No coalition for reason

US President Donald Trump’s America is taking a dangerous direction, headed towards the possible demise of democracy. His unconstitutional actions range from stifling free speech in media, attacking higher education, and damaging the healthcare system, to issuing forced deportations and trying to politicize the defense department. As a result, aspects of a liberal Western democratic state are under threat due to Trump and his ilk’s obsession with authoritarianism and white nationalism. Considering the unique and central position the US occupies as the global superpower, such a trajectory will ultimately seep into the existing world order and leave developing states riven by its consequences.

On free speech, President Trump has been actively threatening his critics and stifling dissent in the media. His copious tweeting provides enough evidence of his politics being based more on impulse than intellect and reason. He has called multiple media organizations, such as CNN and BBC, “illegal” solely because they disagree with his policies and try to hold his coalition accountable for their supremacist ideologies. His historic assault on free speech is not limited to a few mean comments either. He doubles down by issuing billion-dollar lawsuits and funding cuts on independent press companies. His recent attack on free speech was pursued by his lackey, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, whose public threats to ABC resulted in the canceling of Jimmy Kimmel’s show, followed by national outrage that forced the show back on air. Assault on free speech, freedom of thought, and forcing media censorship fall directly under violations of the First Amendment of the US Constitution.

The Trump administration’s feckless crackdown on higher education is another clear attempt to banish diversity of thought and progressive ideals within academic circles. This started with the administration’s freezing of NIH funds for Harvard University’s grants and contracts unless they caved to their ‘demands,’ like a mafioso. Trump, in his executive role, has abused his authority by demanding unprecedented interference in university operations, including admissions, setting the curriculum, foreign student status, DEI programs, and so on. This overreach escalated to targeting other institutes such as Columbia University, UCLA, Northwestern University, Princeton University, and Brown University — setting a template for further extravagance. The Republican government initiated this policy goal under the guise of combating anti-Semitism, which is a false cover. It is a well-known fact that the POTUS himself is an anti-Semite who adores Adolf Hitler to such a degree that during his first term of presidency, according to his first wife, he would sleep with a book of Hitler’s speeches right next to his bed. In another instance, Trump said to his then-Chief of Staff, John Kelly, “Hitler did some good things.” These two incidents are the mere tip of the iceberg in his long list of anti-Semitic comments. Therefore, ignoring his flabby, insipid excuses, let’s call this crackdown what it is: seizing control of free thought. Judge Burroughs described the administration’s true aim as an “ideologically motivated assault,” which shows that their white-supremacist agenda is not a secret. This ideology was also repeatedly discussed by Vice President JD Vance and White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller since their early media presence.

When it comes to the healthcare system, it is a hodgepodge of human rights violations and increasing class disparity. A 15% cut has been introduced to Medicaid spending under Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB) Act, whose ugly impacts are estimated to be the loss of health insurance for about 11.8 million Americans, according to the Congressional Budget Office. William Dow, Professor of Health Policy and Management at UC Berkeley School of Public Health, calls this “undoubtedly the largest, most regressive cut to federal health benefits that has ever been enacted in the U.S.” Similarly, The Lancet medical journal declared that Trump’s cuts to the USAID budget will result in 14 million additional deaths by 2030, of which four and a half million are children under the age of 5. The US Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has assumed a similar mission to reduce scientific research to a farrago of anti-vaccine drivel, misinterpreting research to support his own claims and non-existent links between certain medicines and medical conditions. US public health has global outreach, and where the current health sector is headed is dangerous to all, especially the vulnerable communities relying on the CDC and other departments.

Immigration in the US, under the Trump regime, has seen cataclysmic upheaval. Trump’s immediate executive order regarding immigration proclaimed an “invasion of the United States by millions of illegal aliens” and called for the construction of a wall on the southwestern border, endangering people’s right to asylum. The rhetoric Trump used against immigrants in this order was caustic and corrosive, to say the least. He appointed a “border czar,” Tom Homan, whose title may sound ridiculous, but his policies are much worse than the title suggests. Under Homan, the ICE agencies have turned into masked officials carrying weapons — highly unusual behavior for this position — threatening people of color without legitimate cause, throwing them in detention centers, not granting fair trials, and forcibly deporting a large number of immigrants. The humanitarian losses and violence being observed in these detention camps and all over America are too extensive to contain in a few lines, but can be accessed on websites of organizations like Human Rights Watch. Another horrendous misstep in this goal has been the Trump administration’s efforts to rescind birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented parents. The executive order stating such is in direct violation of the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution, but the government is relying on interpretation to justify the breach.

Lastly, the recent debacle, broadcast internationally, was taken up by US Secretary of War (an embarrassing moniker for defense) Pete Hegseth and President Trump, where around 800 high-ranking US Generals and Admirals were addressed at Quantico, in efforts to politicize the military. Hegseth says, “No more climate change worship. No more division, distraction or gender delusions. No more debris,” while instituting a message of violence against “the enemy from within.” Surely he must realize that, yes, there is division in that. Although, Trump and his acolytes follow the age-old playbook for dictators, for which these words are quite standard. So, statements like “We also don't fight with stupid rules of engagement. We untie the hands of our war fighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt, and kill the enemies of our country” shouldn’t come as a shock either. This is exactly the mindset of a war criminal; no rules, guns akimbo, and besmirching the very sanctity of human life.

Seeing the US case study up close, it is pertinent to ask: Is this what the global world order is set to become? America reverting to a WW2 era and letting power-hungry elites take control is a trope. It’s Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Huxley’s Brave New World, and Orwell’s 1984. It’s a warning for the world to look for the signs of future oligarchs in their own surroundings and take swift action. When leaders of the most influential state start walking down such a destructive path, acting with no restraints on their authority, the ripples are felt more harshly in weaker states or fragile democracies already struggling under problematic leadership. In childhood, part of our bedtime family ritual included my mother reciting exciting moralistic tales for us kids, and one of the lessons from Aesop’s Fables in The Wolf and the Lamb that remained with me long after was, “The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny.” This moral lesson rings just as true today as it did years ago. Autocratic leaders are good at creating national security concerns and all sorts of threats to subdue the voices of the subjugated. At a time like this, it becomes our civic duty to relume the rhetoric of reason and resist the brutes and the tyrants.

The author is an advocate of the Lahore High Court.