'Arc de Trump' will tell Americans who's really in charge

For many gauging the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the end of Fourth of July festivities headlined by the president of the United States was a relief. Rather than using the nation’s bully pulpit to uplift and unify, he vilified fellow Americans with different political views as “communists,” misquoted the Declaration of Independence, trotted out aging, possibly unwitting wartime veterans as political props and unleashed a bombastic and expensive fireworks display that suggested World War III, not a national celebration.

In a predictable culmination of the Fourth in the Age of Trump, the president of the United States in his address on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., reduced veterans of World War II, Korea and Vietnam to conveniently timed bit parts while conflating their sacrifice and courage in faraway venues with his own as he voiced his determination to please his people and give his Fourth of July speech despite lightning and thunder. “If they can storm the beaches on D-Day,” he boldly told Fox News, “I can deliver a speech.”

Fearful of the approaching midterm elections and the prospect of Democrats taking over one or both houses of Congress, the Republican president repeatedly suggested that his political opponents were homefront communists seeking to take over the country. At one point, he ad-libbed recklessly, counting on either the ignorance or the easy manipulation of dulled MAGA minds in his audience: “And as our Declaration of Independence tells us, we are all made in the image of one almighty god. And a communist will never say that. That's for sure.”

Indeed, no intelligent communist would say this – nor would any red-blooded American who knew what he was talking about. The Declaration of Independence says nothing at all like this. Author Thomas Jefferson was a well-known skeptic of organized religion and a primary advocate of the separation of church and state, recognizing from history the frequent prostitution of religion in the service of tyrants. Wittingly or not, the president of the United States mined biblical text, not our nation’s foundational text, to malign, deceive and inflame.

And the MAGA crowd before him cared not a bit. They cheered in their denial, ignorance and hatred, completing the picture of America’s sad, delusional decline and fall.

Meanwhile, amid rockets’ red glare some of us wondered whether our republic would survive two and a half more years of this president, given his efforts to strike down by command parts of the Constitution he dislikes (and some Supreme Court justices’ willingness to accommodate him); armed, masked federal agents lawlessly arresting and shooting people, citizens and non-citizens alike; and possible passage of a law that would heap hardships on voters, especially if they “accidentally” get bumped off voter rolls and lack a passport or birth certificate.

“The dream of democracy is not dying – it’s really dead,” a New York Times subscriber opined in an otherwise lively online discussion among readers (including me) about films representing the American experience. “Our country always had a dirty underside, but the dirt is everywhere now. The country this movie is about is gone. We call this the United States, but this is another, starker, crueler and more corrupt country now. I will not celebrate the Fourth – my country didn’t make it to 250. This is a new country, only a few years old, and nothing to be proud of.”

Yet the Trump-styled Fourth isn’t over. There’s the matter of what his administration sometimes touts as the “Independence Arch,” which the president plans to impose on what many veterans view as sacred ground – that strategically designed stretch between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery. Australian-born art critic Sebastian Smee argues in The Atlantic that the arch would further undermine the meaning of the words “honor,” “sacrifice” and “humility” which “have been leaking away from American civic life like red blood cells from an anemic.”

To quote Smee, “if there’s one place where they [those words] retain their rich, sticky, life-giving force, it’s surely in the air around the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery. The cemetery is where Americans remember those who sacrificed their lives for the nation. The memorial is where they remember their greatest president – the man who proclaimed an end to slavery and kept the union intact, though the cost was staggering. The air between these two places is the medium through which Lincoln gets to speak with his war dead, and vice versa.”

This is a historically and patriotically relevant insight. The arch would sit within Memorial Circle, between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery, resting place of some 400,000 veterans and their families. “This 250-foot structure would permanently transform the view from the Lincoln Memorial to Arlington National Cemetery, one of the most sacred landscapes in America, where families visit fallen veterans every day,” Alexandra DeCandia wrote to a see-nothing/hear-nothing federal commission stocked with Trump appointees poised to approve his arch. “Once that view is gone, it is gone forever.”

Indeed, one simple way to gauge our democracy’s durability hinges on our nation’s war dead and those who claim to revere them. Of thousands of comments submitted by Americans this spring and summer to the National Capital Planning Commission, an AI-tabulated 99 percent condemned the president’s “triumphal arch” as an affront to the city’s meticulously planned and placed monuments. One argued that “allowing the current administration to continue to build lawlessly, selfishly and haphazardly is against our democratic principles and what the vast majority of Americans want.”

Nor has the president exactly helped validate his arch, modeled after Paris’ Arc de Triomphe. During an Oct. 15, 2025, Oval Office press conference, when a reporter examining a model of the arch asked who it was for, the president replied: “Me.” The remark was not forgotten, especially after other presidential appointees targeted the district’s performing arts center, dedicated by federal statute to the memory of the late President Kennedy; they renamed the place the Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.

It took the federal judiciary to order on May 29 that Trump’s name be promptly removed with District Judge Christopher Cooper reminding the president that “Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name and only Congress can change it.” Which is no doubt why the president doesn’t want Congress trifling with his erection of a gargantuan, kitsch-endowed, European-styled, humble-yourselves, imperial arch near a cemetery abundantly populated by Americans who served and in some cases perished for a constitutionally run democratic we-the-people republic.

Beyond an offhand remark that the arch would honor himself, the president has supported the monument because, to quote him, Washington, D.C., is “the only important and major city that doesn't have one.” Yet the Arc de Triomphe honoring the fighting French soldiers of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars was commissioned in 1806 by self-crowned, self-important French Emperor Napoleon I; Rome's Arch of Titus, which in turn influenced the Paris arch, sought deification of late Roman Emperor Titus. Question: Is there a pattern here?

If the president's administration is sincere in claiming that the arch is a tribute to the nation on its 250th anniversary, and not the president, it by now faces an uphill battle to convince Americans otherwise – not just because of the president's notorious narcissism in seeking for himself honors and tributes galore – including his failed attempt to have Dulles International Airport renamed in his honor – but a clear authoritarian style of governance. Retired historic preservation architect Susan Turner noted as much in her own comments submitted to the National Capital Planning Commission on June 27:

As inappropriate as the design and physicality of this monument is, its symbolism seems somehow more troubling. It is said that it will be built to commemorate 250 years of American independence by honoring America’s founding principles. However, those very founding principles are now under attack by the government administration that proposes to build the arch. Sadly, we are in a time where we have little to celebrate, being led by an administration that has been actively working to destroy everything positive and honorable about our nation.

At home, the executive branch is undermining the rule of law, fouling civil discourse, violating public trust, destroying the effectiveness, integrity and expertise of our institutions and corruptly enriching themselves in the process. All while the legislative branch enables this national destruction.

Abroad, the administration is failing the responsibilities that come with wealth and power, abandoning our alliances and undermining our dependability, leadership and moral authority. Just like at home, the administration destroys the trust that undergirds the values and relationships that make us strong. All the while, they are replacing every positive aspect of our national identity with immoral and illegal aggression.

