Two hundred and fifty years ago, a group of colonists sat down and wrote a detailed list of reasons a government had become tyrannical. They covered military occupation of civilian life, the undermining of courts, and the use of armed force to crush political opposition. It reads, in 2026, less like a founding document and more like a current events briefing. Happy birthday, America.
The Grievances Were a Checklist, Apparently
Writing in The Guardian, University of Pennsylvania law professor Claire Finkelstein lays out the comparison with the kind of calm, methodical precision that makes it somehow more alarming than if she'd just started screaming. The Declaration of Independence, she points out, wasn't just about taxes. It was a detailed indictment of King George's use of military force against his own civilian population.
The colonists complained that British officers were sent to harass the people. That standing armies were kept among civilians in peacetime without legislative consent. That the military was placed in control of civilian government. Sound familiar? Finkelstein's suggested substitutions: swap in ICE and Customs and Border Protection for the British officers. Swap in the federalization and deployment of the National Guard and Marines to American cities for the standing armies. Swap in Trump overriding Democratic governors for the military superseding colonial legislatures.
The pictures are, as she puts it, dismayingly similar. That's the kind of understatement that arrives wearing a three-piece suit and then stabs you in the leg.
The Military Isn't Playing Along Perfectly — So They're Being Fixed
Here's the thing about the U.S. military: soldiers swear an oath to the Constitution, not to the president personally. This has caused some friction. According to Finkelstein's piece, the campaign to press federal troops into service against political opposition has not been entirely smooth sailing for Trump.
The solution, apparently, has been to remove the obstacles. Top Pentagon lawyers have been pushed out. Internal pressure has been applied against anyone who voices objections to Department of Defense policy. Slowly, the reporting suggests, this pressure is working, producing compliance with legally questionable directives, including strikes on drug boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific.
What you're watching is the gradual conversion of the U.S. military from an institution bound by law and constitutional limits into one bound by loyalty to a single executive. The founders wrote about this exact mechanism. They called it the path to dictatorship. They weren't speaking metaphorically.
The Supreme Court Slapped Him Down Once. He's Still Standing.
In December, the Supreme Court handed Trump a genuine loss. The Guardian reports that in Trump v. Illinois, the court found the administration had violated the law by deploying Illinois National Guard troops in Chicago to control what the administration called civil unrest, exceeding its authority under the relevant federal statute. Trump, who had stacked the court with conservatives, did not get the result he wanted.
Finkelstein calls this a likely temporary setback, and it's hard to argue otherwise. The bigger weapon in Trump's arsenal is the Insurrection Act, a collection of statutes that civil rights groups have long warned amounts to a nearly unassailable assertion of presidential power. The Insurrection Act would give Trump considerably broader authority to federalize and deploy troops over the objections of state governors than the statute the court just rejected.
So why hasn't he used it yet? Nobody knows for certain. Finkelstein raises one distinctly unsettling possibility: he might be saving it. Not for now. For the midterms.
The Midterms, the Insurrection Act, and a President Who Regrets Not Going Further Last Time
This is the part where the article stops being an interesting historical comparison and starts being a genuine emergency bulletin. According to The Guardian's reporting, when Trump lost the 2020 election, he entertained a plan with Michael Flynn and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell to use the army to seize voting machines and rerun the election. He was ultimately talked out of it by advisers.
He has since expressed regret that he didn't go through with it. And Finkelstein notes that this time around, there may be no grownups left in the room to stop him.
Trump's incentives to mess with the midterms are not subtle. A Democratic-led House could impeach him or, arguably worse from his perspective, launch investigations that could expose him to prosecution for personal crimes once he leaves office. The pressure to keep Republicans in power isn't just about politics. For this particular president, it may be about something closer to self-preservation.
What the Founders Were Actually Telling Us
Finkelstein's core argument is that the Declaration of Independence wasn't just a birth certificate. It was a warning manual. The founders had lived through what happens when an executive uses military force to suppress political opposition, undermine courts, and tighten control over elections. They wrote it all down, in careful detail, precisely because they knew future generations might need the reference.
Using the military to undermine civilian governance, the piece notes, is one of the preferred tools of dictators. If the military can be brought along, the president's ability to eliminate other checks and balances becomes dramatically easier. The rule of law doesn't collapse all at once. It gets eroded, quietly, through legal pressure and personnel changes and creative reinterpretations of statutes, until one day you look up and realize the guardrails are gone.
Two hundred and fifty years in, and the document drafted in a Philadelphia summer is doing exactly the job its authors intended: telling anyone paying attention that they have seen this before and they know how it ends.
The Dingo Take
The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence landed this week, and the official celebration involved fireworks, speeches, and a general vibe of patriotic self-congratulation. What it probably should have involved was someone reading the document out loud and asking the room how many of those grievances against King George currently apply to the sitting president. The answer, based on Claire Finkelstein's analysis in The Guardian, is: most of them.
The most important detail in this whole piece is the throwaway line about Trump expressing regret he didn't use the army to seize voting machines in 2020. That's not a historical footnote. That's a man telling you exactly what he was willing to do and what he wishes he had done. The question for the 2026 midterms is not whether Trump has authoritarian instincts. We are well past that debate. The question is whether the Insurrection Act, a depleted Pentagon legal corps, and a Supreme Court that already gave him one loss it may not repeat adds up to enough resistance to stop him from acting on those instincts when the stakes are at their highest.
The founders wrote the Declaration as a justification for revolution against a government that had become intolerable. They were not being dramatic. They were being precise. Precision, right now, would be useful.
