Tag: donald trump

The Government Shutdown Isn’t Stopping Trump From Amassing ‘Emergency’ Powers

Usually when we’re in the midst of a government shutdown, I’m in a good mood. Sure, recent shutdowns haven’t accomplished much in terms of shrinking the cost or scope of the federal government in the long run, but it’s nice to walk around feeling a little less governed than usual.

But even that small pleasure has turned sour. Yes, fiscal restraint matters. It matters to this magazine, which has made cutting spending the subject of a greater percentage of our cover stories than perhaps any other publication. And it matters to me personally; I’ve spent the last 25 years writing about the need to take debt and spending seriously. The size of the state is inversely proportional to personal liberty in ways that are too often overlooked.

But the intense acceleration of the quest to aggregate power in the White House is now unambiguously the more immediate threat to liberty. It’s visible every day on my commute to work, as National Guardsmen linger in my D.C. Metro stop. It’s visible in the September gathering of the nation’s top military officials for something between a pep rally and a company retreat. It’s visible everywhere Immigration and Customs Enforcement is staging raids and setting up warrantless checkpoints. It’s visible in the administration’s moves to take a stake in Intel and broker a TikTok sale. It’s visible from space. (As I write this, Blue Origin is completing its 36th New Shepard flight—a bright spot in a dark month.)

The Cato Institute’s Gene Healy wrote the bible on the imperial presidency, tracing how voters of all stripes invest outsized hopes in presidents and then act shocked when presidents behave like tyrants. The durable lesson: Don’t confer powers on your team’s guy that you wouldn’t trust in the other team’s hands.

But it’s hard to break the habit of agglomerating authority when your party is in charge. This problem is cross-partisan and is older than Donald Trump—or Joe Biden, or even Richard Nixon. After Watergate, the nation briefly remembered why limits are good. But it wasn’t long before the White House started soaking up power again, and by the 2000s a cadre of executive-power enthusiasts, such as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, started pushing hard to “restore” presidential prerogatives. The legal and scholarly scaffolding for today’s power grabs was assembled well before the last few months.

Meanwhile, the “national security” and “federal property protection” exceptions have become a tunnel wide enough to drive an armored personnel carrier through. In 2020, the Department of Homeland Security surged hundreds of federal officers into Portland, Oregon, with threadbare training for the job at hand; internal reviews later read like warnings from the future we’re now experiencing. Surveillance of protesters and mission creep were inevitable; they were the most predictable features of an overgrown executive. But despite that mess, the boots just keep hitting the ground. Portland is once more bracing for a federalized deployment—this time National Guard troops—with state and local officials fighting back on the grounds of both necessity and legality.

Immigration enforcement shows how this logic lands in daily life. The federal government claims sweeping authority within a 100-mile border zone that covers where nearly two-thirds of Americans live. That zone has long been a gray area for warrantless stops and checkpoints, ripe for masked agents far from any actual border to nick away at ordinary civil liberties. Powers granted today will be used more aggressively tomorrow. And powers used in that 100-mile border zone will soon be used elsewhere.

The emergency is now the default. Most of the knobs and levers a modern president uses to bully companies, police speech, or move bodies around aren’t new laws—they’re standby powers that switch on with a magic word: emergency. Congress littered the U.S. Code with these shortcuts; the Brennan Center for Justice has cataloged 137 statutory powers that spring to life the moment a president declares one. (Many never fully turn off.) As of mid-2025, there were roughly 50 simultaneous national emergencies still in force; they are renewed annually, spanning everything from sanctions to tariffs. That architecture lets the White House reach for trade controls, financial blockades, and tech blacklists without returning to Congress. If you like your powers separated, this is the opposite.

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Trump terminates trade talks with Canada over Ontario’s ‘fake’ anti-tariff ad featuring Ronald Reagan

President Trump abruptly called off trade negotiations with Canada on Thursday after the Ontario government funded an anti-tariff ad campaign featuring the voice of President Ronald Reagan.

“The Ronald Reagan Foundation has just announced that Canada has fraudulently used an advertisement, which is FAKE, featuring Ronald Reagan speaking negatively about Tariffs,” Trump wrote in a late-night Truth Social post.

The president said the $75 million ad was made “to interfere with the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, and other courts” in cases challenging Trump’s authority to issue tariffs.