There is no triumph in the behavior of the United States of America under the Trump administration, only national shame. It is exceedingly inappropriate to surrender our values and principles and then build a monument to triumph. It seems an Orwellian attempt to project triumph when the reality is complete failure.

While the president’s men have largely settled on the claim the arch marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, doubts understandably remain. East Texas native and former diplomat Charles Ray, 81, a decorated Army veteran of 20 years’ service, including two tours in Vietnam, argued in comments formally submitted May 27 to the commission that the arch “is a garish tribute to one man's vanity and has no place in a democracy of, by and for the People. If you have a scintilla of love and respect for this country and the people whose blood has kept it free for 250 years, you will disapprove this vanity project.”

“This design is ugly, it is grandiose, it is unoriginal and it just gets in the way,” Fran Bowman wrote. “What is it a monument [to] other than the failed Trump presidency? The survival of our republic for 250 years is enough of a monument for me.” Of what she labeled “a monstrous vanity project to please Trump,” Jane Allison added: “He is destroying the beautiful city of Washington, D.C., with monuments to himself. The people used to have a say in this. Trump doesn't get to spend taxpayer money and junk up the city any way he wants.”

“No one should have to experience the desecration of their loved one's grave in such a heinous fashion,” Nancy Bailey Stone wrote. “When my parents were buried at Arlington, I had the consolation that, in perpetuity, their burial place would be one of care and a place where others would find solace. The homage to a man who received multiple deferrals from serving during the war in Vietnam is a disgrace to the men and women in the armed forces who are buried at Arlington. He has no respect for them on any level.”

And Candace Shy Hooper, whose parents are buried in Arlington National Cemetery, fears the arch if built will “shatter the calm, quiet atmosphere of Arlington Cemetery.” She too ponders what it actually commemorates: “It is not needed to celebrate or commemorate any of this country's triumphs – there are monuments to all the wars in Washington and throughout the nation. And it is utterly foreign to the memory of the men and women buried there who fought in those wars because of their dedication to our founding principles, not for posthumous glory.”

Others wondered why the president wasn’t focused on the pressing issues that won him the presidency in 2024. “Last and not least,” former D.C. resident Carolyn Lewis wrote, “Americans are struggling to put food on the table, find affordable healthcare and housing and find employment that provides a living wage. Time and attention should instead be put towards the American public. To spend such resources on a monumental [arch] is a disservice to the ideals that members of the military who now lay at rest in Arlington Cemetery fought for.”

Of several files bursting with submitted written comments, I found only three favoring the triumphal arch. One I encountered in perusing comments myself, another was cited by a fellow journalist in his search; both were brief, perfunctory, hardly convincing. A third – submitted by a California architect named Shady Migally – included a lengthy outline supporting the idea of the arch but proposing his own design, including a calibrated annual solar alignment device: "Each year on July 4th, at solar noon, a beam of sunlight passes through a carefully designed oculus in the monument roof and illuminates a circular stone datum embedded in the ground below, inscribed with words from the Declaration of Independence."

A lawsuit filed by three Vietnam veterans and an architectural historian challenges efforts by the president’s men to bypass the usual congressional approval process: “Although members of the public will undoubtedly hold diverse views about whether, where and how a commemorative arch should be built, the statutorily required procedure is designed to take account of those views through the participation of Congress. Requiring defendants to follow that procedure, then, redounds to the benefit of all Americans, whether or not they share plaintiffs’ concerns.”

The litigants also note in legal filings that “[f]rom the city’s inception as a purpose-built capital, careful attention was given to the aesthetic and symbolic significance of the configuration of buildings and landmarks within the city’s core.” They argue that “construction of the planned arch in Memorial Circle has no foundation in a grant of statutory authority. And without congressional authorization, it would transgress specific prohibitions in the Commemorative Works Act.”

The four cite the grand urban design of Pierre Charles L’Enfant, the artist, engineer and former military officer commissioned by President Washington to design the new capital. In his designs, L’Enfant “strove to embody American ideals, including the principle that ‘every citizen was equally important.’ Notably, ‘instead of reserving the grandest spot for the leader’s palace as was customary in Europe,’ L’Enfant’s plan centered the city on Congress, placing it ‘on a high point with a commanding view of the Potomac.’”

All of which is lost on a president ignorant or dismissive of history, let alone the democratic and spatial genius in L’Enfant’s design of the “Federal City.” I spent a broiling summer day in 2009 hiking among the D.C. monuments and memorials, drawing patriotic inspiration from how most related to one another, the result of respectful lawmakers and designers building on L’Enfant’s concepts through the ages. The only significant outlier seemed the Jefferson Memorial, but, given Jefferson’s sometimes shocking (to this day) beliefs, that too seemed fitting.

Would the triumphal arch fit into all this deliberative D.C. planning? Maybe, but not amid the peaceful, contemplative air of Arlington National Cemetery – and hardly on the impulse of a man who, as of July 23, boasted we'd lost only 18 lives in a "skirmish" against Iran and who himself repeatedly dodged the draft. Nor did his regime help matters by lowering the official death toll from 18 to 14, excluding four U.S. soldiers killed after "Trump declared an April ceasefire." Sensitive to casualties on his watch, Trump touted the toll as “18 in two wars.”  

Furthermore, the arch's stated purpose is “to celebrate the triumphs of the American people, inspire patriotism and beautify the nation’s capital,” yet the president's July rants in which he slanders millions of Americans who disagree with him politically as “communists” cast doubt on such motives. What’s more, during a July 22 rally in Georgia, he argued that American greatness was assured only so long as he endures: "Ladies and gentlemen of Georgia, the golden age of America is upon us. We're in the golden age. This is the greatest we'll ever be." 

The veterans’ lawsuit also notes the work of architects and urban planners on the famed McMillan Commission, charged in 1901 with updating the capital’s monumental core in line with L’Enfant’s vision. This included not only a magnificent monument to President Lincoln to serve as the western anchor along a major east-west vista that included the Washington Monument and the Capitol but also a bridge connecting the base of the Lincoln Memorial to Arlington National Cemetery – a founding vision imperiled by advocates of Arc de Trump.

The president’s attorneys counter that Congress authorized construction of large structures on Columbia Island – site of Memorial Circle before one enters the cemetery – in the 1920s, along with authority to modify planners’ original designs. The proposed arch is merely a continuation of a more modest project that was never completed. The Commemorative Works Act, they argue – “if applicable at all – merely requires ‘express authority of Congress’ to build structures. That authority has already been given to build large structures on Columbia Island.”

Except that the sketches approved a century ago by Congress envision nothing as overwhelming or obtrusive as a 250-foot arch overshadowing Arlington National Cemetery. The original plans propose placing two ornamental columns to frame the view of the Lincoln Memorial, the latter completed in 1922. The president’s arch would hinder that view. Consequently, the Report of the Arlington Memorial Bridge Commission of 1924 calls for two 166-foot-tall columns to be placed about 300 feet apart.

