By declaring that he can get funding for his wall without the approval of Congress, Trump has crossed a line. No previous holder of the office ever held himself to such high self-esteem as to believe that his will should prevail in direct contradiction with the spirit of the separation of powers in the Constitution. The power of the purse belongs to Congress because the founders believed that the United States should not be governed by a king. A king has absolute monarchical powers. A president does not. Placing the fiduciary under control of Congress was a way of ensuring that. Trump’s “emergency” is a naked attempt at funding something Congress refused to pay.
Congress said no to the funding of the wall and that should have been the end of it. But Trump, believing in himself above all else, thinks that he can use emergency powers to take money away from disaster relief in California and Puerto Rico in order to fund his bid for reelection. This for a wall that Mexico was supposed to pay.
As stated before, Trump needs his wall to have any chance of being reelected in 2020. But what has Trump gotten from a shutdown? Other than slight damage to his brand, Trump is in fact getting less money from the deal he eventually signed than from the deal he would have gotten before the nation’s longest government shutdown. In normal times this defeat would be headline news, the fact it is not proves how much of the narrative is driven by Trump. It is as if the media cannot catch its collective breath and analyze the reality of the compromise.
Despite what would in normal times be thought of as setbacks, Trump has in fact emerged victorious, having by now completed his hostile takeover of the Republican party. With Mitch McConnell and others praising Trump, it is clear that the Trump brand and the Republican brand are one and the same. No Republican can now stand against Trump. This is the exact modus operandi of ruffians who take ruthless action to achieve power. They know that frightened people–never mind reptiles like McConnell–will not fight back because it would not be in the interest of self-preservation.
Trump’s actions represent a serious threat to the rule of law and the tenets of democracy. By declaring a state of emergency out of the blue, Trump has opened the door for future presidents to do the same when it very well pleases them, Congress be damned. Nothing. Nothing dictates that the future of the United States is not to be led towards the path of totalitarianism. And Trump just opened the door to exactly that.
At this point the only way in which Trump is stopped is through action on the part of the Democrats. Action needs to be in the form of legal challenges, yes, but it also needs to happen at every venue. Trump’s agenda must be stopped at each and every possible juncture. Trump must not be given breathing space. Democrats must behave no differently and do to Trump no less than what Mitch McConnell and his Republicans did to President Obama when they declared war on his agenda and stole Merrick Garland‘s seat on the Supreme Court. There should be no equivocating on the fact that Trump has proven himself to be a danger to the republic and to the constitutional order.
Lest we forget, the purpose of the wall is to satiate a nativist, racist need to keep Spanish-speaking peoples out of the United States. Trump knows his base well and understands that if he does not satisfy their base needs, they will never vote for him again.