“TARIFFS ARE VERY IMPORTANT TO THE NATIONAL SECURITY, AND ECONOMY, OF THE U.S.A,” Trump argued.

“Based on their egregious behavior, ALL TRADE NEGOTIATIONS WITH CANADA ARE HEREBY TERMINATED,” he declared. “Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

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A Trumpian Headache

President Donald Trump’s use of the U.S. military to kill persons on speed boats in international waters, or in territorial waters claimed by other sovereign nations – all 1,500 miles from the U.S. – has posed grave issues of due process. The Constitution’s guarantee of due process requires it for every person, not just Americans. The operative language of the Fifth Amendment is that “No person… shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.”

The Trump administration has claimed that it can kill whomever it designates as an unlawful enemy combatant – it prefers the political phrase “narco-terrorist” – and the due process it provides is the intelligence gathered by American spies and the White House analysis of that intelligence. This secret analysis, the government’s argument goes, satisfies the president that the folks he has ordered killed are engaging in serious and harmful criminal behavior, and somehow is a lawful and constitutional substitute for the jury trial and its attendant procedural protections that the Constitution commands.

To be fair, I am offering an educated guess as to the administration’s argument. The reason we don’t know the argument precisely is that the Department of Justice calls it classified. This is, of course, a non sequitur. How could a legal argument possibly be secret in light of well-settled First Amendment jurisprudence? It can’t. The Supreme Court has ruled consistently that there are no secret laws or secret rationales for employing the laws. Moreover, it has ruled that the First Amendment assures a public window on government behavior whenever it seeks to take life, liberty or property.

The last time we went through efforts to obtain the government’s legal argument for presidential targeted killing was during the Obama administration. When President Barack Obama ordered the CIA to kill Anwar al-Awlaki and his son – both natural born American citizens – it, too, claimed a secret legal rationale. Yet some brave soul who had access to that rationale leaked it to the press. The rationale likened killing al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son to police shooting at fleeing bank robbers who are shooting at the police.

The Obama justification was absurd, as al-Awlaki was not engaged in any violent acts. He had been followed by 12 intelligence agents during his final 48 hours of life. Those agents couldn’t legally arrest him, because he hadn’t been charged with a crime, but in the Obama logic, they could legally kill him.

When those of us who monitor the government’s infidelity to the Constitution publicly pointed out the flaws in the Obama argument, it reverted to the argument that I suspect the current administration is secretly using. Namely, that its secret internal deliberations are a constitutionally adequate substitution for traditional due process.

It gets worse.

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The Sordid History Of US “Aid” To Colombia

President Donald Trump is rattling his saber against Colombian President Gustavo Petro to punish him for accusing the US government of murdering Venezuelan fishermen. Trump has boasted of the killings by the US military but claims all the targets were drug smugglers. He has threatened to suspend all US government handouts for the Colombian government. Trump warned Petro that he “better close up” cocaine production “or the United States will close them up for him, and it won’t be done nicely.”

Tapping his own psychiatric expertise, Trump proclaimed that Colombia has “the worst president they’ve ever had – a lunatic with serious mental problems.” Is anyone in the Trump White House aware of the long history of U.S. failure in that part of the world? In 1989, President George H.W. Bush warned Colombian drug dealers that they were “no match for an angry America.” But Colombia remains the world’s largest cocaine producer despite billions of dollars of US government anti-drug aid to the Colombian government.

The Bill Clinton administration made Colombia its top target in its international war on drugs. Clinton drug warriors deluged the Colombian government with U.S. tax dollars as they literally deluged Colombia with toxic spray. The New York Times reported that U.S.-financed planes repeatedly sprayed pesticides onto schoolchildren, making many of them ill. Colombian environmental minister Juan Mayr publicly declared last year that the crop spraying program has been a failure and warned, “We can’t permanently fumigate the country.”

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White House Savages Biden, Obama and Clinton with New Major Events Timeline

The White House on Thursday unveiled a new “Major Events Timeline” – and it’s one for the history books, literally.

The Trump White House took a shot at former President’s Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden on its official website.

Bill Clinton- Monica Lewinsky Scandal

“President Bill Clinton’s affair with intern Monica Lewinsky was exposed, leading to White House perjury investigations. The Oval Office trysts fueled impeachment for obstruction.”

