Who is actually running the government?
That is no longer a rhetorical question.
As America’s war with Iran lurches from escalation to ceasefire to renewed threats of military force, Americans are being asked to trust that someone, somewhere, knows what they are doing.
But who?
This is the constitutional crisis hiding in plain sight.
The question is not merely whether Donald Trump is fit to lead. The question is whether any president still leads in any meaningful constitutional sense once the permanent war government gets moving.
The Iran war is merely the latest test case.
If the war machine keeps moving even when the public cannot tell who is steering it, then what remains of constitutional government?
This is the nightmare Rod Serling warned about in Seven Days in May.
Released in 1964, Seven Days in May imagined a dramatic military coup: generals plotting in secret to overthrow an unpopular president because they believed they knew better than the American people what was best for the nation.
The coup is eventually foiled. The republic is saved. The Constitution survives.
At least on screen.
In the real world, the plot has thickened and spread out over decades.
The old fear was that the military might seize power from the civilian government.
The modern reality is that the permanent government does not need to seize power.
It already has it.
The coup no longer requires generals in smoke-filled rooms plotting to overthrow the president at midnight. It does not require tanks on Pennsylvania Avenue or soldiers storming the Capitol. It does not even require an official suspension of the Constitution.
All it requires is secrecy, fear, endless war, executive power, emergency declarations, classified intelligence, compliant courts, cowardly legislators, corporate profiteers, militarized police, and a public too distracted, exhausted or frightened to resist.
That coup has been underway for decades.
Hellbound and Down 