“Arlington [National Cemetery] is not a backdrop, a branding opportunity or a place for self-glorification,” New Hampshire tourism guide Meg Cowan told the National Capital Planning Commission at its July 9 meeting. “To impose this arch there would be, in my opinion, a desecration of the memory of our war dead. A 250-foot occupied arch with elevators, ticketing, restrooms, programming space and an observation deck would create a spectacle and a pressure point in a place that demands restraint. This project would not honor that landscape. It would desecrate it.”

Cowan added: “I have worked in New Hampshire tourism for more than 40 years, including as a tour guide in the White Mountain National Forest. I know what happens when a place becomes a required stop: Buses arrive, crowds gather, traffic backs up, trash appears, restrooms and walkways are strained and the place itself starts serving the attraction instead of the other way around. That may be manageable in a large recreation area designed for visitors. It is entirely wrong for the solemn civic and commemorative landscape near Arlington National Cemetery and the nation’s memorial core.”

Yet despite overwhelming spoken and written testimony opposing the arch, the National Capital Planning Commission – chaired by White House staff secretary Will Scharf and stocked with the president’s “yes men” – ignored pleas for congressional authorization and voted preliminary approval on July 9. Thus we witness the MAGA Deep State at work, leapfrogging the rule of law and ignoring constitutional checks and balances to please an 80-year-old imperial president who demands a monument without legislative or legal scrutiny.

Since then, the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation – another group stocked with Trump appointees – has moved to nix a legal hurdle in the National Historic Preservation Act and thus greatly expedite arch construction. With the National Capital Planning Commission’s final approval all but assured in September and Congress effectively AWOL, only three Vietnam veterans and a historian block what, on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, increasingly seems a regal display of what the signers resolved to fight in 1776.

“With legal challenges already mounting, immense public pushback and the bypassing of traditional congressional approvals, this arch is on a path to becoming a protracted, multi-year, bureaucratic blunder,” Jennifer Ross, an Air Force veteran of 20 years’ service, wrote to the aloof commission on June 29. “The National Mall and its surrounding gateways should not become a construction site for an unstable political symbol that divides the country rather than uniting it. Our nation’s capital belongs to the people, and its monuments should reflect our highest ideals: humility, sacrifice and democracy. This arch honors none of these. To look toward Arlington Cemetery through the legs of a gaudy, unearned monument to individual ego is a profound dishonor to those who gave everything for this country.”

I’d say it’s more than that. If the Arc de Trump survives efforts to halt its construction in that mystic stretch between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery, one can be sure many will one day view it as commemorating the Make America Great Again movement, including its subversion of the legislative branch in ways that our founders never imagined; the ideological corruption of our highest jurists; and, to quote Edward Gibbon in 1776 in a classic postmortem of another failed republic, the passing from the people of “that public courage which is nourished by the love of independence, the sense of national honor, the presence of danger and the habit of command.”

Bill Whitaker spent 45 years as a reporter, editor and columnist in Texas journalism, including a dozen years as Waco Tribune-Herald opinion editor.

Putting the brakes on Trump 2.0: Q&A with Democracy Forward president Skye Perryman

 

Waco native, Baylor University class of ’03 alumna and Democracy Forward President and CEO Skye Perryman, 44, highlighted in Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People of 2025” and the Washington Post’s 50 Americans most shaping society in 2026, was back in her hometown of Waco on Feb. 28 to accept the Baylor Line Foundation’s “Distinguished Alumni Award” for her leadership in “confronting extremism, challenging anti-democratic movements and building a vibrant democracy for all people.” (Other Baylor alumni receiving honors included Chris Seay, pastor of Ecclesia, a holistic missional Christian community in Houston, and Daniel Vestal, director of the Eula Mae and John Baugh Center for Baptist Leadership at Mercer University and long engaged in Christian ministry.) Perryman returned to Waco on March 24 to speak at Baylor’s Whitten Endowed Lecture Series on the intersection of Christian faith and public policy. Democracy Forward’s forays in recent months offer sterling examples of its work and vigilance: legal inquiry into the $230 million in compensation sought by President Trump from his own Department of Justice for federal charges brought against him and dropped only because he was reelected president; a lawsuit challenging unlawful immigration detention practices that kept detained individuals, some of them U.S. citizens, from accessing legal counsel; and challenging the Trump administration’s freezing of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, threatening food access for more than 42 million people during the autumn 2025 government shutdown. This spring its efforts halted the administration’s $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” to compensate, among others, the president's supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and attacked law enforcement officers. Perryman hailed the district court’s shelving of the program as “a victory for transparency, the rule of law and the American people. No administration has the authority to spend public money through a political rewards program that Congress never authorized.” Last month Democracy Forward efforts prompted a federal judge to reverse a Trump executive order mandating that national parks remove exhibits discussing the history of slavery, civil rights, the treatment of Indigenous peoples, climate science and other core elements of the American experience. Plaintiffs included the National Parks Conservation Association, the American Association for State and Local History and the Association of National Park Rangers. Democracy Forward is also fighting construction of the border wall in the remote, hostile Big Bend region that would “leave the region vulnerable to deadly flash floods capable of destroying infrastructure, homes, farmland and agriculture.”

Upon receiving her law degree with honors from Georgetown University Law Center, Perryman began her career at Covington & Burling and WilmerHale, high-profile law firms in Washington, D.C., that, notably, refused to buckle under punitive actions by President Trump in targeting law firms that displeased him. She focused her work on health care, financial services, education and consumer products while maintaining an active pro bono practice. Before assuming the top post at Democracy Forward in summer 2021, she worked with its founding legal team and served as a general counsel of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the largest physician association in the United States dedicated to the health of women. Democracy Forward, a nonpartisan legal organization “committed to achieving a nation and a democracy that enables all people living in America to thrive,” formed in the wake of the 2016 election once it became clear “the number and severity of threats to democracy, social progress and the rule of law would be unprecedented.” Democracy Forward has a staff approaching 200 with more than 85 lawyers. “The lawyers are amazing,” Perryman says, “but their work would not be as impactful without the rest of our staff.” Married to high school sweetheart and fellow Baylor alumnus Cole Bucy (with whom she has a son), Perryman lists as strong influences on her outlook and work former Congressman Chet Edwards of Waco (who influenced her on the importance of the First Amendment and constitutionally grounded church-state separation), Baylor philosophy professor emeritus Robert Baird (the relevance of knowledge and importance of humility when seeking knowledge) and her parents, including Texas economist and Waco Tribune-Herald columnist Ray Perryman (the importance of reducing complicated problems to fundamental components in order to solve them). Her book, “Ordinary People, Extraordinary Times: How to Reclaim Your Power, Fight for Freedom and Reimagine Democracy,” is due for release in August.