Obama Muslim Brotherhood visit

“Obama hosts members of the Muslim Brotherhood, a group that promotes Islamist extremism and has ties to Hamas. The Muslim Brotherhood is a designated terrorist organization by nearly a dozen nations.”

Cocaine Discovered at the Biden White House

“During Biden’s administration, a U.S. Secret Service agent discovered a small, zippered plastic bag containing cocaine in the West Wing entrance lobby. Speculation has pointed to Hunter Biden, an admitted drug user. Additional evidence includes a laptop, seized in 2019, which contains photos of frequent drug use alongside emails about foreign business dealings (Ukraine, China) involving his father, Joe, while he was Vice President.”

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Smoke, Mirrors, and the Pfizer Deal

Iam a mother. I have never been vaccinated myself. I believe deeply in informed consent. And I want to say clearly that I am hopeful about Bobby’s leadership at HHS. I want to believe that he can bring real transparency and accountability to a government that has too often cozied up to the corporations it is supposed to regulate.

But when I read the headlines about Trump’s “landmark” deal with Pfizer, I don’t feel hopeful. I feel misled.

We are told that Pfizer has committed $70 billion to research, development, and production here in the United States. That sounds impressive, like a historic victory for the American people. But the truth is, Pfizer already spends billions every year on research and development. That is simply the business they are in. Without that constant pipeline, they do not survive.

So what is really new here? Nothing at all. It is the same budget they were already going to spend, repackaged and sold as a bold new commitment. The difference now is that Pfizer gets something in return: tariff relief, political cover, and a government-backed direct-to-consumer program called TrumpRx.

That is what makes this deal so frustrating. Pfizer is not changing its behavior. They are not suddenly sacrificing profits or doing more for patients. They are being rewarded for business as usual, only now with added advantages that strengthen their market position even more. And we are being asked to celebrate it as if it is some great victory for ordinary families.

Every producer wants to cut out the middleman. I know this from my own life. As a meat producer, I do not want to pay one. As a vegetable producer, I do not want to pay one. As a content creator, I do not want to pay one. Nobody does. And now Pfizer, of all companies, is getting the official blessing of the US government to do exactly that.

This is the same Pfizer that misled the public during Covid. That is not a rumor, it is documented. Whistleblowers from trial sites described falsified records, patients who were not properly followed up after adverse events, and unqualified staff handling sensitive data. State attorneys general have accused Pfizer of downplaying serious risks, including heart inflammation in young men and pregnancy complications in women. 

Kansas has even claimed the company hid internal studies that showed risks while telling the public something different. And the most central promise of all, that the vaccines would stop transmission, simply was not true, even though the marketing never caught up to that reality.

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China Is Smuggling Fentanyl to US Through Venezuela, Trump Says

U.S. President Donald Trump confirmed on Oct. 23 that China is smuggling fentanyl into the United States through Venezuela to bypass U.S. and Mexican controls.

“They are doing that, yes, but they are paying right now 20 percent tariff because of fentanyl,” Trump told reporters.

Trump said it is one of the issues he will bring up with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping at their bilateral meeting next week.

“The first question I’m going to be asking them about is fentanyl,” he said.

Trump said that with the tariffs on China, which will rise by an additional 100 percent on Nov. 1 if no deal is made, the fentanyl operation will no longer be sustainable for China.

“They make $100 million sell[ing] fentanyl into our country … they lose $100 billion with the 20 percent tariff. So it’s not a good business proposition,” Trump said. “They pay a very big penalty for doing that, and I don’t think they want to be doing it.”

Trump’s meeting with Xi will come at the tail end of his Asia tour, for which he is departing on Oct. 24.

Earlier this year, FBI Director Kash Patel told lawmakers he had spoken to counternarcotics authorities in China and urged them to restrict exports of more fentanyl precursor chemicals.

The Chinese Ministry of Public Security in August added seven chemicals to an export control list, three of them central to producing fentanyl. The restrictions went into effect Sept. 1.

The United States has determined that China is the main supplier of the deadly illicit drug in the United States, and Trump in an executive order on Feb. 1 imposed initial tariffs on China for its “central role” in the fentanyl crisis.

