A Declaration of Independence for our Time

A Fourth of July reflection on power, citizenship, and the preservation of the Republic.

As America celebrates its 250th birthday, the greatest threat to liberty does not come from a distant king but from the growing acceptance of authoritarianism at home. Fidelity to constitutional democracy—not loyalty to any individual—is the true test of patriotism in our time.

With attribution and apologies to Thomas Jefferson

WHEN IN THE COURSE OF HUMAN EVENTS the people of a nation commemorate a quarter millennium of their nation’s democratic journey but find that celebration haunted by an authoritarian danger that threatens the continued assurance of liberty to themselves and their posterity, a decent respect to all the inhabitants of that nation requires that those recognizing and resisting this encroachment upon their liberties declare the causes and events that impel them to withstand the tyrant within their midst and resist the establishment of a new monarchy more pernicious than that from which they separated 250 years ago.

We hold these truths to be self-evident that all people are created equal and remain entitled to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, a principle cited in the nation’s original Declaration but one only belatedly implemented through a progressive series of measures that finally reflected our society’s acceptance of its universality. It remains true today that governments are instituted among the people to secure these rights and that the legitimacy of these governments depends upon the consent of the governed so that when a person or political movement becomes destructive of those ends it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it by preserving and using the means provided in their Constitution. Prudence, indeed, suggests that governments long-established shall not be changed for light and transient causes, and experience has shown that a people are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right and duty to resist such despotism and pursue their future security through every lawful means. To prove the perfidy, deceit, and transgressions of the current occupant of the presidency, let these Facts be submitted to the People and to a candid World.

He has sundered the alliances and world order that provided peace, security and unprecedented prosperity to the Nation for the better part of the past century leaving our international reputation in tatters, our national honor in disrepute, our allies offended and confused, and our security endangered;

He has further threatened those international relationships and the domestic and world economies with a dangerous program of erratic tariffs imposed at his whim, often without legal authority, and certainly without reason or logic;

He has engaged the nation and its military in feckless foreign wars and interventions without the authority of the Congress and against the wishes of the people;

He has amassed for himself and his family an unprecedented fortune through questionable investments, tawdry commercial dealings and offerings, illegal emoluments, and specious lawsuits;

He, and the Supreme Court he has created, have promoted and implemented bigoted and racist policies directed towards removing the protections that, after a gruesome Civil War and a shameful history of discrimination, the people’s representatives had finally erected to remedy those wrongs;

He has designed and conducted a cruel, vindicative, and murderous immigration policy that has divided the nation and brought fear to the people;

He sought to prevent one of the most cherished features of our democracy, the peaceful transition of power, by inciting a riot that led to the death of law enforcement officers and the desecration of our Capitol;

He sought, then reneged only under the vociferous objections of the people and their legislators, to create a fund of nearly $1.8 billion from taxpayer dollars to pay those who supported his false election claims and besieged the Capitol in January 2021 in an effort to unlawfully perpetuate his reign by manipulation and deceit of the electoral process;

He has been convicted of 34 counts of fraud by the State of New York related to his efforts to hide hush payments to a porn star;

He has been found civilly liable for sexual assault and defamation but truculently refuses to pay those judgments and continues to denounce the judicial processes that produced them;

He has sought to alter the nation’s elections by executive fiat to impose biased and bigoted voting restrictions when the Constitution affords him no standing to do so;

He has dispatched agents like locusts throughout the land in an effort to find nonexistent support for his mendacious claims that the 2020 election was fraudulent;

He has sought to impose upon us, in times of peace, armies of federalized militia without the consent of the legislatures or executive authorities of the states;

He has visited upon us plans for repulsive monuments, edifices and other structures to be erected to his own glory, ego and vanity with which he proposes to besmirch our capital city and other locations throughout the land all funded either by the people’s taxes or by grift and fraud on an unprecedented scale;

He has disfigured and demeaned the people’s White House with garish decorations befitting a pharaoh or emperor, sundered an entire wing of the structure, and stained the South Lawn with a spectacle better suited to the Colosseum in Rome;

He has engaged in, and caused the Executive Branch of the nation’s government to support, a vindictive, unremitting, and unwarranted campaign of revenge and retribution to appease his ego and avenge his own wrongdoing through false and contrived fictions about his own past misdeeds;

He has praised despots abroad while casting suspicion upon the integrity of his own nation’s servants and institutions including insulting and demeaning the nation’s Intelligence Community by siding with one of those corrupt despots in an effort to undermine the investigation into the foreign influence that supported his candidacy in the 2016 presidential campaign;

He has debased the First Amendment and abused, with unremittent obloquy and insult, those who serve its purpose through responsible journalism necessary to maintain an informed citizenry essential to a vital democracy;

He has waged a corrosive campaign to diminish and encumber the nation’s institutions of higher learning and those government agencies intended to support the academic freedom and unfettered research that benefits all citizens;

He has lied to the people thousands of times during his service as the nation’s chief executive exhibiting levels of mendacity and indifference to the truth never approached by any prior occupant of the office and, by his prevarications, eroded public confidence in elections, institutions, the office of the presidency, and objective truth itself;

He has treated the offices of public trust as instruments of private loyalty, demanding fealty not to the Constitution, but to himself;

He has abused the pardon power afforded the president in the Constitution by employing it to reward obsequious friends, supporters and admirers with little regard for the crimes they have committed or the damage they have caused society;

He has attacked the independence of courts, judges, and juries whenever their judgments opposed his interests;

He has demeaned veterans, prisoners of war, public servants, and political opponents with language, character, and conduct unworthy of the dignity of his office;

He has trafficked in prejudice and resentment, exploiting divisions of race, religion, and origin for political advantage without regard to its impact on the citizenry or on the nation’s image abroad;

He has encouraged contempt for lawful oversight, refusing cooperation with congressional inquiries and dismissing accountability as persecution;

He has threatened retaliation against critics in government, the press, academia, and private enterprise, seeking not merely to defeat and disparage those who disagree but to intimidate all dissent;

In every stage of these oppressions and indignities, the true facts have been made known by the people and by the press but those facts have been answered only by repeated injury. A president, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

He has not acted alone in these endeavors but has been enabled, aided and abetted by a coterie of sycophants who amplify and spread his blasphemies. These accessories to his indignities and malfeasances excuse what they know should be condemned, sacrifice personal honor and principle for expedience and individual gain, and prioritize faction and partisanship over constitutional duty.

A republic cannot endure upon personality alone. Laws must govern leaders as well as the governed; truth must carry greater weight than lies no matter how frequently and widely propagated; and the temporary entrustment of power must never be mistaken for the arrogation of power as of right.

Therefore, on the sacred day celebrating the independence of our nation, let all who cherish our democracy remember that liberty is not preserved by the idolatrous worship of any one man, but by fidelity to our institutions, restraint, shared principles, mutual respect and the enduring recognition that no officeholder stands above the Constitution or beyond the judgment of a free people. These are principles worthy of our Lives, our Fortunes, and our Sacred Honor.

George Croner is a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and serves on the Advisory Council at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law. He is also a former principal litigation counsel at the National Security Agency (NSA) and Special Assistant U.S. Attorney. He is a member of The Steady State

Founded in 2016, The Steady State is a nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization of more than 400 former senior national security professionals. Our membership includes former officials from the CIA, FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense, and Department of Homeland Security. Drawing on deep expertise across national security disciplines, including intelligence, diplomacy, military affairs, and law, we advocate for constitutional democracy, the rule of law, and the preservation of America’s national security institutions.