"If This Is Winning,
America Can’t Afford Much More of It"
by John & Nisha Whitehead
“We’re gonna win so much, you may even get tired of winning. And you’ll say, ‘Please, please. It’s too much winning. We can’t take it anymore. Mr. President, it’s too much.’”
- Donald Trump
"Donald Trump promised Americans they would get tired of winning. If this is what winning looks like, America can’t afford much more of it. We are losing ground economically. We are losing credibility abroad. We are losing tourists, workers, stability, trust, constitutional guardrails, and whatever remained of the illusion that the government answers to “we the people.”
The tourism economy is taking a hit, with international visitors increasingly reluctant to come to the United States. Even migration - the lifeblood of America’s economic growth, innovation, labor force and national renewal - is now moving in the wrong direction. Fewer people are coming in, more Americans are leaving, and by some estimates the country has already crossed into negative net migration. That is not the mark of a nation “winning.” It is the mark of a nation people are increasingly choosing to escape.
Even the looming World Cup - normally an economic windfall for tourism, travel and hospitality - is being shadowed by the administration’s immigration crackdown, detention protests and threats to disrupt international travel at key airports. That is what happens when a nation treats visitors, immigrants and dissenters as threats first and human beings second: people stop coming, businesses suffer, and fear becomes official policy.
The economy, despite the administration’s relentless victory laps, is flashing warning signs: downgraded growth, strained consumers, rising costs, depleted savings, and policy chaos that leaves families, small businesses and entire industries guessing what fresh disruption tomorrow will bring. We are being worn down by the losses.
Meanwhile, the man who promised to end wars has presided over their continuation and expansion. The man who promised to bring prices down has helped drive uncertainty up. The man who promised to drain the swamp has turned government into a spoils system for loyalists, cronies, contractors, oligarchs and power brokers. The man who promised law and order has treated the law as something to be weaponized against enemies and waived for friends. This is not winning. This is the slow-motion defeat of a constitutional republic by spectacle, grievance, greed and brute force.
Consider the running ledger of Trump’s so-called “wins.” A $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund - ostensibly created to compensate victims of government abuse - quickly became a case study in government abuse, with critics warning that taxpayer money could be used to reward Trump allies, political loyalists and even January 6 defendants. That fund has since been blocked in court, challenged as unlawful, and reportedly reconsidered amid bipartisan backlash, the larger agreement remains a flashing warning sign: a settlement that could shield Trump, his family and his affiliated businesses from future tax scrutiny reeks of self-dealing corruption.
A $400 million White House ballroom, pitched as a “gift” to the country, has become the perfect monument to this administration’s priorities: gilded spectacle, donor influence, security carveouts and imperial pageantry at a time when ordinary Americans are struggling to afford groceries, housing, health care and basic necessities.
The White House itself is being remade in Trump’s image - more gold, more grandeur, more vanity - while the constitutional foundations of the presidency are treated as disposable. Even the Kennedy Center became part of the branding exercise, until a federal judge ruled that Trump’s name had been illegally added and blocked the administration from closing the cultural institution for renovations.
And then there are the courts, where one Trump policy after another has run headlong into the limits of law. Again and again, lower courts have been forced to remind the administration that executive power is not absolute, that emergency does not erase the Constitution, and that even presidents must obey the law.
Those defeats have not been technicalities: judges have faulted the administration for viewpoint discrimination against media outlets, unconstitutional punishment of law firms, unlawful tariff maneuvers, and executive actions that treat constitutional limits as annoyances rather than binding law.
That is the measure of Trump’s winning: taxpayer-funded payback schemes, vanity projects, gilded rooms, legal defeats, constitutional chaos and a government increasingly run as if it were a personal empire. The president gets the spectacle. The loyalists get the spoils. The lawyers get the lawsuits. And the American people get the bill.
To hear the administration tell it, America is stronger, safer, richer, freer and more respected than ever. That is the sales pitch. That is the slogan. That is the circus tent erected over the ruins. The White House’s latest propaganda practically says the quiet part out loud: “TRUST IN TRUMP.” “Just sit back and relax,” the official message from Trump declares, “it will all work out well in the end - It always does!” That is not a governing philosophy. It is a demand for obedience.
A free people do not “sit back and relax” while the government expands its power, wages war, raids the treasury, punishes dissent, tracks its citizens, defies the courts and treats the Constitution as optional. A free people do not trust rulers. They bind them down. And when rulers demand trust while asking the people to ignore the evidence of their own eyes, that is when the people must look even closer.
Look closer, past the slogans, the victory laps and the gold-plated spectacle, and the losses are piling up. Americans were told they would get prosperity. What they got was an economy in which corporate profits and stock market gains mask the fact that ordinary households are stretched thin, savings are shrinking, debt is mounting, and the cost of basic necessities keeps eating away at wages.
They were told tariffs would punish foreign governments and bring jobs home. What they got were higher costs passed down to consumers, retaliation, supply disruptions, and a trade policy built less on strategy than on political theater. Even the courts have begun treating the tariff agenda as what it is: economic policy by executive improvisation, with judges striking down or narrowing tariff maneuvers while the administration keeps looking for new legal workarounds.
