This article was originally published by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead at The Rutherford Institute. 

“This is economic sabotage. Whether through malice or incompetence or, more likely, both Trump is isolating the United States on the world stage, tanking the markets, worsening inflation, and burdening working families with the cost of his 18th-century cosplay. These aren’t policies. They’re performance art. And the rest of us are footing the bill.”—Oregon’s Bay Area (blog post)

What we’re witnessing is the calculated use of emergency powers to concentrate power in the hands of the president, enrich the Deep State, and dismantle what remains of economic and constitutional safeguards.

Nearly 250 years after our nation’s founders rebelled over abused property rights, Americans are once again being subjected to taxation without any real representation, all the while the government continues to do whatever it likes—levy taxes, rack up debt, spend outrageously and irresponsibly—with little concern for the plight of its citizens.

Nothing has changed for the better with Donald Trump. Indeed, it’s getting worse by the day.

Having inherited one of the strongest economies in the world, President Trump—whose credentials as a businessman include multiple failed business ventures, bankruptcies, and a mountain of debt and unpaid bills—has managed to singlehandedly torch the economy with his misguided tariffs and self-serving schemes, which are being carried out without any oversight or checks from Congress.

Yet it is Congress, not the president, that holds the authority to control government spending.

This is spelled out in the Appropriations Clause, found in Article I, Section 9, Clause 7 of the Constitution, which establishes a rule of law about how the monies paid to the government by the taxpayers are to be governed, and in the Taxing and Spending Clause of Article I, Section 8, Clause 1. In a nutshell, Congress is in charge of accounting for those funds and authorizing how those funds are spent (or not spent).

The founders intended this regulatory power, referred to as the “power of the purse” (to determine what funds can be spent and what funds can be withheld) to serve as a potent check on any government agency that exceeds its authority, especially the executive branch.

As law professor Zachary Price observes, “Given how strong this check is, it may not be surprising that presidents have sought ways to get around it.”

Woven throughout the history of the United States are examples of this constant power struggle.

For instance, Congress used the power of the purse to end the Vietnam War and pull the U.S. military from Lebanon.

Yet while past presidents have sought to expand their authority under the guise of national emergency declarations, Trump has simply taken this executive overreach to unprecedented extremes.

Price explains how various presidents from Obama to Biden to Trump have attempted to subvert that same congressional power to press their own agendas, whether by funding the Affordable Care Act, advancing student debt, or, as in Trump’s case, by dismantling and defunding agencies funded by Congress.

Executive orders and national emergencies have become a favored tool by which presidents attempt to govern unilaterally. As the Brennan Center reports, presidents have access to 150 such emergency powers, which essentially allow them to become limited dictators with greatly enhanced powers upon declaration of an emergency.

Because the National Emergencies Act does not actually define what constitutes an emergency, presidents have an incredible amount of room to wreak constitutional mischief on the citizenry.

While presidents on both sides of the aisle have abused these powers, Trump is attempting to test the limits of these emergency powers by declaring a national emergency anytime he wants to sidestep Congress and quickly impose his will on the nation.

Trump’s liberal use of emergency powers to sidestep the rule of law underscores the danger they pose to our constitutional system of checks and balances.

Since taking office in January 2025, Trump has used his presidential emergency powers in a multitude of ways in order to mount brazen power grabs thinly disguised as concerns for national security, thereby allowing him to justify tapping into the nation’s natural resources, rounding up and deporting vast numbers of migrants (both documented and undocumented), and imposing duties and tariffs against longtime allies and trade partners.

Thus far, the Republican-controlled Congress, which has the power to terminate an emergency with a two-thirds vote, has done nothing to rein in Trump’s dictatorial tendencies.

These unchecked powers aren’t just a threat to the balance of government—they have immediate, devastating consequences for the economy and working Americans.

Economists fear the ramifications of Trump’s latest national emergency, which he claims will usher in “the golden age of America” through the imposition of heavy tariffs on foreign nations, could push the U.S. and the rest of the world into a major recession by inciting a global trade-war, isolating America economically from the rest of the world, and flat-lining businesses that had expected to boom.

