A Declaration of Independence From The Mad King

It's time.

When, in the course of human events within a free Republic, it becomes necessary for a people to withdraw their confidence from a leader who has converted public trust into private appetite; who mistakes the powers of his station for a license to indulge his passions, punish his enemies, and endanger the peace and security of such a Republic; a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should speak plainly, and set forth the causes which compel them to this determination.

So let us speak plainly.

Donald J. Trump has driven this nation to the precipice. He has treated the Presidency not as a solemn charge, but as a personal franchise, an engine of revenge, profit, and personal protection. He has replaced law with loyalty, governance with grievance, and the impartial administration of justice with the crude satisfactions of retaliation. He has demonstrated his contempt for this Republic, its democratic principles, and its God-given Constitutional protections more times than we can recount; and his ongoing abuses endanger our continued existence as a nation of liberty and justice for all.

This is not a contest of ordinary politics. It is a trial of first principles: whether we remain a nation governed by laws, or submit to the dominion of one man’s will.

We therefore publish this declaration: that we will no longer varnish danger with polite phrases, nor soothe ourselves with the false comfort that every outrage is merely “how he is.” We will no longer accept the bankrupt doctrine that all factions are alike, while one faction endeavors to bend the whole apparatus of the state into a weapon against the people.

Donald Trump must depart the office he has dishonored, whether by the unlikely remedy of voluntary resignation, or by the sanction of impeachment and removal, or by the constitutional remedy of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment.

Not from personal animus. Not from partisan spleen. Not because the clamor of his 2024 election displeases us.

But because the alternative is the habituation of a free people to national madness, rampant abuse of our rights as citizens, and the conversion of a Republic into a shabby and cruel monarchy.

The Breaking Point

The authors of our constitutional order did not cast off a king at great cost in blood and treasure merely to accept an emperor in a different costume. They did not hazard their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor so that a later generation might shrug, avert its eyes, and mutter that a lawless Executive is simply “the price of doing business.”

They anticipated the old disease of power. They supplied remedies. They established impeachment as a restraint upon abuse; they vested in Congress the purse as the instrument of supervision; and, in later years, the nation added the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to answer the problem of incapacity when the ship of state is steered by an unsteady hand.

When the Executive becomes lawless, Congress is not called to commentary. It is called to action.

We therefore set forth the bill of particulars—the injuries and usurpations that have rendered this Presidency a permanent stain upon the American name; and let these facts be submitted to a candid world.

A Long Train of Abuses and Usurpations

He has attempted to coerce and menace an allied people over Greenland, speaking of sovereignty as though it were acreage in a speculative bargain, and of force as though it were a negotiating posture. He has treated a NATO partner’s territory as a bauble for his ego; and in so doing, he has endangered alliances purchased at dear cost by generations of Americans.

He has exercised the war power as a personal instrument, kidnapping foreign leaders, loosing violence upon vessels in the Pacific and Caribbean under theories so elastic they would make any sober lawyer blush; substituting proclamation for authorization; and converting questions of policing and interdiction into a shadowy claim of armed conflict by mere assertion.

He has given aid and comfort to enemies of this nation at every turn, harming our security and shattering alliances for the friendship of dictators and war criminals.

He has corrupted the mercy of the law into commerce, making favors and pardons the coin of influence; teaching every petitioner that justice may be purchased, and that paid proximity to power is the only credential required. In a Republic, clemency is a solemn act of grace. Under this President, it has been rendered an advertisement for the highest bidder.

He has also levied tariffs as though they were a king’s whimsy and not burden on this nation’s livelihood, taxes laid upon the people without their consent, exacted not for the common defense but for the gratification of his own political appetites, thereby raising the price of necessities, unsettling the farmer and the factory, sowing uncertainty among merchants, and inviting retaliation that punishes our exports and hollows out our markets. While he proclaims strength, the result is the same old ruin of arbitrary power: commerce chilled, supply lines distorted, investment withheld, and working families made to pay, quietly, steadily, and without reprieve, for the vanity of one man’s trade war.

He has moreover converted the honors and emoluments of public station into instruments of private gain; he has invited the wealthy, the foreign, and the favor-seeking to purchase access through his properties and his household; he has blurred the line between the Treasury and his own purse until the people can scarce discern where the Republic ends and his personal ventures begin; and he has taught every lesser officeholder that the path to preferment lies not in merit or service, but in tribute, so that government, instituted to secure the rights of the governed, is made instead a marketplace of influence, where policy is bartered, favors are trafficked, and the common good is sold by the ounce to the highest bidder.

He has degraded the Department of Justice into a partisan instrument, bending prosecutors to his will, demanding investigations as a public spectacle, openly defying both the law and court orders, covering up scandals and abuses to which he is directly connected, and seeking to punish critics while shielding allies. He has pursued not the equal application of law, but the unequal satisfaction of vengeance, and to hide his personal connection and involvement with the most hideous of criminals.

He has turned the force of federal enforcement inward, treating dissent as terrorism and the exercise of constitutional rights as provocation. He has encouraged the state apparatus to regard American citizens not as the sovereign people, but as a population to be managed, intimidated, and disciplined; using the ultimate sanction of state-approved killings, illegal captivity, and overarching surveillance to quell and punish dissent.

He has deployed immigration enforcement in ways that trample the rights of Americans, treating citizens as collateral, communities as targets, and lawful protest as a threat to his power. A government instituted to secure liberty has, under his direction, adopted wholesale the methods of a police state: masked agents, coercive tactics, absolute immunity, and contempt for both the Courts and Congress.

