Who’s the Emperor Now?

A protester at an anti-Trump rally in New York City on February 17. Melissa Bender/NurPhoto/AP

At the end of 2014, the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy, in naming its “national story of the year,” chose “Emperor Obama.” That designation was awarded to the public narrative with the strongest impact on popular sentiment. Jim Ludes, the executive director of the center, explained: “The story of presidential over-reach has been repeated for years, but in 2014, Republican opponents of President Barack Obama used it successfully to gain control of both houses of Congress. It was a tightly crafted narrative used for political effect, and it resonated with a lot of the American public.”

Throughout that year, Republicans and conservatives had decried Obama, who faced an obstructionist GOP-controlled House, for using executive orders to implement policy. When Obama was poised to sign a directive that would protect several million undocumented people—mainly parents of US citizens—from deportation, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) published an article in Politico that declared, “Obama is not a monarch.” And then–House Speaker John Boehner’s spokesman called Obama an “emperor” who was exceeding his constitutional authority and engaging in “lawlessness.” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said Obama was worse than King George. Right-wing activist Allen West and conservative windbag Glenn Beck each slammed him as a “dictator.” Breitbart even ran a photo gallery of images depicting Obama as a king, pharaoh, or emperor. Even after Obama’s immigration order was later blocked by a federal judge, Republican Paul Ryan, Boehner’s successor as speaker, denigrated Obama for signing too many executive orders, excoriating his actions as “a dangerous level of executive overreach." 

When President Joe Biden, in the early days of his presidency, issued a bunch of executive orders, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) took to the Senate floor to denounce him, suggesting the president was assuming dictatorial power. Republicans griped when Biden tried to use emergency powers to cancel student loans for millions. Last year, when he approved a directive instructing federal agencies to work to expand voter registration and voter participation, House Republicans complained he had exceeded his constitutional authority.

By now, you see where I am heading. The GOP and the conservative movement that once howled about Obama and Biden deploying executive orders and relying on emergency authority are now silent about Donald Trump’s far more extensive power grab. Just as right-wingers who usually insist on literal interpretations of the Constitution and laws are presently mum when Trump deploys expansive interpretations of existing laws to adopt extreme measures.

Let’s look at his actions on tariffs and deportation.

The Constitution states that Congress has the authority to impose tariffs. (“The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises.”) Yet Trump has signed several executive orders to slap large tariffs on China, Mexico, Canada, and most countries around the world. In these directives, he claims the right to do so by invoking the International Economic Emergency Powers Act, which Congress passed in 1977. The law grants the president broad authority to regulate an assortment of economic transactions following a declaration of national emergency. The executive order Trump signed in early April imposing a 10 percent tax on imports for all countries cited the IEEPA and declared the United States was in a “national emergency posed by the large and persistent trade deficit.”

But is a trade deficit truly a “national emergency”? It hardly presents an immediate threat to national security. As the Brennan Center points out,

[The IEEPA] can only be invoked…when the national emergency stems from an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to national security, foreign policy, or the economy. Trump’s invocation of the law in this case rests on the specious premise that our trading relationships with each and every country in the world—including those he has dismissed as nations that “nobody has ever heard of”—pose an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to the United States.

The US trade deficit with, say, Lesotho, a low-income nation in Africa that mostly exports clothing and textiles to the United States, is absolutely no emergency. Yet this country has been hit with the Trump tariff.

Again, the Brennan Center:

The International Emergency Economic Powers Act was passed to enable the president to impose economic sanctions on hostile foreign actors. It includes a long list of actions the president may take, but the word “tariffs” appears nowhere on that list. No president has ever used this law to impose tariffs before, and there is no mention of tariffs in its legislative history. That makes it safe to assume that Congress never intended for the law to be used in this way.

Any reasonable reading of the law shows that Trump has abused presidential authority to use executive orders and the IEEPA to implement these tariffs. In fact, this week, the state of California filed a lawsuit in federal district court to block these tariffs and made the argument that it is illegal for Trump to cite these emergency powers to impose these taxes. I’m looking forward to the originalists and literalists within the federal judiciary declaring Trump’s tariffs null and void. But let’s not hold our breath waiting for Republicans to condemn him as an emperor for misreading the law and usurping the power of Congress.

As for Trump’s mass deportation crusade, on March 15 he signed a proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 as authority for deporting without due process alleged members of Tren de Aragua (TdA), a Venezuelan criminal gang. (The Trump administration has indicated it also wants to use this old law to justify deporting members of MS-13, the notorious Salvadoran criminal gang.) This act is rather specific, stating when “there is a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government” or when “any invasion or predatory incursion is perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States by any foreign nation or government,” the president can apprehend and remove citizens “of the hostile nation or government” who are older than 14 as “alien enemies.”

This law, too, seems unambiguous. For the president to have the power to arrest and deport a foreign citizen there must be a declared war with a nation, or a foreign government must be waging an invasion or trying to. There is no declared war with Venezuela or El Salvador. Nor is either government attempting to invade the United States. The Trump administration contends Venezuela is a “a hybrid criminal state” under “ever-greater control” by “transnational criminal organizations, including TdA” and “perpetrating an invasion of and predatory incursion into the United States.”

This is quite the stretch of the original 1798 law, which was written when the United States government expected to soon be at war with France. The act has been used only three times: during the War of 1812 and the two world wars. And it was cited to justify the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. The ongoing legal battles over the Trump administration’s deportation of Venezuelans to a gulag in El Salvador have focused mostly on due process issues and have yet to fully resolve whether Trump’s use of this law is constitutional. But Republicans are abiding by his extremely liberal reading of the act. As the ACLU’s Scott Michelman recently said, “Trump’s attempt to twist a centuries-old wartime law to sidestep immigration protections is an outrageous and unlawful power grab—and it threatens the core civil liberties of everyone.”

