Trump’s flood-the-zone approach means his political enemies, once in power, will follow the same playbook.
Trump’s flood-the-zone approach means his political enemies, once in power, will follow the same playbook.
I n Federalist No. 70, Alexander Hamilton stressed the need for “energy in the Executive,” arguing it would provide “steady administration of the laws.”
Hamilton couldn’t have foreseen the energetic Donald Trump, whose steadiness rivals that of a raccoon that found a bottle of cough syrup in the garbage.
This week, President Trump barred the Associated Press from an Oval Office event after the news service declined to call the Gulf of Mexico by Trump’s executive-ordered new name. The White House said the news organization must refer to it as the Gulf of America or risk being excluded from future press events.
No need to call 911, as you have not ingested any hallucinogens and you are not imagining that last sentence. It actually happened, the AP says, and in fact the White House press secretary has defended it.
Yet it is far down on the list of crazy things Trump — by his own account a supporter of free speech — has done this week. Flip open any website and you’ll see something new, from Trump’s idea of reconstructing Gaza — “owned” by the U.S. — as a resort, to his plans to make Canada America’s 51st state. (Canada has the same politics as California and roughly the same population, so annexing our neighbor to the north would guarantee that no Republican ever wins nationwide office again.)
Of course, Trump has been a political figure in our lives for a decade now, and we have all grown accustomed to his ravings. But even if one brushes off his daily insanities, everybody should be concerned about the precedent he is setting with his flood-the-zone strategy regarding executive orders.
It appears he doesn’t understand that every time he claims a new presidential power, he is granting that power to a president down the road. And when he signs a dubious executive order sucking up even more presidential authority, he is inviting the next Democratic president to undo all of it with the stroke of a pen. Just as he is doing to Joe Biden’s EOs, except that Trump’s ink runneth over.
There is some good news in all this. In a welcome move, Trump reversed executive orders signed by Biden regulating drinking straws, light bulbs, showerheads, and toilets. The composition of the soda straws we choose to use shouldn’t be subject to a president’s whims — let’s hope this is the last we hear of it.
But just as Trump giveth, he taketh away fourfold.
Trump’s executive order eliminating birthright citizenship, for example, is an outrageous act based on a legal theory that has found purchase only on the fringes of the Republican Party. (The order has since been blocked by a federal court.) Conservatives rightly howled when Joe Biden magically added the Equal Rights Amendment as the 28th Amendment to the Constitution; Trump is doing the opposite, using an equally obnoxious theory to undermine the 14th Amendment.
Trump also deemed social media company TikTok worthy of continued operation, even after Congress passed a bill banning the app if it hadn’t divested from its Chinese owners. The law provided only limited situations in which TikTok could continue operating past the due date, and one of them wasn’t “because Donald Trump says so.” Thus, while both Republicans and Democrats spent months bleating about how the app was a national security threat, everyone appears to have gone silent when Trump decided that, apparently, it’s no threat at all.
Perhaps most notably, Trump declared illegal immigration at the southern border to be an “invasion,” allowing him unheard-of latitude to remake the nation’s immigration laws. It is clear Trump will continue to invoke the National Emergencies Act any time he wants to take unilateral action. (It’s just a matter of time until he decides America’s lack of a State of Greenland is a national emergency.)
But, of course, it isn’t hard to see one of Trump’s arch-enemies using these powers against MAGA world. Trump may say that the federal government will tie emergency aid for the California wildfires to unrelated governmental reforms he wants in that state, but it’s not difficult to imagine Democratic President Gavin Newsom returning the favor for hurricane aid to Florida if, say, the state refuses to pass gun control legislation. Trump may grant himself the power to unilaterally impose tariffs that raise costs on American citizens, but there will no doubt come a Democratic president who will do so on disfavored industries.
And if Trump starts to defy federal court orders, as his vice president and speaker of the House have suggested he should do, it should shock no one when a Democratic president decides to ignore the Supreme Court and punish states who do not provide a state-constitutional right to an abortion. These aren’t the checks and balances we know and love.
We have already seen the lengths to which lawless Democrats will go when they grant themselves unfettered powers, from Barack Obama’s executive orders on “Dreamers” to Joe Biden’s failed attempts to “forgive” student debt. After denying he would do so, Biden pardoned his own son, handing Trump a permission slip to pardon violent January 6 rioters. But when Trump shatters a norm and expands his authority, the Republican response can’t simply be “Well, this is okay because it’s Trump.”
When presidents have so much say over our daily lives, it ratchets up the stakes of every election, leading to coarser, bloodier contests. As my Cato Institute colleague Gene Healy has put it, raising the stakes of the transfer of power risks making every presidential election a “Flight 93 election.”
If anything, the Trump era has shown us how much of American politics is based on the unspoken rules of political hygiene. We typically don’t expect our leaders to invent new legal theories, implement them, then challenge the somnambulant court system to catch up.
In other words, it’s difficult to operate on the honor system when we elect presidents who lack honor.