Fears of a recession are growing stronger by the hour.

In addition to sabotaging the economy, laying off tens of thousands of federal employees and dismantling those parts of government which serve the interests of working-class Americans, as well as its aging, disabled and homeless populations, Trump and his cabal of billionaire buddies are dismantling the few remaining checks on public and private corruption—fueling corporate greed at every turn.

This is how the man who promised to drain the swamp continues to mire us in the swamp.

Meanwhile, taxpayers—whose retirement savings have taken a nosedive—are expected to foot the bill to the tune of tens of millions of dollars for Trump’s frequent golf trips to his own golf courses (he’s also charging exorbitant rates to Secret Service to stay at his properties while protecting him), his multimillion-dollar photo ops at the Super Bowl and the Daytona 500, his desire to redo the White House gardens and build a $100 million ballroom, and his latest demand for a costly military parade in honor of his 79^th birthday.

While President Trump may talk a good game about his plans for making America richer, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the only person he’s making richer—at taxpayer expense—is himself.

This fiscal insanity, coupled with Trump’s imperialistic and tyrannical ambitions, echoes the very abuses that drove America’s founders to rebel against King George III.

In other words, the government is still robbing us blind.

Trump hasn’t reined in the government’s greed—he’s just been using a different playbook to get the same result: beg, borrow, or steal, the government wants more of our hard-earned dollars any way it can get it.

This is what comes of those multi-trillion-dollar spending bills: someone’s got to foot the bill for the government’s fiscal insanity, and that “someone” is always the U.S. taxpayer.

The government’s schemes to swindle, cheat, scam, and generally defraud taxpayers of their hard-earned dollars have run the gamut from wasteful pork barrel legislation, cronyism, and graft to asset forfeiture, costly stimulus packages, and a national security complex that continues to undermine our freedoms while failing to make us any safer.

Americans have also been made to pay through the nose for the government’s endless wars, subsidization of foreign nations, military empire, welfare state, roads to nowhere, bloated workforce, secret agencies, fusion centers, private prisons, biometric databases, invasive technologies, arsenal of weapons, and every other budgetary line item that is contributing to the fast-growing wealth of the corporate elite at the expense of those who are barely making ends meet—that is, we the taxpayers.

Trump, a master at saying one thing and doing another, has made a great show of touting his claims to cutting back on government spending through crippling cuts that will impact almost every sector of the American landscape. However, what Trump fails to mention are all the costly big-budget items he’s tacking on that will not only consume his modest claims to saving money by axing essential programs but further mire the country in debt.

Indeed, Trump, the self-proclaimed “debt king,” has presided over one of the most reckless expansions of government spending in modern history while posturing as a fiscal conservative.

Consider that during Trump’s first term, the national debt rose by almost $7.8 trillion.

According to ProPublica, “That’s nearly twice as much as what Americans owe on student loans, car loans, credit cards and every other type of debt other than mortgages, combined… It amounts to about $23,500 in new federal debt for every person in the country. The growth in the annual deficit under Trump ranks as the third-biggest increase, relative to the size of the economy, of any U.S. presidential administration… And unlike George W. Bush and Abraham Lincoln, who oversaw the larger relative increases in deficits, Trump did not launch two foreign conflicts or have to pay for a civil war.”

If Trump’s first term was a preview, his second is a full-blown financial coup—waged against the American people with borrowed money.

Let’s talk numbers, shall we?

The national debt (the amount the federal government has borrowed over the years and must pay back) is more than $36 trillion and will grow another $19 trillion by 2033.

The bulk of that debt has been amassed over the past two decades, thanks in large part to the fiscal shenanigans of four presidents, 10 sessions of Congress and two wars.

It’s estimated that the amount this country owes is now 130% greater than its gross domestic product (all the products and services produced in one year by labor and property supplied by the citizens).

In other words, the government is spending more than it brings in and, in the process, drowning us in an empire of debt.

