On "No Kings"

How Trump sees no limits to what he wants to do

Back in February President Donald Trump posted about being a king.

The official White House social media account then mocked up this image and posted it:

Of course, the impression conveyed was this was some sort of ‘joke’.

But, from another perspective it was not a joke: for if you look and listen you will find that Trump very much has a monarchical view of his own powers as president.

So I wrote about this at Prospect:

In essence: my argument was that Trump sees not only executive power as within his remit, but he also believes that legislative and judicial functions are also subject to his control, indeed whim.

This weekend, as the “No Kings” demonstrations gained force in the United States, I spelled out this view on social media:

On one level, this is all constitutional theory: power is power, and it does not much practically matter what the supposed theoretical origin of that power is.

But it also points to Trump’s lack of restraint: he does not believe there is or should be anyone or anything who can say ‘No’ to what he wants to do.

This week at Prospect, four months on from the column above, I set out how Trump is now mobilising troops against his own citizens - click and read here.

Here Trump is - like with ‘emergency’ tariffs and ‘enemy alien’ deportations/removals - purporting to use old ancient Congressional laws to do as he wishes.

Of course, on any sensible legal analysis, those old laws do not bear the load which Trump and his circle are placing on them.

But the Republican majorities in both houses of Congress seem not seem to care, and the conservative-dominated judiciary is in no rush to hold his actions as ‘ultra vires’ - that is outside of his legal powers.

Trump is thereby acting as a king not because of the inherent executive powers allocated to the president in the United States constitution, but because he has robbed the legislature and judiciary of their powers too.

That is ‘robbed’, with the implicit if not explicit support of the legislators and judges.

One of many possible outcomes of the current crisis is violent civil conflict in the United States - you have protests and an armed state seeking to use its military powers against those protests, and you have deep civil contradictions as to Trump’s abuse of his powers.

There is now more than enough material for a future GCSE or A-Level student to start an essay with “A civil war in the United States became inevitable when…”.

But a civil war is not inevitable: another outcome is that the United States just becomes an ever more illiberal and oppressive polity where nothing can stand in the way of Trump, or of his followers and successors.

That is the thing about constitutional crises: if you can work out the outcome, it is not a crisis.

But whatever the effects, one of the causes will be Trump’s own sense of the limitless nature of his powers.

He believes he can do whatever he wants - and there seems good evidence that he is empirically right in thinking so.