The Fourth of July we just observed, nearly 250 years after America’s Declaration of Independence, felt like a time for reckoning, not celebration. It was the saddest Fourth of July I’ve experienced in over 65 years. Until now, I never associated this day with sorrow—it was always a moment of hope and renewal. But not this year. We are amidst an ominous regime change in America.

Back in 1776, the Declaration of Independence, penned by Thomas Jefferson, marked the first regime change: transforming the colonies into an independent nation. Yet from the beginning, a touch of irony tinged the colonists’ complaints. It wasn’t King George III but the British Parliament that had imposed new taxes. The colonists actually wanted the King to violate the law and overturn Parliament’s decision. When he refused to play dictator, they branded him a tyrant —and moved to sever ties with the empire. The Declaration of Independence inaugurated the American colonies’ divorce from the British Empire.

America’s grand experiment in regime change overcame war and formidable odds to establish a representative government. But that democracy was built for white adult men alone.  For everyone else, democracy remained an unfinished journey. The Civil War (1861–65) and its aftermath led to another profound regime change , pushing the nation closer to its democratic promise. This long, turbulent struggle eventually culminated in the Voting Rights Act of 1965, finally expanding democracy at last to millions who had long been excluded.

Fast forward to the end of WWII: America emerged as an unrivaled superpower. Its economic and military power placed it at the pinnacle of the global power pyramid. The Cold War with the Soviet Union gave the U.S. both the pretext and the opportunity to project its influence across the world. American leaders quickly embraced regime change as a favored tool, especially targeting weaker nations with governments they found objectionable. It didn’t take long before the U.S.  was orchestrating an orgy of regime changes around the globe.   By one count, between 1947 and 1989 alone, America attempted to change the governments of other countries 72 times—66 covertly and six openly. These interventions routinely violated international law, from the 1928 Pact of Paris that outlawed wars of aggression and the 1945 UN Charter prohibiting “the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” And each left its mark, changing the history of targeted nations, often radicalizing their politics and leaving them worse off than before.

Today, we’re being forced to swallow the same medicine we once so readily imposed on weaker, poorer nations. Make no mistake: this July 4th, we are witnessing a regime change—only this time, it’s unfolding here at home.Its seeds were sown during Donald Trump’s first term. As far back as 2017, the late, great journalist Bill Moyers sounded the alarm, observing that for the first time in American history, we had a president “living in a different reality from everybody else, including those who were trying to serve him in the White House.” It foretold the democratic crisis we now face.

Despite Trump’s astonishingly chaotic first term—and his brazen last-ditch insurrection attempt to overturn his 2020 electoral defeat—he left office disgraced. Yet he managed to achieve something with lasting consequences: appointing three far-right justices who have transformed the Supreme Court into a deeply conservative, politicized body poised to serve him in 2025.

That was then. In the interregnum between his first and potential second terms, Trump succeeded in remaking the Republican Party into a loyalist machine devoted not to traditional conservative principles but to him personally.

By the time he won his second term in 2024, Trump effectively controlled the entire trifecta of the federal government: the Executive Branch, Congress, and a highly sympathetic majority on the Supreme Court. As a result, the constitutional guardrails of checks and balances were left battered and unable to function as intended.

Meanwhile, the chaos that defined his first term was replaced by a more organized drive to hollow out the very machinery of American government. Well before his second term, the ultra-right-wing think tank, the Heritage Foundation, along with nearly 150 former Trump staffers, had laid out a sweeping plan called Project 2025. At its heart was a 900-page policy manual, Mandate for Leadership—a blueprint to radically reshape the entire executive branch.

Despite his denials, evasions, and outright lies, Trump has been rapidly pushing forward the Project 2025 agenda, aiming to dismantle the regime that has governed America since the end of the Civil War. In pursuing this unholy mission, he risks not just a regime change, but a regime collapse.

This Fourth of July marked a high noon for America—a moment of reckoning on where we started and the pit into which we are now sleepwalking, two and a half centuries later.

For nations that once fell victim to America’s regime change ventures, watching the U.S. get a taste of its own medicine might seem like a dark poetic justice. Except this time, it isn’t a foreign power orchestrating the upheaval—it’s a homegrown figure who, more astutely than any traditional politician, recognized the deep vulnerabilities in our political system and skillfully leveraged them to amass powers beyond constitutional bounds. These were flaws most Americans failed to see, lulled by a misplaced confidence that established democracies were somehow immune to serious backsliding. Now, we are drifting toward an alternate reality—one that bears all the grim hallmarks of a reactionary dystopia.

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