I don't mean to be too obvious with this, but it needs to be repeated often.
Authoritarian governments are absolutely dependent on maintaining a constant fear in the minds of the citizenry. "Enemies without and enemies within."
As crisis looms, people will generally lean towards a protector - somebody they see as a strong leader to tell them what to do "for the good of the state", which is supposed to mean for all Americans because we're supposed to be the ones in charge of this joint.
But Trump is operating from the standard Daddy State playbook. Every time we turn around he's jumping up and down screaming about the Crisis du Jour.
- The southern border
- Immigrants eating the pets
- Deep State
- Trade imbalance
- Rampant crime
- George Soros
- Fentanyl
- People with brown skin
- and and and
To be sure, we have real problems
- Climate change
- Unfair labor practices
- Healthcare
- Childcare
- General affordability
- Deficit and debt
- and and and
Congress’s hesitancy to do its job would have puzzled the Constitution’s framers.
On the afternoon of Sept. 12, 2001 — for one of the few University of Virginia classes meeting that week after 9/11 — I set aside my prepared remarks and instead offered those rattled undergraduates a prediction about their futures.
Our messy, sometimes dysfunctional, politics of checks and balances would for a time disappear, I suggested, with Americans of all creeds united to follow their president’s lead. Yes, even in support of this unlikely national commander: an amiable but ineloquent Texan who rose to the presidency even though his opponent had gotten more votes.
I did not paint this picture to make my students feel better — although I anticipated it would. Rather, I was explaining to them what history showed was about to happen. At least until the president’s missteps in Iraq intruded years later, George W. Bush enjoyed extraordinary latitude to lead the nation against the threat of global terrorism, both at home and abroad. Republican and Democratic members of Congress joined hands on the steps of the Capitol to sing “God Bless America.” Troops became Bush’s to deploy unilaterally. Intrusive intelligence was his to gather. The economy was his to repair and resurrect. He was, in short, in broad command of our political system.
Bush’s ascension was predictable because it followed a durable pattern in America’s past: During normal times, our government by design and political habit is divided, and the zigzag path it follows emerges from the muddled process of compromise and consensus. Inefficiency is not a constitutional bug but a feature.
In times of genuine crisis, however, when strong action is needed without delay, Americans typically turn to a single, vigorous national leader. The eminent, mid-20th century political scientist Clinton Rossiter called these departures from the norm “constitutional dictatorships.”
Today we are experiencing another kind of vigorous national leadership from the White House. But the current presidency is unlike anything we have seen before. This is not an institution grown muscular from the natural push and pull of American politics.
It is a presidency on steroids.
There is no crisis clause in the U.S. Constitution. Rather, when presidents have proclaimed emergencies — or perhaps more accurately, when they have recognized them — in most cases, Americans have simply behaved differently. They rally to the leader. And these episodes of emergency leadership have produced astounding displays of executive power.
This pattern is older than the Constitution itself. During the American Revolution, the Continental Congress was the national government. But the perils of English marauders on American soil caused Congress to follow Gen. George Washington, who raised and equipped troops, controlled food supplies, meted out justice, regulated public health, and took any steps he deemed necessary to fight off the threat. Congress accepted all this while actively rebelling against kingly rule.
At the beginning of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln was the government of the United States for 11 weeks, not even calling Congress back into session until he could get the Union war effort begun in a direction he single-handedly established. He blockaded Southern ports, a belligerent act widely understood to be the sole province of Congress. He spent tax dollars that had not been appropriated to raise, provision and deploy troops — all without specific legislative authorization. Later in the war he signed the Emancipation Proclamation, which by the conventions of the day amounted to a monumental taking of private property.
Lincoln’s powers were later dwarfed by Woodrow Wilson in World War I, who could, among other things, direct Americans as to how much sugar they could add to their morning coffee. Wilson was granted by a compliant Congress the power to distribute fuels and other public necessaries; to fix wheat prices and coal prices; to take over factories and mines; and to regulate the production of intoxicants. Enhanced legal constraints were created by Congress to control treasonous utterances and punish disloyalty, which the president executed, energetically, through the federal courts.
And during the Great Depression, and then the Second World War, Franklin D. Roosevelt ran a command economy. For a time, he shut down the nation’s banks. He directed human and natural resources to where he judged they were most needed. He controlled prices. And he supervised the growth of an unprecedented defense and national security state, including surveillance of public and private communications. The National Archives reports of Roosevelt’s Office of Censorship, “At its peak, in September 1942, more than 10,000 civil service employees opened and examined nearly one million pieces of incoming and outgoing overseas mail each week.”
FDR interned Japanese Americans and sanctioned the development of the most lethal weapon used in history, without any substantial oversight or checks by Congress or the judiciary. He didn’t even tell his vice president about the bomb, although Harry S. Truman was the one who ultimately had to decide whether to use it. These were powers unknown to even the most ambitious monarch. And during the long run of the Cold War, some of these enhanced authorities reappeared, especially in instances where the nation’s security was vulnerable.
All this muscular presidentialism is an undeniable part of American political history — and a reminder that aggressive use of executive powers in Donald Trump’s second term is not entirely new.
And yet: For all of Trump’s resort to emergency powers, he has seldom stuck to the accepted playbook of crisis government.
