Paul Craig Roberts

Some people will regard my title as hyperbole. It is not. Trump, I believe, understands he is in a fight to the death. The American establishment tried to discredit and ruin him, to imprison him, to assassinate him. They stole his 2020 reelection from him. They tried to steal his NY properties. It is not possible for Trump to have illusions about what he is up against. He is up against evil.

Trump knows that the fight is not just about him. It is about America. For decades a corrupt American establishment has been running the government for their benefit at the expense of the American people. Trump says he intends to take government out of the corrupt establishment’s hands and put it back in the hands of the people. That is the last place the establishment wants it. For them the struggle Trump began in 2015 is existential. If Trump loses, America loses, and the establishment wins. Civil liberties will disappear, especially for “racist” white people and for people who think there are only two genders. Censorship and false narratives will prevail, and we will live in a belief system constructed for us by the establishment and the whore media for whom government is a profit center.

I don’t know how many of Trump’s appointees understand that they are in a fight to the death. How strong are they? If Trump doesn’t win, their careers are over. The establishment will see to that. If the Establishment proves to be stronger, will Trump’s appointees change sides and abandon the fight?

I don’t know how many MAGA Americans understand the stakes. How many of them think that the fight ended with the election victory and now President Trump will put everything right? If this delusion prevails, the emergency extra-legal steps Trump must take if he is to prevail will lack support among his followers. The whore media will paint a picture of Trump as a tyrant.

Democracies are unstable governmental systems, even when the people are ethnically homogeneous, as was the Roman Republic where governing power resided in the Senate. But eventually different interests replace common interests, and the Senate became dysfunctional.

At that point in order to get things done Rome had a couple of temporary term-limited dictators. Then, seeing the collapse of the republican order, Julius Caesar broke the rules and crossed the Rubicon. But Caesar, despite his name, was still not a Caesar. His adopted son, Octavius who took the name Augustus was the first Roman Caesar. Augustus was careful to keep alive the pretense that the Senate was still, at least partially, ruling. But after Augustus, executive authority ruled without pretense.

This is the position in which a dysfunctional American legislature has placed the United States. For decades the Congress has been losing power to the executive. FDR’s presidency in the 1930s was a major destroyer of the power of Congress. Roosevelt’s regulatory agencies seized the power over law by how they wrote the regulations that implemented it. In fact, the New Deal destroyed the power of Congress. Legislative power moved to the civil service in the regulatory agencies.

Seeing the weakness, the federal courts moved in. Today the federal courts, when it serves the establishment, legislate and impose limits on executive authority despite the separation of powers, but stand aside when executive orders serve the establishment.

Of the three branches of government, the legislature is no longer of much importance.

There are no longer only three branches of government in the US. There are four branches, the fourth being the civil service. Once upon a time in a fairy tale the incorruptible, objective civil service was non-partisan and served the American people by keeping the elected government honest. But it was always liberal, because it attracted people who believed in more government.

Today the civil service, recruited as ideological Democrats since the 1990s when Clinton forced civil service retirements in order to make room for blacks and women, is a fourth branch of government, and perhaps the most powerful branch. Trump and Musk are trying to rein it in, but the judiciary is rushing to its defense.

Trump and Musk with their opening blitzkrieg had surprising success. But the establishment has regrouped and launched a counterattack, using, of course the corrupt American judiciary. Judges are no longer appointed for their commitment to justice but for the causes that they support.

Just as American journalism schools teach that the purpose of journalists is not to report the facts but to spin the facts in order to revolutionize society, law school students are taught that their function is not to serve justice but to revolutionize society. Their law school professors having made them confident in using their judicial power for transformative reasons, judges issue their own edicts. These judicial edicts–certainly not legal rulings–are being rapidly issued to block Trump’s effort to bring the government under control and to return the government’s accountability to the elected president. If the President is of the establishment, presidential assertions of power are permitted. Otherwise, the establishment converts the President into a figurehead.

I predicted that the minute Trump moved to “take back the government,” endless lawsuits would be brought to prevent him from functioning as President.

