How Trump abuses emergency powers

The little-understood key to understanding his horrors

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The morning after last year’s presidential election, disheveled and having not slept, I went to give a breakfast talk to a student group about the impact of the result. After I laid out my somewhat apocalyptic predictions, I got a question to the effect of “Can things really be that bad? Isn’t America a democracy with rules?”.

Now, dear reader, you and I both know that yes, things can be that bad. But it’s still worth reflecting on why it is exactly that Trump is able to get away with so much. The rules are being stretched and broken to the limit, but they’re not non-existent. Courts are sometimes restraining the regime, and there are some lines - like using active-duty military to carry out deportation raids - that it still has not crossed. So what exactly makes the difference between what Trump can do and what he cannot do (yet)?

A surprisingly large amount of the answer is to be found in America’s patchwork of “emergency” laws. Many countries have laws which allow the government to do extraordinary things in extraordinary circumstances. Say that your country is invaded - that might make you want to suspend jury trials for suspected spies. Or say that a hurricane devastates a major city and you need to get help, fast - that might be a good reason to deploy the military domestically and seize buildings to use as aid distribution points.

Unfortunately, laws like this often have a weakness, which is that they leave what exactly counts as an “emergency” undefined. The alternative is to overly-specify what exactly counts as an emergency, which might make it impossible to respond to one if the drafters didn’t foresee it. Drafters of these laws often just have to assume that whoever is president is going to be a sensible person who won’t declare an emergency for no good reason and start doing shady stuff.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Donald Trump.

Since he took office, Trump has made a dizzying number of emergency declarations and used them to seize truly unprecedented powers. Here are just a few examples:

• On his first day in office, he declared the arrival of asylum seekers at the southern border to be a “national emergency” which was akin to an invasion, enabling the military to support border patrol;

• He used emergency powers to label international drug cartels as “terrorist organizations”, opening the way to the use of military force against them;

• He declared the fact that the U.S. imports more goods from other countries than it exports to be a national economic emergency, a finding that underpins much of his tariff policy;

• He declared a national “energy emergency” and used it as a pretext to roll back climate policy;

• He has declared a “crime emergency” and used it as an excuse to send armed soldiers to Washington, D.C.

What all of these emergency declarations have in common is that none of them meet the usual standards for past emergency declarations. The fact that the U.S. imports stuff from abroad is a long-standing feature of the American economy, not an emergency. You can certainly argue about whether the U.S. imports too much or whether it ought to make more at home or whatever. But it is simply not the case that it constitutes some novel emergency situation.

Unfortunately, another thing that all of these declarations have in common is that they let presidents amass a huge amount of power.