As a reporter here at Mother Jones, I tend to spend a lot of time thinking about what the president is doing.
A few months ago, I noticed a bit of a theme: every time Trump did something that (to me) seemed bizarre or inexplicable, he'd say it was a “national security” necessity.
Dropping $400 million on a ballroom? National security. Putting tariffs on trumpets and trombones? National security. Letting Elon Musk's xAI pollute Memphis? You guessed it—the chatbot Grok is, apparently, critical to national security.
So I talked to some experts, and learned that Trump's not the only president who's used this get-out-of-jail free card—far from it. Especially since the 9/11 attacks, pretty much every American president has jumped at the chance to expand surveillance and start wars under the banner of national security.
These days, national security “is sort of like a Christmas tree. Everybody can just kind of hang what they want onto it,” as law professor Elizabeth Beavers put it.
For the latest issue of our print magazine, I wrote about how Trump and his predecessors have deployed the ur-excuse of national security to paper over a panoply of abuses of power. Read the full story here.
—Sophie Hurwitz