A federal judge has assumed a non-existent authority to block the Department of Government Efficiency from Labor Department data essential for the Department of Government Efficiency to do its job.

Another federal judge has blocked the Department of Government Efficiency from access to Treasury Department data, ruling that the data is too sensitive for the President of the United States to see. So who can see the data? If it is protected by privacy laws, how could it have been collected?

A dozen Democrat state attorney generals are also suing to block the Department of Government Efficiency from access to Treasury data, claiming it is an unprecedented violation of privacy rights. Think about this for a minute. If the data is private, what is the Treasury Department doing with it? Why can one Department that reports to the President have the data, but not another? Can judges deny the President from having information in departments that report to him? Can the CIA deny the President national security data?

Trump’s Justice (sic) Department, which clearly is not yet Trump’s, has sided with the judge who has blocked Trump’s access to the Treasury data. Somehow it is “unlawful” for the President to know what is going on in his government. If the government is not the President’s, whose government is it? The establishment’s? The civil service’s? The judiciary’s?

Professors and university administrators are suing to block Trump’s DEI orders on the grounds that it violates academic freedom. Of course, there is no academic freedom in universities. There are entire university departments devoted to monitoring the speech of students and professors and assigning offenders to sensitivity-training. Scientists who challenged the Covid narrative and the 9/11 narrative were terminated. The reason the corrupt universities are trying to protect Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is that DEI is the source of their power to censor critics of the censorship regime that has been established in universities.

The federal district judge blocking Trump’s shutdown of the totally corrupt USAID is Trump’s own appointment, another of Trump’s first term mistakes. The extraordinary misuses of funds by USAID have come to light. I have reported many in the last couple of days. More are coming. The funds have been used to support “color revolutions,” to purchase the leaders of foreign governments, to support media attacks on skeptics of official narratives and political opponents of Woke policies and open borders.

The judicial interventions mount.

What can Trump do?

He could have the judges arrested for obstructing the Office of the President, for obstructing justice, or on whatever charge the DOJ cares to invent. Remember, the DOJ had no problem inventing all sorts of phony charges against Trump himself, against the January 6 protesters, against Mike Lindell, against Trump’s attorneys, against Rudy Giuliani. Neither has George Soros’ implant of Letitia James as NY Attorney General had any difficulty inventing charges no one has ever heard of. She doesn’t even need charges. She ruins people without charges. Her notorious attack on the website Vdare succeeded in shutting down the website without ever bringing a charge against the site. She just demanded endless information, the provision of which bankrupted the website.

Letitia James, having violated the privacy of Vdare’s executives, donors, and many other of this evil woman’s victims, is now self-righteously leading a multi-state lawsuit to block the Department of Government Efficiency from viewing data that the government has already accessed. In other words, the data has to be covered up because of the corruption that it reveals. It shows how far the Cultural Marxist “march through the institutions” has progressed. It is the greatest of ironies that Trump’s Justice (sic) Department has accommodated his Democrat opposition and blocked the Department of Government Efficiency’s access to Treasury Department data. If Trump doesn’t clean out the corrupt Justice (sic) Department before one more day passes, he might as well resign.

Judges and prosecutors, especially the DOJ prosecutors, long ago abandoned any pretense at applying a rule of law. Law is a weapon of coercion. Trump must use it against his enemies just as they used it against him. After the hard struggle to win reelection, why let a corrupt judiciary and Justice (sic) Department prevent him from achieving the agenda for which he was elected?

The weak-minded will say that if Trump behaves as his enemies do he will be just like them. But that is untrue. They used law as a weapon in order to destroy America. Trump would be using law to save America. If Trump doesn’t fight fire with fire, he and America will be consumed by the fire of the weaponized law used by our Woke, DEI, Democrat, Establishment enemies against us.

The Democrats and the Woke intellectuals are the enemies of Americans. No use pretending otherwise. The task is to get their tentacles that are destroying our values out of our lives and our government. If this is not done, there is no possibility of making America great again.

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A Fight to the Death Is Underway
https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2025/02/09/a-fight-to-the-death-is-underway/