Contra Trump
違憲惡法
On 17 September 2025, America’s annual Constitution Day, it just so happened that America’s roi manqué, the 47th President of the United States, was wined and dined by King Charles III, the descendant of the British sovereign who had been unsuccessful in his efforts to prevent American independence and, by association, the promulgation of the American Constitution.
Carol Ann Duffy, a former poet laureate of the United Kingdom, composed a poem acknowledging that ugly moment:
State/Banquet
How it glitters and shines, The Grand Service,
among the rocks and the rubble,
laid out on a breezeblock horseshoe table,
six crystal glasses per setting.
It took eight servants three weeks to polish —
silver coated in a thin layer of gold —
even the concrete dust in the air seems glamourised
and the ruins are decked in the uplifting flags of democracy.
To start, fillet of Dover sole filled with salmon mousse,
served on a bed of leeks with white wine sauce.
Poached Sandringham venison with truffles to follow,
then Key Lime Pie, and among the wines,
Chateau Pichon-Longueville Comtesse de Lalande, 1990.
Yum-yum. Let the trumpets sound on the bombsite
as the great and the good pick their way through,
and a famished child peers through a bullet-hole in a wall.
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Charles is bound by a long-established constitutional order, his American counterpart acts despite formal constitutional restraint.
On 4 July 2025, to mark Independence Day, Telos News published an essay by Judge J. Michael Luttig titled The Self-Evident Truths of Freedom—and of Tyranny, one that we reprinted as a chapter in Contra Trump under the title The Fourth of July 2025 & the Enemy Within. To honor Constitution Day 2025, Telos published a follow-up essay by the retired judge titled America’s Grievances Against Its “King”, which we reproduce below.
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In his introduction to Judge Luttig’s first essay, Ryan Lizza, editor of Telos News, wrote that:
On the eve of January 6, 2021, Judge Michael Luttig received an urgent message from Vice President Mike Pence’s office: Could he please make public his confidential advice to Pence that the vice president had no legal authority to overturn the 2020 election? Pence was under enormous pressure from Donald Trump to reverse the results, and he hoped that the analysis from Luttig, one of the most respected voices in American law, could thwart the effort. Luttig tweeted out his views, and Pence cited the Tweets in his letter to the nation as he left the White House for the U.S. Capitol as evidence that he couldn’t block certification of the election.
In 2021, during his first extensive public interview of his career—over three hours!— Luttig told me the incredible story of the Tweets that helped stop the coup of the 2020 presidential election. The story has been told many times since then, including during Luttig’s widely acclaimed testimony before the January 6th Committee, but one humorous detail often gets left out: Luttig didn’t know how to use Twitter. So before he could send what became some of the most important Tweets in history, Luttig had to call his son for tech support to walk him through the process.
Today, America finds itself at another historic moment—another crisis—and Judge Luttig is once again the country’s most indispensable public scholar explaining the law to an American public bewildered by the actions of a lawless president. And once again, Judge Luttig is embracing a new medium to share his views with a wider audience. With some nudging from me, I’m pleased to report that Luttig is turning to Substack as a platform for his writing, which has never been more important.
His first foray on Substack is the extraordinary piece … that marks Independence Day 2025. It is not an essay or op-ed or polemic of any kind. Rather, it is a statement of truths that we Americans hold to be self-evident on this July 4—the eve of America’s founding and the celebration of its 250th anniversary—and it’s a jarring exposition of how closely the modern-day truths parallel the American Colonists’ original list of self-evident truths of freedom and of tyranny.
This is not a piece that should be skimmed or scanned. Luttig is writing for the ages. I recommend you take some time away from the crush of news, find a quiet place without distractions, and read this piece carefully. That’s when the power of what Luttig has written will hit you. I believe Luttig’s piece will be of historic significance, and Telos News is enormously proud to publish it.
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Students of modern Chinese history and of Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium will appreciate the significance of the ongoing Trumpist/MAGA assault on the American Constitution, if for no other reason that they will be aware that the long struggle for a meaningful constitutional order both during the Chinese republic and, from 1949, its doppelgänger, the People’s Republic of China has consumed the energies, and inspired the hopes, of many generations.
Readers of China Heritage will be particularly aware of the consequential assault on the PRC constitution, a threadbare if prolix document, by Xi Jinping and his comrades over the years, something that has upended even the most modest political reforms of the Deng-Jiang-Hu era (see, for example, Xu Zhangrun, Xi’s China, the Handiwork of an Autocratic Roué). Elsewhere, I have described this alarming process, one that began in December 2012 and that continued up to and beyond March 2018, as being the ‘Fourth Auto-golpe’ in PRC history (see the introduction to the series Contra Trump).
