Anyone who attended high school probably remembers their world history teacher talking about countries that militarized their law enforcement to make what is referred to as a police state. Examples taught should have included SS members of Nazi Germany (1925-1945), the secret police—NKVD—of the Soviet Union (1934-1946), the military regime of Chilean Dictator Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), and the apartheid-era (1948-1994) of South Africa.
On April 28, President Donald Trump issued an 879-page executive order (EO) commanding Pam Bondi and Pete Hegseth to work with Kristi Noem and other agencies to “increase the provision of excess military and national security assets in local jurisdictions to assist State and local law enforcement.”
The Legal Defense Fund states Trump’s EO directs federal resources to “promote aggressive policing tactics and further militarize local law enforcement agencies, make it more difficult to hold officers accountable for misconduct and wield the power of prosecution as a threat.” Writer Jim Jordan opines in a June 14 essay that Trump’s EO “calls for a militarized police service in the US, one that essentially operates under martial law” (CommonWealth Beacon).
Stephen Miller and Project 2025’s Police State Proposal
It should be no surprise that Trump’s EO is rooted in Stephen Miller, the far-right anti-immigration policy advisor to the Heritage Foundation on its creation of Project 2025, the playbook for Mr. Trump to implement in the first 180 days of his presidential administration. And, behold, July 19 was Trump’s 180th day in office.
One of the key components of the 922-page Project 2025 playbook for Donald Trump to follow was mass deportations, increasing border enforcement, and changing America’s long-revered asylum system (Project 2025 is a threat to democracy, June 4, 2024, The Fulcrum).
Trump’s aggressive actions
Most people know that ICE, DHS, FBI, and DEA conducted coordinated raids across Los Angeles, targeted workplaces, and arrested people suspected of being undocumented immigrants. On June 24, CBS News reported that of the 59,000 immigrant detainees, fewer than 30 percent have been convicted of crimes. The Washington Post’s July 3 story confirmed this data.
Ten different independent and reliable sources document how Trump 2.0’s administration is systematically dismantling democratic safeguards that rely on civil governance.
They include: 1) police in riot gear dispersing protesters who are using their First Amendment rights to oppose ICE raids, 2) National Guard troops being deployed to quell peaceful protests, 3) framing citizen protests as an “insurrection” and a “national security threat,” 4) federal agents arresting citizens whose immigration-related cases have been dismissed by judges, 5) expanding and creating detention camps, 6) heavily armed and masked men abducting individuals without warrants or identification, 7) providing police with military-grade equipment, 8) closing down the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor and 9) eliminating the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration.
When Trump signed the “Big, Beautiful Bill” into law on July 4 (opposed by all Democrats and approved by all Republicans except five), it wasn’t a celebration of Independence Day but the ramping up of America’s unchecked executive power and militarized policing. The law provided roughly $170,000,000,000 for immigration enforcement, including the hiring of 10,000 new ICE officers.
Hope on the Horizon
While deporting undocumented immigrants—a key tenant of Trump’s 2025 presidential campaign and Project 2025—was supported by a majority of voters, July 11 Gallup poll data found that: A) 62 percent of Americans disapprove how the Trump administration is handling the deportation issue, B) 78 percent of Americans now favor offering pathways to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, and C) 79 percent of Americans say immigration is a good thing; the percentage should be considerably higher since 97.1% of people live in America due to immigration by their original settler family.
Twenty-seven different religious groups—including major Christian and Jewish denominations—oppose Trump’s police state-like actions (NBC News, Feb. 11).
A Call to Conscience
Citizens now recognize that Trump’s militarization strategy mirrors the early stages of a police state development. But, unlike historical regimes (Nazi Germany, Soviet Union, Chile, and South Africa), the U.S. still retains independent courts, freedom of speech, freedom to assemble, a free press, and elections.
It’s time to ask your elected delegates to the U.S. Capitol to retake a high school world history class, reflect on the documented examples of the similarities of Trump’s actions to police state endeavors, and act—legislation wise—before the situation gets any worse.
Citizens must continue to exercise their First Amendment rights, especially those of free speech, free press, and assembly, against Trump’s shift toward unchecked executive power and militarized policing.
Finally, Nov. 3, 2026, should be a `Save the Date’ as that’s when 33 U.S. Senate seats and all 435 House seats are up for the elected delegates to represent our wishes versus those of a particular party and/or anti-immigration influence groups.
Steve Corbin is a professor emeritus of marketing at the University of Northern Iowa, and a non-paid freelance opinion editor and guest columnist contributor to 246 news agencies and 48 social media platforms in 45 states.Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly referred to Rep. Jim Jordan rather than the writer Jim Jordan.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.