They were told immigration crackdowns would make America stronger. What they got was a nation frightening away the workers, students, tourists, entrepreneurs and families who have long helped power its economy.
They were told America would be respected again. What they got was a country increasingly viewed as unstable, hostile, unpredictable and unsafe - not merely by adversaries, but by allies, visitors, investors and would-be partners.
They were told the wars would end. What they got was more war talk, more military escalation, more blank checks for the war machine, and more excuses for expanding executive power in the name of national security.
They were told the Constitution would be restored. What they got was a president who declared, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”
Listen carefully when any ruler says something like that. That is not constitutionalism. That is the language of kings, dictators and strongmen who believe their intentions place them above the law. The Constitution was written precisely to prevent that kind of thinking from taking root in America. It does not say the president may violate the law if he claims noble motives. It does not say the executive branch may override Congress, bully the courts, punish critics, silence dissenters, deploy the military domestically, raid the treasury, or rule by emergency decree whenever it suits the occupant of the White House.
Even voting itself is being pulled into the machinery of executive control, with the Trump administration pushing a mail-in voting order that would insert federal agencies into voter eligibility and ballot delivery decisions traditionally controlled by the states. When the executive branch claims the power to decide whose vote gets counted, who gets mailed a ballot, and who gets prosecuted for resisting, the right to vote becomes one more freedom subject to presidential permission.
Yet that is the theory of government now being tested in real time: presidential power as a blank check, law as a weapon, rights as privileges, dissent as danger, and accountability as an inconvenience. Trump’s brand of winning requires Americans to lose.
For the police state to win, the Fourth Amendment must lose.
For the surveillance state to win, privacy must lose.
For the war machine to win, peace must lose.
For the executive branch to win, the separation of powers must lose.
For the oligarchs to win, working families must lose.
For the propaganda machine to win, truth must lose.
For a strongman to win, the Constitution must lose.
That is the bargain being offered to the American people: trade your rights for promises of safety, your freedoms for promises of greatness, your tax dollars for promises of prosperity, and your conscience for the thrill of watching someone else get punished.
This is how authoritarian politics works. It does not begin by announcing itself as tyranny. It comes wrapped in flags, slogans, scapegoats and promises of revenge. It offers people the satisfaction of seeing their enemies humiliated while quietly building the machinery that will eventually be used against everyone. That machinery is already in place. Consider for yourselves.
Free speech is still being undermined. The First Amendment prohibits the government from suppressing speech, punishing dissent, targeting protesters, intimidating journalists or coercing institutions into silence. Yet political speech that challenges government power is increasingly treated as suspicious, extremist, dangerous or disloyal. Anti-war protesters, student activists, whistleblowers, journalists, religious dissenters, political critics and ordinary citizens who refuse to mouth the party line all risk being swept into the expanding category of enemies of the state.
Surveillance is still expanding. Facial recognition, biometric tracking, license plate readers, cell phone location data, fusion centers, predictive policing algorithms, drones, AI data mining and financial monitoring have made it possible for the government and its corporate partners to track, catalog and profile the population with breathtaking efficiency. Everything that once would have required a warrant, manpower and probable cause can now be accomplished with a database, a software contract and a bureaucrat willing to click “search.”
The government’s police powers are still being weaponized. The same machinery used to target immigrants today can be used to target political dissidents tomorrow. The same watchlists used to monitor “extremists” can be used to monitor parents, veterans, gun owners, activists, journalists, religious believers, environmental protesters, anti-war demonstrators and anyone else who challenges the government’s preferred narrative.
Americans are still being treated as suspects first and citizens second. In a precrime society, innocence is irrelevant. What matters is what the algorithm predicts, what the watchlist suggests, what the data profile implies, or what some government official believes you might do, say, think or support. Due process becomes an afterthought once suspicion is automated.
The military is still being normalized as a domestic force. With every new call to deploy troops at home, every new declaration of emergency, every new fusion of local policing with federal power, the line between battlefield and homeland grows thinner. The founders understood the danger of a standing army used against the people. We are living with the consequences of ignoring their warnings.
Police remain militarized. Local law enforcement agencies, armed with battlefield equipment and trained in combat-style tactics, continue to function less like community peacekeepers and more like occupying forces. No free society can remain free for long when every encounter with the government has the potential to become a show of force.
Whistleblowers are still punished. Watchdogs are still sidelined. Inspectors general, auditors, investigators and civil servants who expose corruption are treated as obstacles to be removed rather than safeguards to be protected. A government that cannot tolerate scrutiny is a government with something to hide.
The imperial presidency is still expanding. Trump did not invent executive overreach, but he has embraced it with a vengeance. Every president in recent memory has contributed to the growth of presidential power through executive orders, emergency declarations, signing statements, national security directives and unilateral actions. Trump’s contribution has been to strip away the polite fiction that such power is being exercised reluctantly or within constitutional limits. He flaunts it.