Those who have studied these episodes in American history have noted one indispensable principle of proper crisis government: They are not free-for-alls for those in charge.
Even during periods of greatest emergency, constitutional dictators in America have been restrained by certain boundaries of behavior, which must be acknowledged and respected. “Although the normal rules do not apply,” observed South Carolina law professor William J. Quirk of these unusual times, “there are other rules that do and that make the difference between a constitutional dictatorship and a dictatorship.”
The first and most basic relates to the definition of the word “crisis” itself — and whether that term is even appropriate for our times (quite apart from any calamity this president may have self-generated now that he is back in the White House). Was the country Trump inherited in January besieged by an emergency on the same scale as the Civil War or the Great Depression? That’s plainly not so.
There are among the president’s supporters those who will assert that we are at war, perhaps on cultural grounds. But a heavy burden of proof is on them to make that case. Given the stakes, the proper standard for persuasion is Thomas Jefferson’s, announced in the Declaration of Independence: a “decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” Or, for those who prefer Lincoln, reasoning “without guile and with pure purpose.”
Second, crisis government in the democratic tradition is to be deployed as a last resort. Any problems, however vexing, that can be addressed through normal constitutional means should be handled that way and that way alone.
A routine failure of the political order to address certain public issues does not gift the president dictatorial powers. Otherwise, partisans are too tempted to take refuge in emergency claims merely to avoid the heavy lifting called for under our system. Constitutional dictatorships are to be expressly reserved for that special class of troubles that threaten the survival of the republic — say, 9/11 or the attack on Pearl Harbor — and that are resistant to resolution through normal politics.
It follows that the exercise of emergency powers should be confined to the agreed upon threat at hand. A constitutional dictator must be parsimonious, focusing his or her enhanced powers on the wolf at the door. There is no broad license to diverge unchecked into political priorities unrelated to the crisis. The objective is to get out from under the state of emergency as quickly as possible, without distraction.
Conversely, Trump’s exercise of his authorities has been comparatively unfocused. He imposes massive tariffs across industries and nations, compels states to verify citizenship at polling places, dismantles broad swaths of executive agencies created under law, levies punitive fines or sanctions on universities and law firms, offers pardons of Jan. 6 offenders, and deports more than 100,000 foreign nationals. There is no common public purpose visible in this collection of executive actions.
Which brings us to a key point: The basic premise of crisis government is national unity. The community as a whole — Republican and Democrat alike — is under threat from a mutual peril, and thus has consented — against all the normal rules of political behavior — to entrust a single person with extraordinary authorities to defeat a common enemy. The misuse of such authorities by the president to benefit his or her political friends or ideological allies is inimical to the spirit of emergency government.
Vice President JD Vance and Speaker Mike Johnson applaud as President Donald Trump addresses a joint session of Congress last month. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
It should go without saying that crisis governments are to last only as long as a well-defined emergency, and once it is ended, those responsible for it should be held to account for their actions. Rossiter acidly observed that “officials who abuse authority in a constitutional dictatorship — in other words, men who were charged with defending democracy but instead profaned it — should be ferreted out and severely punished.” That kind of accountability rules out the deployment of one of Trump’s favorite tools of executive power: the pardon. In a constitutional dictatorship, there is no lasting protection for those who misuse the great trust invested in them, however great the emergency may be.
There is one final difference between what the nation has commonly experienced during times of national emergency and the Washington, D.C., of today: the effective disappearance of Congress.
It is true that Congress has always played a secondary role in past instances of constitutional dictatorship. But it has never vanished as a governing partner. Once Congress reconvened in July 1861, Lincoln formally invited its review and authorization for his solo acts as a wartime president. He subsequently had to contend for years with a nettlesome legislative Committee on the Conduct of the War, and he had to lobby Congress to constitutionalize emancipation by passing the 13th Amendment.
Wilson became America’s closest approximation to a prime minister, openly courting congressional authorization for virtually everything he did. His Congress was a full governing partner.
FDR worked both around and through Capitol Hill, but Congress flexed its muscles enough for the president to know that lawmakers were not to be ignored — generating enough political opposition to spark a stunning 635 presidential vetoes, one-quarter of all ever issued. This baseline congressional vigilance remained true throughout the Cold War and George W. Bush’s presidency.
In the main, of course, members of Congress did defer to presidential direction during these crises. Yet they did so all the while mindful of their obligations to protect their institution and its prerogatives. Thus they actively patrolled those outer boundaries of proper presidential behavior: assuring that the scope of the president’s authorities were being exercised in the public interest, not for partisan or personal ends; reining in presidents who, as Rossiter argued, would find the constraints of the judiciary too easy to shrug off; and policing the essential from the nonessential departures from regular constitutional practice. These were all core to the proper functioning of Congress, even during system-threatening crisis.
We are just now approaching the end of Trump’s first 100 days — so there remains ample time for the scales of government to rebalance. But this is unlikely to happen without the insistence of Congress — which Trump narrowly but effectively controls for the moment. The hesitancy by lawmakers to play their assigned role would have puzzled the Constitution’s framers, who gave pride of place to the legislative branch in the first article of the Constitution.
Thus the only certain check on a president who claims that “I have an Article 2, where I have the right to do whatever I want,” is a Congress firm enough to assert in reply, “Yes, but we have Article 1.”
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