In the order, Trump noted that despite a long history of discussions over the years, Chinese regime officials “have failed to follow through with the decisive actions needed to stem the flow of precursor chemicals.”

According to the order, in addition to subsidizing and incentivizing chemical companies to create and export fentanyl precursors, the regime has also provided “support and safe haven” for transnational criminal organizations that launder the related profits.

“The CCP does not lack the capacity to severely blunt the global illicit opioid epidemic; it simply is unwilling to do so,” the order reads.

In recent weeks, Trump has authorized nine strikes on vessels suspected of trafficking drugs.

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Washington’s Deadly Lack of Foreign Policy Empathy Toward Russia

It is hard to believe that U.S. and other Western officials actually are surprised at the consequences of their habitually tone-deaf policies toward Russia.  Are they truly shocked that a major power, already humiliated by its defeat in the Cold War, resented having the most powerful military alliance in history steadily expand toward its borders?  One need only look at a current map and compare it to a map of Eastern Europe in 1990 at the time of Germany’s reunification to see the geographic extent of NATO’s expanded military power.  The encroachment on Russia’s core security zone is blatant.  Yet, U.S. leaders in five administrations ignored repeated, escalating admonitions and warnings from Moscow as those provocations took place.

The culmination – so far – of such policy arrogance and ineptitude is a dangerous proxy war between NATO and Russia, with NATO using Ukraine as its principal weapon.  Most worrisome of all, the proxy war is a conflict that could, given the slightest miscalculation by either side, escalate to the nuclear level.

Members of America’s foreign policy elite fail to exhibit even a modicum of strategic empathy, and that deficiency urgently needs to be corrected.  The principal global nightmare in the coming decades is likely to be a possible military collision between the United States and the People’s Republic of China (PRC).  If the new generation of U.S. policymakers cannot do a far better job than the current crop has done with respect to policy toward Russia, a catastrophe becomes much more likely.

Aspiring and current U.S. policymakers should be compelled to conduct mental exercises in which they genuinely attempt to view a geostrategic issue from the perspective of an opponent or competitor of the United States.  As an important corollary, there needs to be a more serious effort to comprehend how the other party seems to view specific U.S. actions and initiatives.  Such an approach requires sincere, in-depth intellectual role reversals.

An attempt to achieve something at least resembling strategic empathy would, for example, try to determine how a defeated and humiliated United States would react to a victorious Russia expanding a powerful military alliance it controls ever closer to the American homeland.  Let’s say that the encroaching Russian great power started by adding small nations in the Caribbean and Central America as new alliance members and then moved on to admit larger countries possessing more significant military assets, such as Colombia and Venezuela.  Not content with implementing those provocations, Moscow then seeks to make Canada or Mexico a front line alliance member against the United States.

Substitute the Baltic republics for the small Caribbean or Central American countries, and substitute Poland, the Czech Republic, and Romania for Colombia and Venezuela, and one has the mirror image of what the U.S. and NATO did in Eastern Europe between 1998 and 2004 with the initial stages of NATO’s expansion.  Throughout that period, Washington and other leading NATO powers kept insisting that the moves were not hostile measures directed against Russia – an assertion that had little credibility even during the early phases of expansion and ultimately had no credibility with Russian leaders.  When Anti-Russia hawks began to do their utmost to admit Ukraine to NATO during George W. Bush’s administration, the provocations reached an intolerable level.

Adding Ukraine as a NATO military asset, whether or not Kiev was granted formal membership, was the functional strategic equivalent of a victorious Russia trying to add Mexico or Canada to the looming military power already arrayed against Washington.  In this alternate universe, would anyone be surprised if the increasingly beleaguered United States took decisive steps to prevent Mexico or Canada from becoming a crucial Russian geostrategic asset?  Would we be surprised if U.S. leaders and the American people concluded that they faced an existential security threat and decided that decisive action to neutralize that threat must be taken, whatever the risk?  It is nearly certain that both the public and the government would reach such a conclusion.

Why, then, do U.S. leaders and their NATO allies profess to be surprised and outraged that Russian officials and the Russian people seem to view matters in a similar fashion about the threat their country faces?  The total lack of strategic empathy on the part of Western – especially U.S. – policymakers has produced a predictable, disastrous outcome.