That is the real danger of this moment. It is not merely that one president wants too much power. It is that the entire system has been conditioned to give it to him. Congress grumbles but abdicates. The courts object but defer. Agencies comply. Contractors profit. The media chases the spectacle. The public is distracted by the daily outrage cycle. The parties cheer when their side benefits and complain only when the machinery is turned against them.
This is how the Deep State wins no matter which party claims victory on Election Day. The faces change. The machinery remains. The slogans change. The surveillance remains. The party in power changes. The war machine remains. The rhetoric changes. The debt, the spending, the secrecy, the police state, the corporate influence, the emergency powers and the contempt for the Constitution remain.
Trump’s “winning” is simply the latest branding campaign for an old con: convince the people they are winning while stripping them of the power to govern themselves. Call it what you will - national security, border security, economic nationalism, law and order, anti-corruption, emergency authority, America First - but when the end result is more government power and less individual freedom, we should know by now who is really winning.
It is not the family struggling to afford groceries. It is not the small business trying to survive tariffs, inflation, labor shortages and regulatory whiplash. It is not the farmer, the teacher, the veteran, the student, the retiree or the parent trying to make ends meet. It is not the traveler detained, searched, questioned or turned away by an increasingly hostile security state. It is not the immigrant family living in fear. It is not the protester exercising First Amendment rights. It is not the citizen whose financial transactions, movements, communications and associations are being tracked. It is not the taxpayer forced to bankroll endless wars, corporate subsidies, militarized police, surveillance contracts, detention centers and political vanity projects.
The winners are the same as always: the defense contractors, data brokers, private prison operators, surveillance companies, lobbyists, political insiders, Wall Street speculators, government contractors, partisan enforcers, donors with access, loyalists seeking payouts, and bureaucratic power centers that thrive on fear, crisis and control. The losers are “we the people.”
This is the hard truth Americans must face: a government that promises to make you “win” by taking power away from someone else will eventually take power away from you, too. Rights are not partisan. Due process is not partisan. Free speech is not partisan. Privacy is not partisan. Limits on executive power are not partisan. The Constitution is not supposed to be a campaign prop, a legal technicality or a speed bump on the road to political victory. The Constitution is the contract that binds the government down. Without it, all we have are rulers and subjects.
That is why the real measure of any administration is not how loudly it boasts, how many enemies it punishes, how many executive orders it signs, how many troops it deploys, how many agencies it purges, or how many headlines it dominates. The real measure is whether the people are freer, safer in their rights, more secure in their property, more protected from government abuse, and more capable of holding power accountable.
By that measure, we are not winning. We are losing, and we are losing in all the ways that matter. We lose when the president claims the power to decide which laws apply to him. We lose when Congress allows itself to become irrelevant. We lose when courts are treated as obstacles rather than constitutional checks. We lose when police act like soldiers and soldiers are invited to act like police. We lose when dissent is treated as extremism. We lose when surveillance becomes the price of citizenship. We lose when the economy is engineered to benefit the powerful while ordinary Americans are told to applaud their own hardship as patriotism. We lose when war becomes permanent and peace becomes the broken promise no one bothers to keep. We lose when government by consent is replaced by government by coercion. And we lose most of all when we accept the lie that any of this is victory.
My friends, do not be fooled by the slogans. A nation can wave flags, stage parades, build monuments, boast of greatness, punish enemies, dominate headlines, and still be losing its soul. A president can call it winning. A party can call it winning. The media can package it as winning. The crowds can chant along. But if the price is the Constitution, then we all lose.
The solution is not to trade one strongman for another, one party’s abuses for another party’s abuses, or one set of rulers for another set of rulers who promise to use the same machinery more benevolently. The solution is to dismantle the machinery.
Reject the politics of fear. Reject the cult of personality. Reject the false choice between security and freedom. Reject the propaganda that tells you your neighbor is the enemy while the government quietly picks your pocket and strips you of your rights. Find common ground with your fellow citizens, not in party loyalty, but in constitutional principle. Defend free speech even when you dislike the speaker. Defend due process even when you dislike the defendant. Defend privacy even when you have nothing to hide. Defend limits on executive power even when your preferred politician occupies the White House.
Be dangerous in the best way possible: by thinking for yourself, refusing to be silenced, rejecting political tribalism, and insisting that no president, no party, no agency, no court, no corporation and no crisis is above the Constitution.
As I make clear in my book "Battlefield America: The War on the American People" and in its fictional counterpart "The Erik Blair Diaries," the government’s war on the people will not end until the people stop mistaking domination for leadership, spectacle for strength, and propaganda for truth.
Too much winning? No. Too much power. Too much corruption. Too much surveillance. Too much war. Too much greed. Too much fear. Too much government acting as if the Constitution is optional. If America is going to win again in any meaningful sense, it will not be because a politician promised it from a podium. It will be because “we the people” finally remembered that freedom is not something rulers give us. Freedom is something we must refuse to surrender."
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