Why are we playing by the rules with people who follow no rules at all?

I remember being a young Hill staffer, cheerfully emerging from the staircase at the Capitol South Metro station. On the walk to work, you would pass a few far-left cranks waving scary, hand-lettered signs demanding REAL! CHANGE! NOW!

Back then, you could roll your eyes and keep moving. Today, the cranks work inside the building.

President Trump promised accountability. He has the mandate. He has the tools. He should use them now.

When I arrived in Washington 20 years ago, the baseline assumptions still held. America was good. The Constitution mattered. Terrorists were the enemy. That consensus has collapsed. Over the last several years, political violence has risen and elected Democrats have poured gasoline on the flames instead of trying to put them out.

If a radical had murdered Ann Coulter in 2006, Democrats in Congress would have condemned it. After Charlie Kirk’s assassination last year, Democrats offered little beyond silence, snide distancing, or moral equivocation — while much of the progressive ecosystem treated it as a punch line.

Americans have had enough. They’re sick of protesting without purpose, for-profit rioting, and the endless indulgence of radicals who would rather watch the country burn than let it thrive. That disgust helped carry President Trump back into office on a red wave. He promised to crack down on left-wing extremism. He needs to deliver now more than ever.

In recent months, reports have described widespread Somali-linked fraud in deep-blue Minnesota, elected Democrats flirting with open defiance, and physical attacks on federal law enforcement. Conservative voters keep asking the same obvious question: Why hasn’t the administration used federal tools — IRS audits, DOJ investigations, and financial tracing — to identify who finances this fraud and violence?

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Photo by Brendan SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images

None of this looks organic. It looks organized. Someone trains the activists, coordinates the logistics, pays the legal bills, and bankrolls the infrastructure.

Recent reporting by Gabe Kaminsky at the Free Press suggests senior advisers and Republican donors have urged restraint, warning that investigations of left-wing networks will trigger retaliation when Democrats regain power.

President Trump should reject that advice — decisively. No more playing Mr. Nice Guy with these maniacs.

Democrats don’t need “provocation” to use government power against their enemies. They do it because it works. They did it under Obama. They expanded it under Biden. They will do it again the moment they get the chance.

Trump should listen to the silent majority of law-abiding Americans who are tired of watching violence, fraud, and abuse go unpunished while ordinary citizens get lectured to accept disorder as the price of “progress.”

The pattern isn’t subtle.

During Obama’s first term, the IRS targeted Tea Party groups for lawful political activity. The people responsible faced little accountability. Many stayed in government. Senior leadership protected them after Lois Lerner’s misconduct became public. Our enemies in the corporate left-wing press called it “scrutiny.”

Under the next phase, left-wing NGOs leaned on social media companies to suppress conservative viewpoints and blacklist influential outlets. Under Biden, federal law enforcement treated ordinary dissent as suspicious. Justice Department initiatives, such as “Arctic Frost,” and task forces consistently aimed their rhetoric — and often their resources — at the right. Merrick Garland’s Justice Department smeared concerned parents as domestic threats for protesting radical gender ideology in public schools.

Americans don’t want persecution. They want basic law enforcement.

They want an IRS that applies the same level of scrutiny to left-wing networks that obstruct law enforcement as it applies to small business owners and seniors who make honest accounting mistakes. An agency that can ruin someone’s life over paperwork can spare resources to investigate whether donors and nonprofits fund violent criminal activity.

If top Treasury officials like Ken Kies and Kevin Salinger cannot meet that simple standard, they need to go.

RELATED: Trump declared war on leftist domestic terror. The IRS didn’t get the memo.

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This isn’t a witch hunt. Legitimate questions exist about whether charitable dollars move through nonprofit networks to finance criminal obstruction, coordinate rioting, or facilitate fraud against U.S. taxpayers. If charitable organizations fund efforts to intimidate and obstruct ICE agents, the public deserves to know. If nonprofit lawyers coach migrants on how to defraud federal programs, consequences should follow — including professional discipline.

Equal justice under law means equal. It can’t mean impunity for the left’s allies while government reserves its full weight for targeting conservatives.

President Trump promised accountability. He has the mandate. He has the tools. He should use them now.

We’re no longer dealing with a few amateurs loitering outside the Metro station. The extremists moved inside the institutions. If the administration still acts like the old norms apply, it will lose the country it just barely won back.