For Donald Trump, Everything Is an Emergency

The United States is a nation in crisis, President Trump says. The problems are both profound and urgent. He knows how to fix them, but his ideas are hard to implement: They require new legislation or lumbering legal petitions. Luckily, there’s an easier way. The law often gives the president new and broad powers in a state of emergency.

So he has declared nearly a dozen. Trump says he can impose tariffs because he says it’s an emergency to contain trade deficits. He can deport immigrants without due process because it’s an emergency to fight a Venezuelan gang’s invasion. He can dispatch the National Guard to American cities like Los Angeles because it’s an emergency to quell protests and crime. He can ask the Supreme Court for emergency rulings on legal challenges to his authority because we can’t afford to wait for judges to debate his policies.

All this exposes a diabolical problem in our legal order: An emergency is in the eye of the beholder. Do these problems of debatable urgency demand an immediate response? The trade imbalance is generations old. Immigrants — even foreign gangs — are not an invading army. Protesters aren’t rebels. Crime has plunged nationwide, including in all of the cities Trump says need urgent protection. He could wait for courts to decide if he has the power to remake the government, as his predecessors generally have.

Invoking emergencies lets the president have his way, now. If there is a dire new threat and our laws and norms can’t protect us from it, then serious leadership requires the suspension of normalcy. That’s the pitch, anyway. “Violent, insurrectionist mobs are swarming and attacking our Federal Agents,” he posted online when he deployed troops to California. “Harvard is a threat to Democracy,” he said in explaining his intervention there.

It’s not a new idea. “We tend to associate autocracy with emergency,” says Kim Lane Scheppele, a Princeton professor who studies the rise and fall of democracy. Ferdinand Marcos cited a communist insurgency in the Philippines to grab the reins; Recep Tayyip Erdogan blamed a failed military coup in Turkey as his reason to rule by decree for two years; Viktor Orban justifies his suppression of civil rights in Hungary by pointing to Covid, Ukraine and immigration emergencies.

Carl Schmitt, a Nazi political theorist, wrote extensively on the “state of exception.” The main attribute of a sovereign leader, he argued, was the ability to pause the normal legal order during a time of crisis. Schmitt’s idea vexed liberals because it took advantage of the liberal, rules-based system: A president could win a legitimate election, follow the laws, govern normally — and then, at any point, declare a state of exception that suspends those laws.