Since launching China Heritage in 2016, we have frequently celebrated the ideas and words of Chinese constitutional specialist and lawyers, including Xu Zhangrun 許章潤, Zhang Qianfan 張千帆 and Xu Zhiyong 許志永. They and their fellow men and women of conscience have been relentlessly targeted, pilloried and punished by Beijing. The betrayal of the American Constitution by all three branches of the American government offers succour to Xi Jinping and his fellow global autocrats while further undermining the advocacy of the champions of meaningful constitutional rule in China.
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If I were to express any reservation about the rousing essay reproduced below, and its predecessor, it would be that Judge Luttig frames his argument in what might be called ‘the hopeful present tense’, even though the ‘historic present’ — though not yet the ‘past perfect’ — would seem to be more appropriate. For all of the wailing and gnashing of teeth, we recall that it was Addison Mitchell McConnell III and Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. whose actions, and lack of action, have led directly to the undoing of America’s constitutional order.
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The Chinese rubric of this chapter in Contra Trump is 違憲惡法 wéi xiàn è fǎ, ‘noxious laws that contravene the constitution’.
— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
17 September 2025
America’s Constituion Day
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America’s Grievances Against Its “King” on
Constitution Day 2025
J. Michael Luttig
In his defense of the Constitution against what he describes as Trump’s “vicious, unsustainable, and unendurable attack,” Luttig has assumed the role of a republican statesman in the old mold—part Marcus Tullius Cicero, part James Madison. Like Cicero, Luttig’s warnings have been precise, legal, insistent that republics die less from the assault than from the neglect, and that respect for the law, once forsaken, rarely returns. As Madison did, Luttig has been reminding Americans that the Constitution is not a set of suggestions, but the frame that bears the weight of the Republic. He has warned not of imminent collapse, but the creeping rot that follows when reverence for law gives way to partisan expediency. In his new essay, Luttig declares “twenty-six grievances against the forty-seventh President of the United States,” and, invoking Abraham Lincoln, he calls for the Constitution to once again “become the political religion of the nation.”
— Ryan Lizza
“We the People . . . ordain[ed] and establish[ed]” our Constitution in 1787 “in Order to form a more perfect Union.”
It was not until 2004, over two centuries after the signing of the United States Constitution on September 17 that Congress legislated Constitution Day.
If the First Congress of the United States had legislated Constitution Day in 1789, this Constitution Day 2025 would be the most critical and consequential Constitution Day for America in all of our history. For, on this Constitution Day, our Constitution and Rule of Law; our institutions of democracy and law; our institutions of government and governance; and our institutions of justice and law enforcement are under vicious, unsustainable, and unendurable attack.
Speaking in another tumultuous time in America over one hundred and fifty years ago, Abraham Lincoln urged upon the nation a revival to the Constitution, a renewed reverence for that Great Charter for our governance and guarantor of our liberty and our freedoms.
“Let reverence for the laws,” the 29-year-old Abraham Lincoln beseeched, “be breathed by every American mother to the lisping babe that prattles on her lap — let it be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges; let it be written in Primers, spelling books, and in Almanacs; — let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, and enforced in courts of justice. . . .”
Let the Constitution “become the political religion of the nation,” Lincoln sermonized with the reverence he beseeched.
On this Constitution Day, September 17, 2025, “We the People” declare these twenty-six grievances against the forty-seventh President of the United States, as the American Colonists declared their twenty-six grievances against King George III on Independence Day, July 4, 1776, almost two hundred and fifty years ago. And as did Abraham Lincoln before us, we beseech that the Constitution once again “become the political religion of the nation.”
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Those then, who resist a confirmation of public order, are the true Artificers of monarchy—not that this is the intention of the generality of them. Yet it would not be difficult to lay the finger upon some of their party who may justly be suspected. When a man unprincipled in private life desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents, having the advantage of military habits—despotic in his ordinary demeanour—known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty—when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity—to join in the cry of danger to liberty—to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion—to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day—It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may “ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.”
― Alexander Hamilton
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He has ruled us as if he were a king who is above the law, when in America there are no kings, the law is king, and no man is above the law.
He has corrupted our democracy and asserted control over our elections in violation of our Constitution.
He has refused to faithfully execute the laws, and he has waged war on our Constitution, our Rule of Law, and our Federal Courts, abridging our constitutional rights, mocking our Constitution and Rule of Law, and attacking our courts. He has defied the orders of our courts, and has harassed, accused, and threatened our judges in order to delegitimize them, intimidate them, and bend them to his will and against our Constitution.
He has corrupted our institutions of law, justice, and law enforcement, making of them instruments for his unfaithful and revengeful execution of the laws against us, not for offenses against the nation, but for perceived personal and political offenses against him.
He has sought absolute power, unchecked and unbalanced by the other branches of our government, by the several states, by the free press, or by us.
He has enthralled our Supreme Court, spellbinding it into submission to him and his will rather than to the Constitution and its will, and our Supreme Court has favored him with its affirmation and its acquiescence in his lawlessness.
