ARLINGTON, Mass. — Driving through this old New England town, visiting relatives to celebrate Passover, I noticed every house on the street sported an American flag.

This was the route Paul Revere and William Dawes traversed by horseback exactly 250 years ago on their way to Lexington and Concord to warn local militias that British regulars were coming to destroy munitions stored by the patriots.

The subsequent battles on April 19, 1775, during which the militias drove the British back from Lexington and Concord, sparked the American Revolutionary War — a rebellion against King George III’s refusal to grant the patriots the rights due them under British rule of law.

Reenactment riders will gallop along the same streets this week to celebrate “the midnight ride of Paul Revere,” and the anniversary of the battlefield victories will be commemorated on Saturday, Patriots’ Day.

It is a bitter irony that this celebration — and America’s Semiquincentennial festivities next year — will take place under President Donald Trump, who is trashing the rule of law and the spirit of U.S. independence.

Trump’s whole presidency is based on disdain for the law, the Constitution, and the courts — as evidenced by his continued lie the 2020 election was stolen. Trump has made repeatedly clear he feels most comfortable schmoozing with murderous dictators who make King George III look like a saint.

The president’s stand-up routine Monday alongside Salvadoran strongman Nayib Bukele at the White House is a warning his lurch towards unchecked authoritarian powers is growing more dangerous by the week.

The meeting, staged by Trump for the media, had far larger implications than the fate of Salvadoran immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who is married to a U.S. citizen. The administration has admitted he was mistakenly deported to a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador, in defiance of a court order, due to an “administrative error.” (Despite administration lies, there was no credible evidence Abrego Garcia ever belonged to a gang.)

Trump’s team has ignored a judge’s ruling that the White House inform the court of its efforts to return Abrego Garcia to this country. Clearly annoyed, the judge repeated the demand on Tuesday, with a two week deadline. Meantime, and even more fraught, the administration is flouting a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court ruling that it “facilitate” the return of the prisoner.

What was so horrifying about the twisted Abbott and Costello routine put on by Trump and Bukele was the president’s delight in his absurd claim he had no power to retrieve the prisoner from El Salvador, while Bukele insisted, all smiles, he couldn’t return a “terrorist” to the U.S.

Trump then urged the dictator to build more “mega-prisons” so he could send “some of our own homegrown” U.S. criminals to these hellholes. “You gotta build about five more places,” Trump said. “It’s not big enough.”

Bukele responded, “All right,” and others in the room laughed.

The notorious military contractor and former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince is already pitching the White House on a plan to vastly expand deportations to El Salvador, according to Politico. Never mind the evidence that many of the undocumented immigrants the White House already dumped there had no criminal records.

Given Trump’s disdain for due process and the constitution, and his constant threats against his “enemies,” we should not rule out his threat to deport U.S. citizens to a foreign dictator’s jails.

Indeed, the White House has given the finger to so many courts that it’s hard to keep track. It has almost taken on the appearance of the new normal. This is the way modern dictators, such as one of Trump’s favorites, Hungarian President Viktor Orbán, normalize authoritarian rule.

Beyond immigration, the White House has gleefully trampled on so many laws and regulations — including Elon Musk’s destruction of whole government agencies, the firing of government watchdogs, along with the attacks on major law firms — that courts can’t keep pace.

In its blatant efforts to tamp down free speech and muzzle fact-based news, the White House banned the Associated Press from presidential events since early February because of the AP’s decision not to rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” It only relented Monday, permitting AP to cover a White House event, in a rare case of bowing to a federal judge’s order.

And then there is the use of alleged antisemitism as an excuse to try to take control of private universities. Read the demands sent to Harvard University — which is fighting back — and you see that antisemitism has little to do with the White House’s effort to take control of the hiring and firing of professors, course content, and admissions — even though the university has already pledged numerous reforms.

One of the most infuriating of Trump’s hits to the rule of law is his effort to usurp Congress’ power of the purse, aided and abetted by a slim GOP majority in the House and Senate. According to the Constitution, only Congress has the power to level taxes on its citizens.

Despite Trump’s repeated lies, tariffs are a tax on American businesses and consumers. Many of his “Liberation Day” tariffs are on hold, but others, especially on China, have already been implemented. They are already increasing prices, slamming small businesses, dragging down stocks, and threatening global trust in U.S. Treasury bond sales — which could lead not just to a recession, but to a depression.

Which brings me back to Paul Revere. When this silversmith and his colleagues began the Revolutionary War, they were protesting taxation without representation, which expanded to a fight for individual freedoms.

Today, the values our Founding Fathers fought for are being threatened by the president and supine GOP legislators in Congress. They are colluding with Trump in his drive to massively tax ordinary Americans while cutting taxes on the rich. They is not what most of their voters elected them to do.

Moreover, Trump’s praise for Bukele’s prisons is a preview of how he would like to punish his enemies — if he could ignore the democratic right to legal due process which is conveniently absent in dictatorial regimes.

According to his own words, Trump is ready to send Americans, without any transparency or legal rights, to rot in foreign jails. And the Supreme Court still hesitates to reign Trump in.

Yet, Patriots’ Day — which celebrates ordinary Americans’ resistance to tyranny — is a reminder it is possible to fight back and win against superior forces. A repressive British government overreached in its persecution of Americans. It was repelled by America’s unique civil society from which new leaders emerged.

The bravery of many U.S. judges, the resistance by Harvard and some big law firms, and the rise of active civic groups are the beginning of the pushback against Trump’s dictatorial instincts.

But it will take the emergence of new democratic leaders from both parties, helped by Trump’s overreach and disastrous decisions, to preserve our Constitution. I still have hope Chief Justice John Roberts will grow a spine and convince one conservative justice to help him save the rule of law.

So hats off to Revere for reminding us of how farmers turned militiamen defeated the British at Concord 250 years ago — and for showing us what motivated patriots can achieve against daunting odds.

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