Trump thrives on creating crises, and then "solving" the crisis he, himself created. He did it with DACA, with Obamacare, and with North Korea. It seems he's trying the same playbook with Iran and immigration/asylum.
But what if the crisis he creates in this case involved what looked like widespread violence?
The Constitution gives Congress (controlled by the GOP) the power to "suppress insurrections," while numerous laws including the Patriot Act and its successors give the president the power to declare various levels of emergency or even martial law. (It's been done before; Lincoln did it and even suspended habeas corpus, which was clearly unconstitutional.)
In 2004, the Congressional Research Service (a federal agency that researches legal questions for members of Congress) looked into whether a president could suspend elections in a time of crisis. They concluded: "While the Executive Branch does not currently have this power, it appears that Congress may be able to delegate this power to the Executive Branch by enacting a statute."
Is it inconceivable that our current Congress might do such a thing? Wouldn't it depend on how many people were in the streets protesting (after the election it was a million-plus) and how many right-wing open-carry armed thugs show up?
If Heather Heyer was only the first anti-Trump protester murdered by white supremacists, and dozens or hundreds more were to fall to the guns or bombs of Trump's Very Fine People, Congress may well consider it a state of emergency.
This was, after all, the exact scenario that Timothy McVeigh thought he would bring about. Following the Turner Diaries script, known to every white supremacist, McVeigh believed that President Bill Clinton would react to the Oklahoma City bombing with widespread gun control, which would cause all the good well-armed white people to start a killing frenzy against people of color and bring about the Aryan forces' "triumph."
And McVeigh's thinking on the subject is widely shared in the hard-right-wing underground today.
We Americans tend to think of ourselves as totally unique, but numerous democratic republics have gone down this or similar roads in past generations. As Trump biographer Tony Schwartz noted, "Just look at any country that has been taken over by the military. He'd say there is a threat to the republic and the military needs to crack down and he would start with curfews, and the stop and frisk of anyone who is not white, male and rich."
But what about the power of the Article III courts to restrain Trump, you might ask?
So far, with his Muslim ban and his brutal confinement of refugee children, Trump has gone along with the courts. But consider his presidential hero, Andrew Jackson, the man whose picture Trump hung by his desk in the Oval Office.
Not just the lower courts, but the Supreme Court itself told Jackson that he couldn't do things -- twice -- and both times he simply defied them. One was ending the second National Bank, and the other was the genocidal Trail of Tears.
John Marshall was Chief Justice of the Supreme Court at the time. President Jackson simply ignored the earlier SCOTUS ruling in the constitutionality of the bank (McCulloch v Maryland), and ignored legislation supporting the Court and the bank that passed through both the House and the Senate.
Ignoring the law and legal precedent, Jackson proceeded to shut the bank down, an action that, in part (along with paying off the national debt), produced the deepest and longest depression in the history of the United States.
And when Marshall ordered him not to forcibly relocate the Cherokee Indians from Georgia to Oklahoma (indirectly; the case had to do with a Vermont man held in Georgia who was going to be relocated along with the Cherokee), Jackson was said to have bragged to his friends, "John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!"
So, what if Trump were to simply follow the example of his hero, Jackson?
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