“You want to defend the United States of America, then defend it with the tools it supplies you with – its Constitution. You ask for a mandate, General, from a ballot box. You don’t steal it after midnight, when the country has its back turned.” – Seven Days in May (1964)
Who is actually running the government?
That is no longer a rhetorical question.
As America’s war with Iran lurches from escalation to ceasefire to renewed threats of military force, Americans are being asked to trust that someone, somewhere, knows what they are doing.
But who?
The president who boasts one moment of imminent peace and threatens the next to “finish the job”? The Pentagon officials who insist the war is going according to plan? The vice president who has reportedly questioned whether the Defense Department is giving the president the full picture? The intelligence agencies, defense contractors, war planners, foreign allies, billionaire donors, political handlers and unelected power brokers who operate behind the curtain?
This is the constitutional crisis hiding in plain sight.
The question is not merely whether Donald Trump is fit to lead. The question is whether any president still leads in any meaningful constitutional sense once the permanent war government gets moving.
That war government – the military industrial complex, the intelligence apparatus, the surveillance state, the federal police bureaucracy, the defense contractors, the private-sector profiteers and the unelected functionaries who keep the machinery running – does not need tanks in the streets to take over. Continue reading →