No, our commander-in-chief is not a hysterical little girl who sees monsters hiding under her bed or in the back of every closet she passes.
Admittedly, he does seem to be more jittery than usual these days. For example, he invoked once again this week his fears about his own mortality, plaintively noting how he is trying to be good so he can, you know, go to heaven and be with all the angels. (To which my own professional analytical commentary is, “as if.”)
But it’s much more than that. For months, everywhere our Dear Leader looks, he appears to see a national crisis, an invasion or even a war.
Trump looks at Portland, best known until now for “putting a bird on it,” and he sees World War III. Chicago, LA, Memphis, New York, even D.C.—the same thing! He sees Democrats who frankly can barely organize well enough to produce a strongly-worded bumper sticker and his response is, “It is an insurrection! I must invoke the insurrection act!” (Which you’ll recall he did not do back in 2021 when we actually had an insurrection.)
He has launched a war on the high seas against fishing boats, and last week, his government said that drug dealers should be treated as a foreign army. He has reportedly contemplated attacking Mexican cartels and now he could be thinking about attacking Venezuela.
What past presidents have seen as an immigration problem—which admittedly they did not do much to resolve—he declares an invasion. He sends troops to the border. He unleashes a militarized, Gestapo-like police force, authorizing his masked bands of thugs to use deadly force, storming apartment buildings and snatching kids without benefit of due process or, for that matter, any sense of decency.
Whereas some prior governments might have seen unfair foreign trade practices as an obstacle to good relations or an economic problem to be resolved by negotiations, Trump sees a national emergency that requires him to ignore US laws and unilaterally launch trade wars with the world. If a foreign government fails to do as he says or a foreign leader won’t go along with his fabulist tales, what’s the solution? More tariffs! More unnecessary, burdensome taxes on American consumers imposed without benefit of any action by Congress.
Perhaps most absurdly, he’s doing the same thing with a government shutdown that he himself started, declaring that it is a crisis that empowers him to take special action—like stripping away further the powers granted by the Constitution to Congress to control US spending.
Like the little kid in The Sixth Sense, where we just see life as normal, he sees dead people, catastrophes, looming global conflicts everywhere. He then describes them using a tone typically embraced by teen-agers on social media who can’t get tickets to a Taylor Swift concert, “OMG! OMG! It’s a disaster! The end of the world!”
My late father used to describe such behavior as being “as skittish as a menstruating fawn.” And he would’ve been right. But my Dad was also a psychologist and he knew that underlying strange actions were often reasons that might be less strange and, rather, more calculated—even ominous. All these things are true in this case.
Admittedly, what he is doing is transparent. Because there is a reason Trump has become a 24/7 disaster merchant. It is because he and his merry band of aspiring fascist enablers have determined that the fastest way for him to assume king-like powers is through declaring emergencies—and thereby ostensibly triggering the legal provisions created to give presidents greater latitude in such times of genuine crisis.
Forget the (entirely made-up, anti-Constitutional) theory of the “unitary executive” that power-hungry right-wingers have been peddling for a couple of decades now. Stephen Miller, Pam Bondi and a seeming endless supply of White House lawyers who seem to be graduates of the Pyongyang School of Law have clearly said to Trump that the fastest way to seize maximum power now is to assert that these are more or less the End Times and you need to be left alone to president however you want in order to stave off potential calamity.
Trump and Bondi and Miller are all counting on the Supreme Court to accede to the administration’s assertion that the question of what is and is not an emergency should be left entirely up to the president and that whatever he decides goes.
Indeed, the future of democracy in America may depend on how Trump’s law firm of Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh & Coney Barrett rule on the scope of a president’s prerogative to seize and exercise emergency powers. Because those powers are what turn a meek, mild Clark Kent into the authoritarian Superpresident that our man of steel in the White House yearns to be.
Such a decision would not only be every bit as consequential as the one that granted presidents sweeping immunity or the Citizens United decision that essentially gave billionaires special voting rights in our country—taken in conjunction with those it would spell the end of democracy in the United States. And that, of course, would be a real disaster, far, far worse than any of those our president has been ranting about since he returned to office in January.
The post Opinion: This Is the Real Reason Trump’s a Disaster Merchant appeared first on The Daily Beast.