Q   The Atlantic magazine describes Democracy Forward as “the single largest source of Trump’s legal problems.” In surveying the breadth of cases filed, I can believe it. I understand Democracy Forward formed after the 2016 presidential election. Many mistakenly assumed that while Trump was certainly an off-the-rails presidential candidate, he would settle down to some conventionality and be guided by wise counsel from Cabinet secretaries and astute legal advisers and congressional wisdom. The folks at Democracy Forward knew better. You were a litigator with Democracy Forward in those early days.

A   In the presidential election of 2016, the majority of Americans who were voting voted for Secretary Hillary Clinton. President Trump wasn’t happy he won the Electoral College but lost the popular vote [by nearly 3 million votes], so he immediately – right after the election – began casting doubt on the vote count and started suggesting there was fraud, and that it wasn’t fraud by people who looked like him, it was fraud he alleged was committed by people of color, people in communities he didn’t like. And then he didn’t like the crowd estimates at his 2017 inauguration. He got into disputes with journalists – at the time the press pool was more diverse than it is now – over things that are verifiable like crowd size. What we know about unbridled power is it doesn’t like a check, and the checks in our system of government include Congress, the courts and public opinion. But another of those checks is reality – facts and science and evidence, things that can be verified. Reality is a threat to people who want to deny truth.

Q   Yes, President Trump in 2017 formed a commission under Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach to find this widespread voter fraud in the 2016 popular vote count. In closing down a year later, it acknowledged finding no evidence of such fraud.

A   Yes, that commission was disbanded in the wake of litigation revealing there was no fraud. That was my first case against the first Trump administration. Part of the work of Democracy Forward in those early days was to understand the extent to which the Trump administration was operating in a new way – outside the bounds of what we had seen with other presidents. There were concerns, for instance, that ended up verified by reports put out by a U.S. Senate controlled by Republicans about foreign interference in elections that benefited President Trump.

Q   I believe there were several sets of reports by the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee highlighting Russian interference in the 2016 election. I read some of it back then.

A   Exactly. So what is going on is, all of a sudden, you have a president challenging reality on his first day [regarding inauguration crowd size]. Why does he do this? He wants to test the loyalty of those around him. That’s classic anti-democratic autocratic behavior. It’s something we know from other nations and movements. We know it can break down the democratic safeguards in a nation. Remember the story of the emperor who has no clothes? He parades around saying he’s wearing a beautiful gilded suit and the people are afraid to tell him the truth and reality: He wasn’t wearing any clothes. Democracy Forward came on the scene to bring the expertise of litigators to address this new era of American life. Part of the new era was how Trump sought to weaponize the power of government against people whom he does not like. These types of challenges involve areas of law that extend beyond constitutional law and there was new legal expertise needed to be able to defend people and their rights. Democracy Forward understood these threats and saw these trends back in 2017 and built a team of lawyers who had either been in corporate legal practices that have to move fast and litigate complex cases or had been in positions of government and knew better the mechanics of government, an expertise that did not exist at scale in traditional public-interest organizations.

This is the particular gap and expertise Democracy Forward filled. What if the American people had representation in court like big corporations get? Democracy Forward filled this gap without, I think, understanding that it would grow into what we have built now. But there was clearly a “democracy emergency” and lawyers are the emergency physicians in that unique realm of democracy. At the end of the first Trump administration, various developments in the country suggested the organization should stick around and become an institution. The board asked that I come back to grow Democracy Forward and build it to be an institution for our democracy. I came back in summer 2021 after January 6.

Q   I understand the January 6 violence at the U.S. Capitol was particularly formative on you.

A   I think it was a formative event for many people in our country. It certainly didn’t seem as formative for the majority of Congress, which never passed comprehensive legislation to prevent something like that from happening again. But for me, it was significant. January 6 showed what we know from people who study history. We know that attacks on democracy aren’t about one election cycle. They’ve been here since the founding of the nation – the institution of human enslavement, the suppression of people’s rights – those threats to the reality of democracy were here. This has always been a country that has had to work toward achieving true democracy, which we’ve never really had. But there has been, over the course of decades, a real backlash against the progress the nation realized in our civil rights movements. We’ve seen that extremism rise here in Central Texas, of course, and that piece in my background places me on high alert. So when January 6 unfolded – an attempt to disrupt the peaceful transition of presidential power – that’s really a five-alarm fire for our democracy and an indication that our crisis was not going to be solved quickly.

Q   Republican block walkers at my front door have insisted up and down that the January 6 violence was all a false-flag operation or provoked by the cops. I spent eight solid hours talking to these people during the March 25, 2023, Trump campaign rally here in Waco. Is there any hope for these people? I mean, right now some of them argue that, because Trump got 77 million votes in the 2024 election, he should be able to supersede the will of Congress whose members garner but a fraction of that, or the federal courts, whose jurists are appointed, not elected.

A   One good question for us to ask: Is there hope for the majority of Americans who in the last election didn’t vote for any candidate? I mean, there’s more people who didn’t vote at all [87 million] than voted for either Donald Trump [77.3 million] or Kamala Harris [75 million]. I think that is a relevant question we need to wrestle with: What is it about the democracy that existed prior to this election that led people not to invest and participate in it? The answer may well be that democracy as we had it wasn’t delivering for people. We have a minimum wage in Texas of $7.25 an hour – working people cannot come close to making ends meet. We have to be realistic about the world we live in and the failures of the system we’ve had, the failures of the leadership – even well-intended leadership.

So the question I’m focused on: Is there hope for those people who didn’t vote? How do we instill hope? Because democracies can’t sustain if people aren’t willing to defend them. Democracy is advanced citizenship. We have in the nation right now people who, perhaps for very good reasons, do not believe that one of the top things to do is become civically engaged. I do have hope that we, the people, can build something that the vast majority of people will invest in. But it will have to be different from what we’ve had.

On the point of our fellow people who are very deep into the MAGA movement, I testified on the fifth anniversary of January 6 alongside Pamela Hemphill who was a MAGA rioter on January 6, 2021, was convicted [and spent two months in prison] and later refused the president’s Jan. 20, 2025, pardon [because she didn’t want to, in her words, “become a part of their narrative”]. She is telling her story and shows us that change is possible. I write about this in my upcoming book.

Q   She was a grandmother, wasn’t she?