He has arrogated to himself the powers of our Congress and subjugated our Congress to his will so that our representatives are subservient to him and not to us, and Congress has willingly ceded to him its power, which is our power and not its power to cede.
He has commandeered the several states and their officials into his personal service in violation of the sovereign rights reserved to them by the Constitution.
He has proclaimed the free press to be the “enemy of the people” and censored it, and the press has surrendered to him our constitutional right to the free press and abdicated its constitutional responsibility to protect us from him, bribing him in return for his official and political favor and leaving us without the protection of a free press.
He has pronounced us enemies of each other and made of us enemies one of another. He has deliberately divided us from each other, turning us against one another, citizen against citizen, neighbor against neighbor, friend against friend, parent against child, and child against child.
He has censored and suppressed our speech and silenced our dissent by persecuting and prosecuting us for speaking critically of him and for dissenting from him and his rule, denying us our constitutional rights to speak freely, to associate freely with each other, and to petition our government, for fear of his reprisal.
He has claimed false emergency after false emergency where there has been none, in order to seize powers that are not his — constitutional powers, war powers, foreign policy powers, national security powers, military powers, border security powers, economic powers, taxing powers, trade powers, spending powers, social powers, public health powers, and even judicial powers — and with these wrongly seized powers he has wrought havoc on the nation and on the world.
He has alienated and abandoned our allies and our friends around the globe, and he has befriended and ingratiated himself with our adversaries and our enemies, aligning himself with them instead and upending our foreign policy and diplomatic history. With his withdrawal from our allies and friends, our allies and friends and our adversaries and enemies have conciliated and aligned themselves with each other and disaligned themselves with us.
He has taken military command of our cities and towns on false pretenses, without authority, cause, or justification, over objection of our state and local officials and in violation of our Constitution, dispatching his standing armies to occupy our cities and towns and patrol our streets, intimidating and harassing us, and striking fear in us solely for the purpose of striking fear in us, all for his own egotistic show of might.
He has asserted control over our central banking institutions responsible for our nation’s monetary policy, when the Constitution denies him such control, and he has recompositioned these institutions with loyalists to him, politicizing and roiling the global central banking system and destabilizing our national economy and the economies of the world.
He has eliminated departments and agencies of our government and renamed others without constitutional authority to do so, and he has summarily dismissed large numbers of our public servants without authority, cause, or justification, replacing them with persons loyal and servant to him and not to us.
He has scorned, slandered, and summarily dismissed from government our public servants who have sought to hold him accountable to us and to our Constitution for his grave offenses against our nation, and for unlawful purpose he has summarily dismissed from public service all who would hold him accountable for his present and future offenses against our nation, appointing in their places loyalists to him, so that he is accountable under law to no one.
He has weaponized our government against us, falsely and hypocritically declaring criminals to be heroes, befriending, pardoning, and exalting them, at the same time that he has falsely and hypocritically persecuted and prosecuted our fellow citizens, public servants, and national heroes in personal revenge for their political disagreement with him and for their attempts to hold him accountable to our Constitution for his various offenses.
He has falsely and hypocritically accused our leaders and our public servants of offenses — even treason — against our nation when, unlike him, they have committed no offenses against our nation whatsoever, and he has hypocritically persecuted and threatened to prosecute and imprison our leaders and public servants for their honorable service to us and to our nation.
He has dispatched swarms of his masked and unidentified officers to abduct us from our streets, our workplaces, and our communities without due process of law, and he has cruelly banished and exiled our neighbors and friends to faraway places to be held forever in squalid prisons unfit for human beings.
He has bludgeoned our colleges and universities on pretext and contrary to law, demanding control over their governance, quashing their academic freedom, and cracking down on free speech in our educational institutions and on our campuses.
He has unlawfully extorted our business companies and our legal profession, conscripting them into his personal service, and they have bribed him in return for his approval and for his official and personal patronage. Our companies have betrayed their shareholders, and our law firms their clients and the law, to gain his blessing and secure his official and personal favor.
He has taken dominion over our free enterprise and governmentalized our American capitalism, so that our great business companies are no longer independent of our government, but are dependent on and subject to our government, as in communist and socialist nations.
He has denied and sought to expunge the facts of our nation, our history, our national defense and intelligence, our economy and our justice, our science, our health, and our medicine, and he has summarily dismissed our public officials and national experts who have reported facts to him that he refuses to accept, replacing our public officials and national experts with servants loyal to him and ordering them to report false facts to him that are to his liking.
He has assumed control over the repositories of our history, culture, arts, and national identity and ordered our government to expunge and to rewrite our history, remake our culture, recreate our arts, and redefine our national identity in his image and to his preference.
He has exploited his high public office at home and abroad for emolument and enrichment of himself, his family, and his friends, at our expense and our nation’s expense, in violation of the Constitution.
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Source:
- J. Michael Luttig, America’s Grievances Against Its “King” on Constitution Day 2025, Telos News, 15 September 2025
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