the people who pay his salary. Reporters need to support each other. When he refuses to answer, that refusal becomes the story, and it belongs at the top of the front page and the top of the broadcast.
You are the reason the free press exists. The First Amendment put the press first among your freedoms because a country that loses the honest question loses the power to govern itself. When the government starts keeping a list of the people who ask the questions, the hour is later than you think.
Outrage Is the Product, and You Are the Target
None of this works without one more ingredient, and this is the one that makes me the angriest, because it targets good people.
A person who wants to run a country like a personal business needs a public that stops asking hard questions. So the name calling never stops. Judges who rule against him become enemies. Reporters who cover him become the opposition. Neighbors who disagree with you become the reason your life feels hard. The insults do real work. They keep you angry, and anger keeps you from reading the 927 pages.
Look honestly at how you take in the world now. You scroll through an endless feed of posts, videos, and podcasts that fight for your attention every waking hour. The messages that spread fastest reward outrage over accuracy. Repetition beats evidence. Each of us drifts toward the voices that already agree with us. Those forces work on every one of us, and people who understand them use them on purpose.
For the most part, I do not believe the people caught up in this are stupid. Sure, there are exceptions but most are simply targeted. They are fed a steady diet of repetitive, out of context, and flat out false messaging, engineered by people who understand exactly how anger moves across a screen. Good, decent, hardworking Americans have been handed a version of reality built to keep them loyal and keep them furious. A country that stops thinking for itself becomes a country you sell a billion dollar meme coin to. That is the whole point.
The answer is older than any app. Critical thinking. You ask questions. You look at the evidence. You weigh competing claims. You stay willing to change your mind when the facts change. Civic education matters here more than ever, because a constitutional republic falls apart when its citizens never learn how it works. An informed voter is the one thing this machine chokes on.
Ask the Four Questions
On this anniversary, put the whole record to a plain test. Four questions decide the health of a republic, and you already know how to answer them.
Are our institutions earning public confidence? Look at 927 pages and a one sentence denial, and answer honestly.
Are ethical standards receiving the attention they deserve? Look at a President profiting from thousands of stock trades involving companies his government is regulating. Look at him profiting from a private prison company as his agents fill its cells.
Are the Constitution’s checks and balances working as intended? A six to three ruling saved birthright citizenship this year. The margin of one vote is your answer about how safe the rest of it is.
Are citizens receiving the information they need to make sound decisions? Look at the outrage machine built to make sure they do not.
These questions belong to every generation. They belong to every voter. They belong to every official who raises a hand and swears an oath to support and defend the Constitution. The answers will shape the next 250 years.
This Is Where You Come In
Here is the part the people in power do not want you to hear.
The Constitution they keep testing was built with a remedy, and the remedy is you. This November, you decide who controls the House and the Senate. Control of Congress means you get back the subpoena. You get back the power of oversight, the same oversight the current majority chose to abandon no matter what landed on its desk. You get back the power of the purse, the authority to tell a president no when he treats the Treasury like a personal account. You get back the separation of powers, snapping into place after two years of a Congress that looked away.
I believe this country is going to take that power back. I believe voters across red states and blue states are going to look at 927 pages of self enrichment, at a spy chief who has never worked in intelligence, at a signature that tried to erase part of the Constitution, and decide they have seen enough. The damage will take years to repair. Some of it will take decades. Public trust grows back the slow way, the way it always has, through transparency, integrity, and a plain respect for the rule of law. Repair starts the moment enough of you refuse to look away.
Two hundred and fifty years ago, ordinary people risked everything so that no one would ever rule this country like a king. You are the heirs to that risk. This Fourth of July, do more than fire up the grill and watch the fireworks. Read the record. Talk to one person who has been fed the lie, with patience and with facts. Share what you learn. Register to vote, then vote like the country your kids inherit depends on it, because it does.
You honor 250 years with your voice and your vote. Nothing less will do.
Mitch Jackson, Esq.
No comments:
Post a Comment