Good morning. Here’s the latest:
More news is below. But first, we look at President Trump’s emergency declarations.
Calling national emergencies
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. But there’s a way around that. The law often gives the president new and broad powers in a state of emergency. So he has declared nearly a dozen. Trump can deport immigrants without due process, he says, because it’s an emergency to fight a Venezuelan gang’s invasion. He can dispatch federal troops to L.A. and D.C. because it’s an emergency to quell protests and fight crime. He can ask the Supreme Court for emergency rulings because we can’t afford to wait for judges to debate his policies. Even when Trump doesn’t declare a legal emergency, he describes crises that justify dramatic action: Foreign aid is so woke and wasteful that we should end it altogether. The vaccine advisory board at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was so beholden to drug companies that its members had to be fired en masse. It feels dizzying. Just how urgent are these crises, and who gets to decide? For an essay The Times published this morning, I wanted to catalog Trump’s emergencies — both the legal ones and the rhetorical ones — to explore how he is using them to remake the government. The lawUnlike several other nations, the United States doesn’t have a broad emergency provision that lets its leader suspend rights and laws. But a web of statutes gives the president emergency powers in specific instances.
Judges must now decide whether Trump’s emergencies are genuine. They’re generally bad at this. “It’s striking how little policing of bad faith courts do,” says David Pozen, a constitutional expert at Columbia Law School. “They’re working with limited precedent, vague statutory language and a tradition of deference to the executive branch, all of which potentially cut in Trump’s favor.” In this way, the president has immense power to define reality. The vibeEven if the courts constrain Trump’s legal declarations of emergency, the spirit of emergency seems to inflect everything that the White House does. A judgment against Trump’s tariff plan will “literally destroy the United States,” he says. His chief policy adviser, Stephen Miller, declares: “The Democrat Party is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization.” The climate of emergency can be used to rationalize virtually any action. The president can pardon insurrectionists and fire the people who punished them, meaning the very idea of justice is up for grabs. The president can say that data about the economy — or weather or autism or the census — is bogus and proffer his own figures instead. Perhaps Trump’s zeal for emergencies will backfire: In polls, voters say they dislike the chaos around his administration. But it’s also possible they’ll just acclimate. By invoking so many crises, Trump signals that he must take abnormal action to cope with an abnormal time. Read why scholars are alarmed by the idea of government-by-crisis: “We tend to associate autocracy with emergency,” one told me.
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This question comes from a recent edition of the newsletter. Click an answer to see if you’re right. (The link will be free.) Trump blamed A.I. for a widely shared video that showed which of the following being thrown from a White House window?
People often assume they’ll get along with others who share their background or personality. But it’s actually the ability to riff that binds us together, Maya Rossignac-Milon and Erica Boothby write. Bret Stephens and Frank Bruni discuss what Democrats can do to get rid of the scarlet L for “loser.” Morning readers: Save on the complete Times experience. Experience all of The Times, all in one subscription — all with this introductory offer. You’ll gain unlimited access to news and analysis, plus games, recipes, product reviews and more.
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