Whether the Supreme Court ends up agreeing with the ACLU, this is another Trump stab at expanding presidential power via an abusive interpretation of the law. Exactly what conservatives and Republicans used to hyperventilate about when Obama and Biden were in office. Yet on tariffs, mass deportations, and many other fronts, Trump is going far beyond anything attempted by Obama, Biden, or any president in modern times. He’s bending, if not breaking, the law to amass power. And he’s applying that power in ways no other president has done, pressuring law firms and universities to do his bidding, targeting political enemies and critics (and ordering investigations of them by the Justice Department), and defunding government agencies established by Congress. I’d say something about Republican hypocrisy, but it seems meaningless at this point.

Trump is a MAGA emperor—or trying to be—and the GOP and the right are not protesting. His unsurprising and successful (to date) efforts to pervert laws, undermine the Constitution, and trample the rule of law demonstrate how fragile our system is, as he reaches for dictatorial powers. He certainly can be stopped—perhaps by the courts, perhaps by popular opposition. But don’t expect the crew that once claimed to care about presidential overreach to give a damn. 

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland.corn@gmail.com.

Severance and The White Lotus. Endings are hard, as a famous film director recently said to me. For the premium television crowd, two finales sparked much jabbering. And before I proceed, I shall warn: This item is nothing but spoilers.

Most of the value of The White Lotus is the Big Finish. The HBO series written and directed by Mike White always begins with a dead body at an uber-luxury resort in an exotic locale, and then it rewinds to a week earlier, with the sole mission of providing an answer to the question, who was murdered? The latest chapter, set in Thailand, concluded with an accidental killing that turned out to be not a killing and a somewhat absurd shootout.

In the last episode of season 3, Timothy Ratliff (Jason Isaacs), a North Carolina financier who’s likely heading to prison when he and his family return from Thailand due to a sleazy deal he helped, plans to poison his in-the-dark wife and two of his three kids because he’s convinced none of them can live without the pleasures, privilege, and comfort their riches have afforded them. But he plans to spare his high school–age son, who tells Dad that he’d prefer a simple (and less expensive) life. After distributing to his family piña coladas laced with poisonous seeds of a local tree, Ratliff has a change of heart and stops them from drinking the deadly potion. Alas, the young son the next day uses the same blender with remains of the lethal drink, and it’s…curtains for him. Quite the turnaround, eh? And quite the gut-punch. But a few scenes later the son revives. This fake-out felt cheap.

Meanwhile, Rick Hatchett (Walton Goggins), the shady mystery man who has come to Thailand to confront the fellow who he’s been told murdered his father, appears to have overcome his desire to kill the guy. A few episodes earlier, when it was revealed why Hatchett was in Thailand, I said to myself, “I sure hope they don’t pull the obvious he’s-really-your-father trick.” But White did. In the end, Hatchett cannot resist the urge for revenge and shoots the fellow. The resort owner, cradling her dying husband, angrily says to Hatchett, “He’s your father.” Oops. And the shootout itself seemed a tad implausible, as Hatchett easily dispatches two bodyguards before he’s shot by the too-nice security guard who would rather not harm anyone. Hatchett dies alongside his too-good-for-him girlfriend, who took a bullet during the gunfight. It was a sad ending, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But it didn’t say much. I was hoping for something more imaginative and thoughtful.

The denouement of Severance was better realized. It did spur a bit of frustration, with the season finishing without revealing the big mystery of what the hell is really going on. Lumon, the corporation that calls to mind a mix of Scientology and Mormonism, is planning to do something big with the severance procedure that allows a person to create a second self without any memories of their life that’s called an “innie.” Supposedly, this is done to produce non-distracted employees. But we still don’t know what the corporation’s ultimate goal is. And it remains unclear why Lumon’s effort to split Gemma, the wife of main character Mark Scout, into 25 different innies is the key to their must-be-evil scheme.

What was brilliant about the conclusion was that it flipped the show on its head. Until this episode, most viewers probably saw Mark’s innie, who worked at Lumon, as a secondary character, and Mark’s outie as the chief protagonist. Outie Mark exists in the real world and is trying to figure out what’s happening on the lower floors of Lumon where his innie toils at a computer monitor. In this episode, innie Mark, at the urging of outie Mark, agrees to participate in a plot to save Gemma, though innie Mark has no feelings himself for her. He’s in love with innie Helly, another severed Lumon employee. The save-Gemma scheme entails innie Mark sacrificing his own existence so outie Mark and Gemma can reunite and live happily ever after. But at the last moment, innie Mark, once he gets Gemma to safety, refuses to take the last step and decides to save himself so he can stay with Helly. At that point, you realize—or at least I did—that this series may not be the story of outie Mark but the tale of innie Mark. Well done, everyone; you flipped the script. It was a provocative surprise and a reminder that point of view can be highly relative. This ending was a thrilling cliffhanger posing several vexing questions. I hope it won’t take the show’s producers nearly three years—as it did last time—to return with some answers.

“Idiot Box,” Sharon Van Etten and the Attachment Theory. While driving by Philadelphia recently, I was listening to WXPN, a wonderful station, and I heard a song that reminded me much of Yo La Tengo, one of my favorite bands, which I wrote about last year. The tune was a track from the latest album by Sharon Van Etten, an indie rock act heretofore unknown to me. For the past 15 years, she’s been pursuing acting and music careers, receiving critical praise for her songs but not a tremendous amount of commercial success. The song I caught, “Idiot Box,” was hypnotic and haunting. I’m hoping this album lands her much attention.