He has displayed a pattern of conduct that calls his capacity into question, an evident decay of judgment, an enslavement to obsession, a substitution of impulse for deliberation, and a public temper that veers between furious megalomania and howling grievance. No physician’s certificate is required to observe when reality is no longer a fixed point in the mind of the man entrusted with the nation’s safety.

He has advanced the doctrine that Executive power is absolute; that the President may do as he pleases, restrained by no law or custom, checked by no watchdog, and accountable to no tribunal. He has sought to purge professional servants of the public and replace them with personal loyalists; he has assailed inspectors general and overseers; he has treated independence as insubordination; and he has attempted to render the Presidency not an office, but a throne.

In every stage of these proceedings, we have petitioned for redress in the customary forms. We have reasoned, warned, and pleaded. Our petitions have been answered only by further injury.

A President whose character is thus marked by repeated acts of abuse and usurpation, pursuing invariably the same object—the concentration of power and the erosion of liberty—is unfit to be the chief magistrate of a free people.

This is not a normal political disagreement.

It is a constitutional emergency.

The Remedies the Constitution Provides

What, then, is to be done?

First: he should resign. If there remains in him any regard for the country whose honor he has besmirched; if he can perceive, however faintly, the wreckage left in his wake; he should lay down the authority he has so persistently abused. Let him depart, and spare the nation further convulsion. We do not expect such an outcome, but it must be offered to him.

Second: if he will not resign, then the House must impeach, and the Senate must convict. The previous impeachments of this President were saved by a handful of men in the Senate, acting from partisan political impulses, not loyalty to the nation.

Impeachment is not a curiosity, nor a weapon reserved for academic debate. It is the Republic’s safeguard against the Executive who believes himself above law. If Congress lacks the courage to employ it in the face of open abuses, it announces to every future demagogue that there is no line he cannot cross.

Third: if the Vice President and Cabinet retain any allegiance to the Constitution and not merely to their own advancement, they must invoke the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. The nation cannot be held hostage to a single man’s evident and growing instability. When incapacity endangers the Republic, delay is not caution. Delay is complicity.

The Founders exhausted every avenue before declaring war on King George III and Great Britain. So too must we before moving to more grievous and consequential measures, but those measures must now begin to occupy our minds as a last resort.

A Call to Republicans: Be Worthy of the Name

Many ships have foundered on the lee shore of calls to the President’s party to show principle and courage, but the reminder must be issued, the call must be made. To Republicans who still claim to revere the Founders, to honor the Constitution, to respect order and law: this is the hour that will define you.

Not the private murmurs to donors. Not the anonymous laments slipped to reporters. Not the cautious “concerns” and performative frowns.

Courage.

You have witnessed the corrosion. You have seen alliances battered, institutions degraded, law enforcement twisted into a cudgel, and public life reduced to a cycle of vendettas. You have witnessed his most passionate loyalists discarded, threatened, and abused, believing you are the one exception. You have told yourselves, as every compromised courtier does, that you can manage him; that you can use him; that you can ride the tiger.

You cannot. The tiger consumes its riders, and then looks for the next meal.

You have given him everything he has desired for a decade, made every sacrifice of honor and integrity. You have said yes to him when it burned your soul, and looked away from his crimes, his decay, and the harm he has caused this Republic.

If you will not join in removing him, then cease pretending you are conservatives. A conservative conserves the institutions that safeguard liberty. He does not torch them for the momentary warmth of power.

A Call to Democrats: Employ the Power You Possess

And to Democrats: cease the pleasant rituals of outrage without consequence.

Enough stern letters. Enough “urging.” Enough theatrical hand-wringing that leaves the machinery of abuse fully funded and operational.

Use the instrument the Constitution placed in Congress’s hands: the purse. At this moment, you can and must learn to fight the fight you are in, not the one you’d prefer. You must abandon the notion you can focus-group your way to saving the Republic.

America calls for fighters, and you must take up the weapons of political battle or your party and your nation are doomed.

If this Executive insists on governing as though the state were his personal kingdom; if the Justice Department is bent on persecution; if federal agents are used to intimidate communities; if lawless violence is dressed as policy; if oversight is mocked; then Congress must refuse to finance the transformation.

Shut down the government until the guardrails are restored.

Shut it down until real oversight exists.

Shut it down until Republicans choose: the Constitution, or the man.

It will be called partisan. It will be called reckless. But it is better to be denounced for resisting lawlessness than praised for accommodating it. Better to endure temporary disorder than to accept permanent submission.

The Permanent Stain, and the Choice Before Us

The damage this President, this mad king, has wrought will not evaporate the day he leaves office. Allies will remember the threats and the cheap sale of America’s loyalty to the long enemies of freedom in the world. Institutions will bear scars. The habit of vengeance will linger. The corrosion of truth will outlive the liar. The temptation of cruelty will remain, waiting for the next ambitious man who envies what Trump attempted.

But permanence cuts both ways.

If Americans decide that a President may do these things and remain in office, if we teach ourselves to live with it, then that becomes the lasting stain. That becomes the new standard. We become a tragic footnote in history, a nation that squandered its colossal inheritance and its glorious promise on rage, hatred, and lawlessness. That becomes the invitation to the next would-be autocrat: push far enough, fast enough, and they will adjust.

We will not adjust.

We declare independence from Donald Trump, from his corruptions, his delusions, his abuses, his demand for obedience, and his contempt for the constitutional order.

And we call upon those with conscience and courage, Republicans and Democrats alike, and upon every citizen who still remembers what this Republic must be, to bring this crisis to an end.

Let him resign.

If he will not, let him be impeached and removed.

If Congress falters and the danger remains, let the Twenty-Fifth Amendment be invoked.

Choose the Republic.

Or surrender it.