The government doesn’t care about freedom, but that was obvious long before 2025. From John and Nisha Whitehead at rutherford.org:
Some years chip away at freedom. Others tear the mask off.
2025 was the year the government stopped pretending it was constrained by the Constitution—when executive power expanded openly and unapologetically, surveillance became ambient, dissent became dangerous, and the machinery of militarized government embedded itself into daily life.
Under Trump 2.0, the erosion of civil liberties gave way to something more brazen: the dismantling of constitutional government itself.
What made 2025 different was not any single abuse of power, but the relentless accumulation of them. The losses mounted week by week, crisis by crisis, executive order by executive order, until exhaustion itself became a political condition.
Outrage no longer led to accountability; it simply rolled into the next emergency.
What follows is not a list of grievances or a catalogue of partisan disputes. It is a record of the year freedom lost its guardrails—and of a nation torn apart from within by the very individuals and institutions entrusted with preventing such tyranny.
Donald J. Trump entered his second term promising revenge, retribution, and sweeping transformation. In that regard, he has been utterly successful.
Where he has failed—spectacularly—is in honoring his oath of office to protect and defend the Constitution. He has failed to represent all of the people, opting instead to serve only those interests that inflate his ego and advance his personal and financial ambitions. He has failed to unite the country behind any shared civic vision, choosing instead to deepen divisions through rhetoric and policies that inflame hatred, entrench discrimination, and normalize cruelty. Racism was emboldened, bigotry encouraged, misogyny amplified, and corruption reframed as governance. Authoritarian instincts were no longer masked; they were embraced.
