By ROGER ARMBRUST
News this Friday 13 has Congressional Democrats calling for Donald Trump to declare the coronavirus (COVID-19) a national emergency. News is he’s “hesitating”. But his hesitation, which folks see as his reluctance to endanger his re-election, may be a canny game.
Why? Because Trump’s presidential history – his aggressive, attacking words and actions toward the Constitution, the press, the separation of powers – shows his desire to become a dictator. So do his associations. He loves other dictators like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. Even see-saws with Turkey’s democratically elected president-turned-dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Meanwhile, Trump dislikes democratically elected leaders of the European Union, who’ve been forced to return the relationship.
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| A president's emergency powers invite dictatorship |
Trump’s history, as I’ve written before, involves following his Cohn Core Principles, which might be better termed Connivances. They are three aggressive practices he learned from his mafia-connected longtime lawyer Roy Cohn: (1) never admit to anything negative; (2) lie and propagandize every negative into a positive; (3) whenever sued (attacked), countersue.
I warned of how Trump would perform as president in my column following the election: “Prepare to Fight Fascism: 2017 and Beyond”. After he took office, I explained how he practiced the connivances from the beginning of his presidency in my 2017 column “Simplifying Trump and Predicting His Future”. If you’ve paid attention, you see how he has continued to practice them to this day, including with the coronavirus’s impact on America, for which he, as usual has blamed anyone but himself.
The fact is, the growing American pandemic could actually cement Trump’s efforts at dictatorship if he declares it a national emergency. Why? Because Congressional legislation has allowed a president dangerously expansive powers under a national emergency, powers which could indeed turn the chief executive into a dictator. I was concerned about these emergency powers during the George W. Bush administration. I authored a column explaining their dangers during the Obama tenure: “July 4: Our Independence Versus Today’s Emergency Powers”.
Bush declared a temporary national emergency following the 9/11 tragedy. He carried that throughout his administration’s existence. Barack Obama continued it through his. If Trump decides to declare a national emergency now, he could carry his emergency powers, and their limits on citizens’ freedoms, through and beyond the November elections. He might even carry the current efforts of canceling public events to avoid contagion to the national elections themselves, "postponing" them for “health-emergency reasons”.
Trump has already tested his desire to implement dictatorial emergency powers with his obsession to build a border wall with Mexico. In February 2019 he declared the emergency to obtain billions of dollars for the wall which Congress refused to allocate. As Peter Baker wrote in The New York Times, it provoked a battle with Congress over the Constitutional separation of powers. You'll recall he also sent the military to the border, an introductory exercise to implementing military power inside the U.S., challenging the Constitution.
The Lawfare blog carried an article in response: “Congress Should Limit the Emergency Powers of All Presidents”. It’s a dilemma which John Dean, who had personal experience with presidential power as Richard Nixon’s attorney in the White House, warned of in a 2002 article:
An American President, should he need them, possesses awesome powers. Those powers potentially include what political scientists have described as the powers of a "constitutional dictatorship." No President has ever had to go that far - although they have come close.
Trump has continued challenging that separation of powers, even saying the Constitution allows him limitless powers, to this day.
Trump also has responded to the coronavirus with political thinking, i.e., how would it affect his re-election. He battled to understate its reality. So you can expect him at some point to use the coronavirus by declaring it a national emergency, not to help the nation, but to gain more dictatorial power over it.
Congress could prevent this by removing the vast emergency powers it’s provided, but with the Republicans’ record of sheepishly following Trump, don’t expect that. Unless voters, meaning you, get organized, educated, and active, and change Congress’s membership.
But that will depend on whether Trump implements his dictatorial emergency powers to the point of even preventing national elections to occur in November.
(You can read my columns I link to in this writing, and many more, in my new book The Vital Realities for 2020 and Beyond published by Parkhurst Brothers.)
