"The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding; it seeks to annihilate rather than to convert… It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers."—Martin Luther King Jr.

We have been ambushed.

We should be talking about the dangerous, destabilizing things being done to this country.

We should be talking about the data centers spreading across the landscape, draining electricity and water, straining local infrastructure and expanding the technological machinery needed to track, profile and control the population.

We should be talking about the government's growing network of detention centers and its family-separation policies, which have resulted in an estimated 145,000 American children experiencing the detention of at least one parent—including more than 22,000 U.S.-citizen children whose entire household of co-resident parents has been detained.

We should be talking about license-plate readers, facial recognition, government databases and artificial intelligence capable of turning our movements and associations into a digital dossier on every person in America.

Taken together, however, these are not isolated events.

They are tests.

Donald Trump is not defending the Constitution. He is testing how much of it he can violate before anyone stops him.

He is testing whether a president can wage war without Congress. He is testing whether federal power can be turned into personal power. He is testing whether dissent can be punished without formally outlawing speech. He is testing whether masked government agents can operate as a secret police force beyond public scrutiny and constitutional accountability. He is testing whether the government can watch, track and profile everyone without meaningful limits. He is testing whether the Twenty-Second Amendment, which limits a president to two terms in office, means what it says.

Most of all, he is testing how much abuse the American people will tolerate before exhaustion, fear, distraction and partisan loyalty wear down their willingness to resist.

That is the real constitutional crisis confronting America.

Trump has turned constitutional government into a continuous test of submission: He pushes beyond a boundary and waits. Will Congress resist? Will the courts intervene? Will government officials refuse? Will the public object? Or will everyone retreat, rationalize, delay and adjust?