Interest payments on the national debt are more than $582 billion, which is significantly more than the government spends on veterans’ benefits and services, and according to Pew Research Center, more than it will spend on elementary and secondary education, disaster relief, agriculture, science and space programs, foreign aid, and natural resources and environmental protection combined.

According to the Committee for a Reasonable Federal Budget, the interest we’ve paid on this borrowed money is “nearly twice what the federal government will spend on transportation infrastructure, over four times as much as it will spend on K-12 education, almost four times what it will spend on housing, and over eight times what it will spend on science, space, and technology.”

In ten years, those interest payments will exceed our entire military budget.

This isn’t governance. It’s looting—by legislation, debt, and design.

We’ve been sold a bill of goods by politicians who promise to pay down the debt, rebuild the economy, and protect our freedoms—but deliver only more debt and more control.

Indeed, the national deficit (the difference between what the government spends and the revenue it takes in) remains at more than $1.5 trillion.

According to the number crunchers with the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, in order to spend money it doesn’t have on programs it can’t afford, the government is borrowing roughly $6 billion a day.

Basically, the U.S. government is funding its existence with a credit card.

If Americans managed their personal finances the way the government mismanages the nation’s finances, we’d all be in debtors’ prison by now.

Despite the government propaganda being peddled by the politicians and news media, however, the government isn’t spending our tax dollars to make our lives better.

We’re being robbed blind so the governmental elite can get richer.

This is financial tyranny.

In the eyes of the government, “we the people, the voters, the consumers, and the taxpayers” are little more than pocketbooks waiting to be picked.

“We the people” have become the new, permanent underclass in America.

We have no real say in how the government runs, or in how our tax dollars are spent, but we’re being forced to pay through the nose, anyhow.

We have no real say, but that doesn’t prevent the government from fleecing us at every turn and forcing us to pay for endless wars that do more to fund the military industrial complex than protect us, pork barrel projects that produce little to nothing, and a police state that serves only to imprison us within its walls.

While we’re struggling to get by, and making tough decisions about how to spend what little money actually makes it into our pockets after the federal, state and local governments take their share (this doesn’t include the stealth taxes imposed through tolls, fines and other fiscal penalties), the government continues to do whatever it likes—levy taxes, rack up debt, spend outrageously and irresponsibly—with little thought for the plight of its citizens.

And now Trump, eager to do away with goods and services for the poor and needy while imposing a greater tax burden on the working-class citizenry (a burden not shared by the nation’s financial elite), wants $1 trillion for the military so it can be even more lethal and prepared to unleash violence around the globe.

That’s in addition to the nearly $1 billion the Pentagon has already spent on Trump’s largely futile bombing campaign in Yemen.

Incredibly, all of these wars the U.S. is so eager to fight abroad are being waged with borrowed funds. As The Atlantic reports, “U.S. leaders are essentially bankrolling the wars with debt, in the form of purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds by U.S.-based entities like pension funds and state and local governments, and by countries like China and Japan.”

Of course, we, the taxpayers, are the ones who have to repay that borrowed debt.

As Dwight D. Eisenhower warned in a 1953 speech, this is how the military-industrial complex continues to get richer, while the American taxpayer is forced to pay for programs that do little to protect our rights or improve our lives.

This is no way of life.

Once again, we have a despotic regime with an imperial ruler doing as they please.

Once again, we have a judicial system that insists we have no rights in the face of a government that demands total compliance.

And once again, we’ve got to decide whether we’ll keep footing the bill for tyranny.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, if you have no choice, no voice, and no real say over how your money is used, you’re not free. You’re being ruled.

This is no longer the American dream. It’s a financial nightmare.

As political analyst Robert Reich warns, “Make no mistake about what’s really going on here. While the United States has plenty of real problems to deal with, Trump is ignoring them to manufacture the fake emergencies he needs to further enlarge and centralize his power. America’s real national emergency is Donald J. Trump.”

Until we push back, this nightmare will only deepen.