A   Yeah, they called her the “MAGA Granny.” It’s unclear when you read the public reporting on all the things that led [to her involvement in Make America Great Again and the J6 riot], but she concluded, after January 6, that MAGA was really a kind of cult. That’s her word, not mine. Part of the reason was the people around her were seeking to belong to something and started believing in the movement as a way to find belonging. [NOTE: In her Jan. 6, 2026, testimony, Hemphill told lawmakers: “Five years ago, I traveled from Idaho to D.C. to see Donald Trump speak. I had fallen for the president’s lies, just like many of his supporters. Local people had welcomed me into their circle, and when I was around them, I heard them say things like ‘the Democrats are trying to turn this into a Communist country’ or ‘the Radical Left wants to do away with the Constitution.’ That gaslighting caused a lot of fear and I was scared.”] Is there hope for people who seem to be parting with reality? I will always have hope that we can come together. There’s a chapter in my book dealing with how we do this. You can set boundaries. You don’t have to spend time with people who want to deny your very existence or your loved ones’ existence and just aren’t going to be reasoned with. But we can soften our hearts and at least try to understand them and be curious about what led them to this place [of parting with reality and reason]. But, as I said, to me, the much more important question is: What do we do to engage people who in some way opted out of the system [through not voting] because it wasn’t delivering for them? What is a democracy if it’s not serving people? We don’t need to be sanctimonious about the word. What is it? What can we do in this moment to try to bring people in? That is the larger thing that keeps me up at night. [NOTE: Excerpt from Perryman’s Jan. 6, 2026, congressional testimony: “Congress must do its part – to assert its check on the president’s excesses, to defend the American people from the autocratic steps we are seeing and to protect the right of the people to vote. The people must keep showing up too, as we will in courts and communities across the nation. We must fight and overcome those threats to our democracy that we saw in all their ugliness five years ago today in this very building.”]

Q   The MAGA movement seems fueled by resentment and grievance more than optimism, consensus and constructive dialogue. Your organization came out with its State of Democracy report the same day the president gave his polarizing 2026 State of the Union address. It’s a great chronology of all we’ve witnessed in the first year of Trump 2.0. But what impressed me is that, under each category, your report showed ways that Americans can resist by tapping remaining institutions of democracy. I know civic-minded Wacoans who write letters to the editor of the local newspaper on grassroots democracy and constitutional vigilance. In nearby Hillsboro, I met a woman training to be a volunteer deputy registrar to get more people registered to vote. A few hundred good-hearted folks in Waco run the Heart of Texas Network for Immigrant Rights, co-founded by religious scholar Blake Burleson, to help area immigrants in need. One of your mentors, Chet Edwards, though no longer serving in Congress, speaks to groups ranging from church assemblies to Baylor Law School students on everything from the importance of separation of church and state to daily applications of the idealism and mutual respect imbuing the Declaration of Independence. Are you confident these levers of democracy are sufficient to prevent the United States from ending up like, say, Viktor Orbán’s Hungary did for nearly a generation?

A   I think this is the most significant year since 1863 and the Battle of Gettysburg. The answer to that question: It’s entirely up to us as people – not just the lawyers or politicians or media consultants or direct-mail messaging campaigns. It’s going to rely on ordinary people. And it’s going to rely on ordinary people who look at what is happening and say, “This is not where I want to be, this is not what I want my future to be,” and find a way to do what they can in this moment. I do have ultimate faith that people using the levers in our system can make a big dent against this accelerating democratic backsliding and can turn this around. That’s a piece of it. But it is not going to be about the strength of one lever or one institution. It’s going to be about people who become willing to use the things that are available to them.

Q   But how do you do that? I run into a lot of people and talk to a lot of people about these things. Many don’t read newspapers anymore, they don’t watch the TV news anymore. And, frankly, a lot of the news media now are no longer what they used to be in terms of watchdog reporting and robust editorial perspective. Consider the Washington Post and CBS News. Edward R. Murrow must be spinning in his grave right now.

A   Let’s take a step back and remember our history. A lot of people believed, as late as the 1920s and ’30s, that Black people were not human. So this is not the first time people in this nation have dealt with huge systemic, almost insurmountable obstacles. I think the solution is a combination of the humanity that people can find in each other when they are proximate to one another plus a commitment to what this country says its values are – those do mean something. Promises in America’s Declaration of Independence were hollow when they were first made [referring to Jefferson’s aspirational passage “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”]. But we were the first country in the world to be founded on ideas. And yet at the same time, there were enslaved people who were terrorized after independence was declared. They didn’t get their freedom. No woman had the right to vote. Yet even against those odds, they continued to believe and fight for their freedom. So I understand the odds now are very long, but to think that in this moment we’re confronting insurmountable odds that people in this country haven’t confronted before and that people across the globe haven’t had to confront denies our history. I just refuse to believe that this extraordinary time isn’t one that ordinary people can meet. It is an extraordinary time but we have faced insurmountable barriers before. And it has been ordinary people who have been a key to meeting the moment in those times.

Q   I came up to you at the 2025 Baylor Line Foundation dinner and congratulated you on the work that Democracy Forward was doing. I said I hoped your organization could sustain it. And you said, “I think the federal judiciary will rise to the challenge, but they’re going to need help, that at least one of the two chambers of the legislative branch must change hands in 2026.” Do you still feel this way?

A   The federal judiciary, which is bigger than just the U.S. Supreme Court, has reminded people what it means to have courts that protect our rights. We have won a number of court orders in cases where we were opposing the harmful policies of the Trump-Vance administration – and we have won before all types of judges, including those appointed by President Trump. We have seen the judiciary step in, even in the midst of great threats that have been made to judges and their families. So far, the judges are not intimidated by those threats and continue to do the work they need to do. I always firmly believed that if people can get access to the courts – and we represent all of our clients on a pro bono basis so they can access the courts – we could meet the “shock and awe” with the people’s response, which is what we’ve done with our hundreds of cases and through our Democracy 2025 initiative, which is coordinating hundreds of organizations in doing this work. [NOTE: The Democracy 2025 initiative, involving multiple organizations, is “committed to defending our freedoms and our democracy in the face of the profound threat that is the Trump administration.”]

To me, the power of the courts is the power of people because in this country we do have the ability, at this point, to initiate litigation against our government to say, “We have a constitution, and, if the government violates our rights – even a government that was elected – we do have a remedy.” So I stand by what I said last year: the federal judiciary has been a backstop. We have taken court action to save critical community programs like Meals on Wheels and programs for survivors of domestic and sexual violence, through blocking the president’s attempt to freeze all federal funds. There have been many more grave threats since we saw each other last year. If I’m not mistaken, that Baylor Line Foundation event was before J.G.G. v. Donald J. Trump and before the violent ICE surges in Minneapolis. [NOTE: This explosive March 15, 2025, habeas corpus lawsuit, filed by the ACLU and Democracy Forward, involved Venezuelan immigrants and the legality of President Trump’s invocation of a centuries-old wartime act in peacetime to spur mass deportations.] There have been a lot of sustained threats, and the federal judges are doing what we need them to do and the people are meeting the moment too.

Q   I tell folks if they really want to know constitutional law, don’t look to the Supreme Court of the United States, look to federal district judges laboring away, unknown to the masses. I mean, the Supreme Court won plaudits on Feb. 20 for striking down President Trump’s imposition of global tariffs without proper congressional authorization. Justice Gorsuch gave the president and Republicans a grand Civics 101 lesson on the Declaration of Independence and kings. Yet a few days later, the same court wildly misinterpreted a federal law protecting the U.S. Postal Service from lawsuits over accidentally lost or miscarried mail. It contorted that law to bar lawsuits over mail that is intentionally misdelivered!