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Who Would Jesus Bomb? The Gospel According to the Military-Industrial Complex

“Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.”—Thomas Jefferson

For a man supposedly intent on winning a Nobel Peace Prize, Donald Trump spends an extraordinary amount of time waging war, threatening to wage war, and fantasizing about waging war.

Notwithstanding his dubious claims about having ended “seven un-endable wars,” Trump has continued to squander the American people’s resources and moral standing by feeding the military-industrial complex’s insatiable appetite for war—preemptively bombing nuclear facilities in Iran, blowing up fishing boats in the Caribbean, and flexing military muscle at every opportunity.

Even the Trump administration’s version of “peace through strength” is filtered through a prism of violence, intimidation and strongman tactics.

It is the gospel of power, not peace—a perversion of both Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount and the U.S. Constitution.

Thus we find ourselves at this peculiar crossroads: a president hailed by his followers as an “imperfect vessel” chosen by God to save the church and restore Christianity—while they turn a blind eye to his record of adultery, deceit, greed, cruelty, and an almost religious devotion to vengeance and violence.

If anything captures Trump’s worldview, it is the AI-generated video he shared on social media: a grotesque fantasy of himself wearing a golden crown, flying a military fighter jet, and bombing a crowd of protesters with brown liquid feces.

This is the man who claims to be “saving God”?

Dismissed by his devoted base as harmless humor—a cheeky response to the millions nationwide who took part in the “No Kings” protests on Oct. 18—Trump’s crude fantasy of assaulting critics with fecal bombs nevertheless begs the question: Who would Jesus bomb?

That question, of course, is meant less literally than morally.

To answer it, we must first understand who Jesus Christ was—the revered preacher, teacher, radical, prophet and son of God—born into a police state not unlike the growing menace of America’s own police state.

When he came of age, Jesus had powerful, profound things to say, about justice, power and how we are to relate to one another. “Blessed are the merciful,” “Blessed are the peacemakers,” “Love your enemies.”

A revolutionary in both spirit and action, Jesus not only died challenging the police state of his day—the Roman Empire—but left behind a blueprint for resisting tyranny that has guided countless reformers and freedom fighters ever since.

Far from the sanitized, domesticated figure presented in modern churches, Jesus was a radical nonconformist who challenged authority at every turn. He spoke truth to power, defied political and religious hierarchies, and exposed the hypocrisy of empire.

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Ninth Circuit Hands President Trump Sweeping Win Over Gavin Newsom — Trump Can Federalize California National Guard to Enforce Federal Immigration Law

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has denied en banc rehearing in Newsom v. Trump, effectively upholding the earlier panel decision that sided with Trump and affirmed his authority to federalize the California National Guard to support federal immigration enforcement.

When California officials refused to cooperate with federal agents, Trump invoked § 12406(3), federalizing and deploying 4,000 members of the California National Guard to Los Angeles to secure ICE facilities and restore order.

California Governor Gavin Newsom and the State of California sued over President Trump’s order, claiming it was unconstitutional and violated state sovereignty.

Newsom wrote at the time:

“We are suing Donald Trump. This is a manufactured crisis. He is creating fear and terror to take over a state militia and violate the U.S. constitution. The illegal order he signed could allow him to send the military into ANY STATE HE WISHES. Every governor — red or blue — should reject this outrageous overreach. There’s a lot of hyperbole out there. This isn’t that. This is an unmistakable step toward authoritarianism that threatens the foundation of our republic. We cannot let it stand.”

US District Judge Charles Breyer (brother of retired SCOTUS Breyer), a Clinton appointee, granted Newsom a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) and said Trump’s decision to federalize the National Guard was illegal.

But the appellate panel ruled that the statute clearly empowers the President to act whenever he is “unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States.”

In practical terms, this means the Commander-in-Chief may call Guard troops into federal service when local or federal law-enforcement personnel cannot safely or effectively enforce the law.

After Senior Judge Marsha S. Berzon, joined by several liberal colleagues, requested a full-court rehearing, a vote of active Ninth Circuit judges failed to secure a majority, and rehearing en banc was denied on Wednesday. That denial makes the earlier Trump victory final within the circuit and binding precedent across nine Western states.

Judge Marsha Berzon’s 38-page dissent argued that the ruling “invited presidents, now and in the future, to deploy military troops… in response to commonplace, short-lived, domestic disturbances.”

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