A   The Supreme Court, certainly for a few decades last century – say, beginning with Brown v. Board of Education [a landmark 1954 ruling that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional] and continuing with Miranda v. Arizona [the right to be informed of constitutional rights upon arrest and interrogation], Griswold v. Connecticut [the right of married couples to use contraceptives without government restriction], Loving v. Virginia [the right of marriage between whites and African Americans], Roe v. Wade [the right to choose to have an abortion without excessive government restriction] – was an institution interpreting the Constitution in a way to affirm the rights of the people, to expand rights recognized by courts of the past. Yet, those few decades [the 1950s through 1970s or so] were an exception to the way the court had generally operated and we have seen only a smattering of such wins since this, such as maybe Obergefell v. Hodges and Barnes v. Felix last term. [NOTE: In the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges case, the high court ruled the fundamental right to marry was guaranteed to same-sex couples by the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. McLennan County Justice of the Peace Dianne Hensley has since pressed federal courts to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges on the grounds the high court subordinated state law “to the policy preferences of unelected judges.” The Barnes v. Felix ruling by a unanimous Supreme Court last year held the Fourth Amendment prevented “excessive force” by peace officers.] My point: If you look throughout our history, the U.S. Supreme Court has not been a consistent arbiter of constitutional protection – think of Dred Scott v. Sandford [U.S. citizenship and constitutional rights cannot be extended to people of black African descent], Plessy v. Ferguson [allowing racial segregation laws], Korematsu v. United States [forcible incarceration and internment of Japanese Americans during World War II], Lochner v. New York [striking down laws carving out worker rights]. And so people concerned about the Supreme Court are right to be concerned but we should remember that these concerns are not new. The court as an institution hasn’t found justice on its own. It is up to the people to guide the way.

Q   That’s why I find more constitutional gravity and fidelity in most district courts. After the Supreme Court gets done with the law, it can be a pretty misshapen thing alongside tradition, legal precedent and the U.S. Constitution.

A   District courts are courts that are closer to the experiences of people. And you have seen the district courts consistently strike down much of what the Trump-Vance administration has done to violate the rights of people. Local courts are often more trusted. You can find this in Pew Research and other surveys. Typically the courts are the most trusted branch of government. And what we’ve seen in the last few years is that the Supreme Court’s rating is at a historic low. [NOTE: A Pew Research Center survey found the high court’s favorable rating in 2025 was 22 percentage points lower than in August 2020.] People still actually trust their local courts relative to other branches of government and the courts generally are still the most trusted branch of government. But there’s been a nosedive of support for the Supreme Court and that has to be addressed.

A court like the U.S. Supreme Court may seem anti-democratic in that its members are not elected. At their best, the U.S. Supreme Court and other courts derive their legitimacy in a democracy when they operate to protect people’s rights and our democratic institutions – that is what the Constitution contemplates. The Constitution understands that the court is necessary to ensure that the rights granted to people in the Constitution are not overridden by the majority or based on political whims. When the court serves that function – as we saw it do in Brown v. Board of Education or as it does when it protects due process rights or birthright citizenship for people when a president tries to erase them – it is fulfilling its role in protecting our rights and ensuring our democracy is not restricted to just benefiting some. That is when the court is at its best.

One reason we have such high expectations of the Supreme Court is because of the generations we grew up in when, in fact, that's what the high court was doing – actually protecting our rights and ensuring democracy was not restricted to just benefiting some. It’s what we saw of the court in what we learned in school, what the court was doing in prior generations. But when the court is not protecting democratic institutions or protecting people who get left out of the political process because of systemic barriers to that process, it faces a massive legitimacy crisis. When the U.S. Supreme Court fails in protecting people’s rights and our democratic institutions, it faces a legitimacy crisis – it becomes just an unelected body that is exerting power. The court also faces a legitimacy crisis when it operates in secret and fails to explain its decisions. The U.S. Supreme Court has been doing that at an increasing rate with the use of its emergency docket or so-called “shadow docket” and this leads to a decline in trust. Your rights may be taken away by the court and the court then fails to explain itself – that’s a real problem in a democracy and needs to be addressed.

Q   Are you talking about reforms?

A    I certainly believe the Constitution permits a range of reforms and one thing that we, the people, must do in the next governing moment is to insist on more transparency and accountability from the Supreme Court. The court does not have an enforceable code of ethics. That needs to change, as merely one example.

Q   Many of us who follow the courts are astonished at the flagrant lawlessness manifesting itself in the Trump administration. We see this in everything from the president’s willy-nilly imposing global tariffs without congressional approval, to the employment of “administrative warrants” rather than legitimate judicial warrants to arrest and detain immigrants legal and illegal as well as U.S. citizens, to federal judges expressing anger nationwide that their orders are ignored or defied by the Trump administration, to the president and his attorney general ignoring a vote by Congress for prompt and proper release of the so-called “Epstein files.” Is what we now behold since Inauguration Day 2025 worse than you imagined or right about where you and Democracy Forward colleagues figured we would be?

A   We did believe it was going to be this way and we knew the president would immediately lose support when people saw what he actually was going to do. Indeed, the main reason we’ve been able to get into court so quickly is we started working in late 2023 to understand what would happen if the federal landscape regressed and to be able to make sure people could respond. In 2021, the United States was added to a list of global backsliding democracies [by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, partially due to “the inability of the U.S. Congress to check the executive or investigate the actions” of President Trump]. It’s remained on that list every year since. The crisis in our democracy did not start on Inauguration Day 2025 but the backsliding started rapidly accelerating. And what I know, from growing up in a place that became very influenced by far-right movements, is that when these movements tell you what they are going to do, you need to believe them. And while we hoped the preparations we made then would be unnecessary because the country wouldn’t have actually faced this crisis, we knew there was no other option but to be prepared. Without the cases we prepared and the legal groups with which we coordinated and organized, there wouldn’t have been pushback in the early days [of the second Trump presidency] when the administration from Day One started to take “shock-and-awe” actions that harmed people. The administration was shocked we got into court so quickly. They didn’t anticipate that some of their efforts got blocked.

In the early days of the administration, the president hired the architects of Project 2025 and the White House issued a memo saying it was going to cut off funding across the nation. We got into court within hours and blocked that funding and essential services freeze. The first White House press conference, you’ll remember, was a complete disaster because the administration was forced to stand before the American people and explain why [the White House Office of Management and Budget] would be cutting off essential services across the country, including rural and red communities which use those services more – everything from Meals on Wheels to Head Start to small-business credits, all of it. There had been panic across the country. And our ability to get into court demonstrated to people that they still had some power. The same thing happened with the cases state attorneys general and the ACLU brought to defend birthright citizenship [in the Fourteenth Amendment]. Within hours of the president issuing an executive order to strike down birthright citizenship, because lawyers went to court, right out of the gate, a Reagan-appointed judge [U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour] ruled: “It has become ever more apparent that, to our president, the rule of law is but an impediment to his policy goals. The rule of law is, according to him, something to navigate around or simply ignore, whether that be for political or personal gain. Nevertheless, in this courtroom and under my watch, the rule of law is a bright beacon which I intend to follow.”

Q   I remember President Trump issued his executive order striking birthright citizenship from the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution on his first day back in office. [NOTE: Famed Yale-based legal scholar Akhil Reed Amar, arguably the nation’s foremost expert on the U.S. Constitution and an occasional guest lecturer at Baylor Law School, argued in a Feb. 23 amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court that Trump’s executive order “defies the plain letter and spirit of the Fourteenth Amendment’s first sentence, one of the crown jewels of our Constitution. In lieu of the Constitution’s grand guarantee of equal birthright citizenship, E.O. 14160 substitutes ad hoc rules pulled out of thin air. Constitutional birthright citizens are citizens because of where they are born, not to whom they are born. The amendment is geographic, guaranteeing equal citizenship to those born on American soil and ‘under the flag,’ as countless Reconstruction Republicans, led by once and future vice presidents Hannibal Hamlin and Schuyler Colfax, put the point time and again in the amendment’s drafting and ratification process. These touchstones – the soil and the flag – cleanly explain both the scope and the limits of the Constitution’s grand birthright-citizenship guarantee. When a baby is born in America and an American flag flies above the cradle, that baby is a birthright citizen. All major Republican leaders who carried the banner of President Abraham Lincoln during his tenure and after his death –including Hamlin, Colfax, Edward Bates, Salmon P. Chase and William Seward – shared this vision.”]

A   Yes – and at a time when people are scared and you have a person in the White House and a movement behind him that do not want the nation to believe anyone different from them has any power to stop it. It’s like some of the people you’ve talked with who believe that because the president won the election, that president then gets to run roughshod over your constitutional rights. That’s not how our country works. Our Constitution provides the guarantee of your rights – even when someone elected by the people violates them. We had to be ready and we had to be able to meet the speed at which these things might occur, and we did. But it took over a year of preparation. We were very clear-eyed about what we would see and we’re still working now on things the president hasn’t done yet but said he was going to do that are harmful to people. We’re watching how the president evolves in his long-term strategy. 

[NOTE: In something of a shock to even veteran Supreme Court observers, the court on June 30 only narrowly ruled against President Trump's 2025 executive order neutering birthright citizenship – the guarantee of citizenship to almost anyone born in the United States. "Children born in the United States to parents unlawfully or temporarily present are 'subject to the jurisdiction' of the United States and are citizens at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority; Justice Samuel Alito, among the dissenters, described the ruling as "a serious mistake." In a June 30 statement, Perryman praised the majority's decision while acknowleding cause for concern in the number of justices dissenting: “The majority of the Supreme Court rightly reaffirmed one of the Constitution’s clearest and most enduring promises: If you are born in the United States, you are a citizen. Congratulations to the ACLU and its legal director Cecillia Wang, who argued this case with grace and determination. For more than 150 years, the Fourteenth Amendment has guaranteed that citizenship is not determined by politics or cannot be stripped away at the whim of those in power. This decision makes clear that no president has the authority to rewrite the Constitution through executive action or deny people rights that the Constitution guarantees. At a time when fundamental freedoms and democratic principles continue to face unprecedented attacks, this ruling reaffirms that the rule of law still governs our nation. Every child born in this country deserves the certainty, dignity and equal protection that citizenship provides, and today’s decision preserves that constitutional promise for generations to come. While birthright citizenship was reaffirmed, four justices ruled that it was not required by the Constitution and three ruled against it altogether. This shows you what the American people are up against – and there are many other rights we are still fighting to safeguard.”]

Q   During a Baylor Homecoming address you gave to Baylor Interdisciplinary Core students on Oct. 31, 2025, you stressed the importance of embracing Socrates’ much-praised “examined life.” Yet today in higher education, we witness rancor even over Plato. I guess you’ve heard about the flap at Texas A&M, which admittedly is more nuanced than some people grasp. You talked to Baylor students about the importance of critical thinking. What did you personally get out of the celebrated Baylor Interdisciplinary Core program as a student?

A   Well, there’s so much, especially given the people who have taught there such as philosophy professors Bob Baird and Lenore Wright. The curriculum tries to take disciplines and lessons we can learn in context. How do you read and understand a text such as the Declaration of Independence without fully understanding its history? How do you understand a piece of art like Picasso’s “Guernica” if you don’t understand what was happening in the Spanish Civil War when he painted it? So, for me, it was very helpful to get a broader view. It’s a view that reinforces our humility as people. All of the challenges we face now are things that people in the past have also dealt with and they’re trying to make sense of it with the tools they have. People here who believe misinformation and disinformation – say, our MAGA fellow citizens – you can criticize them or you can be curious about what led to their commitment to that movement. I learned early on that it is much better to approach people and circumnutates that you don’t understand with a curiosity and humility and to try to find context than to just make rash assumptions. Those insights are helpful in my present work.

An incredible part of the Baylor Interdisciplinary Core are the professors who teach in the program. The professors actually sign up to teach things they have some expertise in but are not their primary areas of focus. In doing this, they are modeling curiosity, saying, “I can learn something, too. I can teach alongside another professor who might have a completely different expertise than me and we can be on this journey together.” So the method was important and, of course, the ideas and the text. I talked in that Oct. 31 speech about Socrates but also Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement and what that meant. What did King mean in his 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail” [about what citizens can do to test unjust laws] and what are those references that he’s drawing upon as he tries to describe not just the fight for freedom – that’s how people like to view it – but also the apathy of white Christian people who said they knew and in theory affirmed the value of all people but thought he was a little extreme in his marches and his demands? So those types of pieces have really shown how people have persisted and overcome. Many of these were core texts in the Baylor Interdisciplinary Core.

Q    I was impressed but challenged by Lenore Wright’s introduction before your address on how students in the Baylor Interdisciplinary Core “would struggle with Aeneas on his journey, weep with Rama in exile, laugh with the irrepressible Monkey King as he marked the farthest Column of the Universe and learn to embrace ‘the other’ across the boundaries of time and culture.” OK. Just how do these particular works help you understand what we face at this perilous moment in America?

A   I’ll just talk about Aeneas and the story of the founding of Rome with its references to the democratic tradition. We could put it alongside Dr. King’s Birmingham letter and Plato’s “Apology” about Socrates [and the latter’s dialogue with his accusers in an Athenian court], which we read at Baylor. These stories are about insurmountable barriers that people or gods or whoever is in the telling – and in “The Aeneid,” it’s humans and gods, Juno in that work famously says, “If I cannot move heaven, I will raise hell” – to me, these texts are about what you do when things seem insurmountable. One of the lessons in the story [of Aeneas] is you don’t know how it’s going to turn out, but the way you achieve the work you’re here to do as a human and, in a way, achieve immortality is to strive and have courage even against long odds. There are two passages from “The Aeneid” I have from a list of reflections I generally review each day. One: “But to lengthen out one’s fame with action, that’s the work of courage.” Note the word “fame” in the translation means immortality, not fame as we know it. The other: “Blessings on your young courage, boy; that’s the way to the stars.”

I gave a speech [Feb. 26 in Arlington, Texas] to a group of Baptists at the T.B. Maston Foundation. They asked me to speak about my faith journey and how it has impacted my work. And one of the things that has recently occurred to me is how the stories of my faith tradition [Christian, Baptist] exemplify what courage means. Think about the story of David and Goliath, which we read in the Baylor program as well. In that story, we’re reminded that when God wants to make David a king, he doesn’t send him a crown, he instead sends a challenge in the form of Goliath. This demonstrates that when we face our threats head-on with what we have – in David’s case, a mere sling shot – and when we have the courage to stare our challenges in the face without blinking, we can prevail, no matter the odds. Wherever these stories appear, whether in the Hebrew text, whether in Greek and Roman text, whether in Western text, you see that struggle for courage. The Baylor Interdisciplinary Core does a good job of linking these pieces of literature today. What does Aeneas’ journey have to do with Dr. King in the basement of the Birmingham city jail? They face seemingly insurmountable obstacles and don’t know how matters are going to turn out. But they do what they need to do anyway. The outcome wasn’t necessarily going to be controlled by them, but they still found some way to persist and they found courage.

Q   There was some humor in the fact that legal scholar Ben Johnson, the person tapped to personally introduce you during the Feb. 28, 2026, Baylor Line Foundation banquet honoring you, while a longtime friend from your Baylor undergraduate days, nonetheless has very different political sentiments than you. Was he the best person to introduce you in receiving the Distinguished Alumni Award?

A   What is life if we don't have friends who are different than us? Ben, who is a law professor in Florida, has been a friend of mine since we were in preschool together in Waco. I was in his wedding and he and my husband have an ongoing banter about Baylor football. The fact that he and I have always had differing political views doesn't change our friendship. Ben's support for my work defending people, the Constitution and the rule of law has been especially meaningful given his political leanings. It shows us that this is a time that transcends politics; it is about whether you support our nation's 250-year-old democratic experiment and basic constitutional rights or you don't. And friendships are also beyond politics. Frankly, I encourage everyone to have friendships with people who hold differing viewpoints.

Q  While I haven't always agreed with some of its past statements and actions, I've long viewed the Baylor Line Foundation – the old Baylor Alumni Association – as more properly representing Jefferson's famous New Year's Day 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists stressing the absolute importance in a democracy of "a wall of separation between church and state" and praising the old-time Baptist religion as "a matter which lies solely between man and his God." A few weeks ago, we saw another example of faith leaders, including a noted Baptist pastor in Waco who once served on the Baylor University board of regents, laying hands in prayer on President Trump in the Oval Office and investing God's blessing and wisdom upon him. Does this violate Jefferson's insights from 1802 or is this all fine and good in the American tradition? Shortly after this, I received an email from President Trump claiming "Democrats hate America" which, as an old-time Republican, I know is an absolute falsehood. 

A   The president and the political movement that led to his rise to power have weakened the wall between church and state – but erosions of that wall have occurred for some time, especially here in Texas. We see this play out in a number of respects and our team at Democracy Forward is challenging the president's so-called Religious Liberty Commission, which is not about religious liberty but fails to include a diversity of faiths. We have also won court orders on behalf of houses of worship, including the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and the Alliance of Baptists, that sued to protect them from ICE conducting surge operations in ways that threaten communal worship. The separation of church and state – the fact the U.S. Constitution prohibits the establishment of a national religion – is critical to our freedom and our democracy. Using religion to subvert people's freedom is concerning and represents a slippery slope that every American should be concerned about. Currently, this is playing out in the government's efforts to impose a version of Christianity on people in the nation. As a practicing Christian and Baptist, I believe it is incumbent upon people like myself to oppose efforts to misuse religion and weaken the wall between church and state. This is one of the things that former Congressman Chet Edwards taught me early in my career. I am really proud of the team at Democracy Forward for pursuing cases that affirm true religious liberty and oppose the misuse of religion by those in power. I am grateful for organizations like the Interfaith Alliance, where I serve as an executive committee member of their board, and the BJC, formerly the Baptist Joint Committee on Religious Liberty, who advocate for these values every day.

[NOTE: Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who chairs the Religious Liberty Commission, mostly drawn from the ranks of President Trump’s right-wing Christian supporters, declared in April the U.S. Constitution does not mandate separation between church and state. Earlier this year, Democracy Forward and Americans United for Separation of Church and State filed a lawsuit on behalf of Interfaith Alliance, Muslims for Progressive Values, the Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund and Hindus for Human Rights challenging the commission’s creation, highlighting alleged violations of the Federal Advisory Committee Act and the “unbalanced and biased viewpoints assembled” on the panel. “The government has no right to pick and choose which religious beliefs to promote and which to marginalize,” said Rev. Paul Brandeis Raushenbush, President and CEO of Interfaith Alliance. “We won’t let them get away with secret witch-hunts hidden from the public eye – or with claiming to champion religious liberty while in truth they undermine it at every turn.” Perryman’s observation on Feb. 9: “Since the nation’s founding, the values of religious liberty and pluralism have been central to the American identity. These values are now under accelerated attack. The Trump-Vance administration’s Religious Liberty Commission is not about religious liberty, it is about pursuing a culture of Christian Nationalism that seeks to divide and isolate people across our nation.”]

Q   Part of Democracy Forward's success in promptly and smartly filing lawsuits against the administration's excesses involves strategically anticipating what the Trump administration is planning next. Do you foresee the Trump administration seeking to cite some emergency and then nationally hijacking and federalizing state-run midterm elections this year?

A   The president has already tried to federalize elections through early executive orders that have largely been struck down by courts. He also sought to deploy the National Guard in many states citing emergencies and the Supreme Court upheld a lower court's decision that found what he had done unlawful. The National Guard still is occupying Washington, D.C., where my husband and I live and raise our son. The Constitution does not allow the president to have control or influence in the way elections are run. That is left to the states and Congress. We are preparing to confront these threats in court should the president continue to try to federalize elections and it will be important that people engage too. One of the reasons that I wrote my book is to provide ways people can engage to protect their rights and help advance our democracy in their local communities.

[NOTE: Of the Supreme Court’s April 29 decision arguably gutting the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and setting off a wave of redistricting efforts across the South, Perryman observed in an official statement: “This decision will open the door to anti-democratic suppression of the right to vote, making it easier for a revival of Jim Crow tactics and diluting the power of voters of color. While this is a sad day for our democracy and fair representation in America, the path forward is clear: We must recommit to protecting and exercising our right to vote and to using our voices to oppose extreme power grabs of state and federal governments that seek to subvert the voices and votes of the people. We must hold those in power who have – for too long – opposed or delayed progress toward more comprehensive voting protections to account.”]

Interview conducted, condensed and edited for clarity by retired Waco Tribune-Herald opinion editor Bill Whitaker. A more concise version of this Q&A was published July 2 in the Waco Tribune-Herald.