This one is brief for me but still too long for a social media post. It’s about tariffs or, more exactly, how Trump is leveling them.

Typically, changes in the budget have to originate with the House of Representatives and get passed into law. Control of the executive’s purse strings was one of the first moves towards a viable democracy in the Anglo-American legal tradition, returning to the Magna Carta. However, US law allows the president to levy taxes by declaring an emergency, also a presidential power. (1)

At the same time, it is well-known that one of the opening moves of any dictator is to declare an emergency to get around the rest of the government! It goes back at least as far as the Roman dictator Sulla, who famously “broke the constitution to save it,” plunging Rome into generations of civil war that ended with the rise of Augustus. (2) It is equally true of modern dictators, though. Hitler and the Reichstag Fire Decree, Ferdinand Marcos saying he needed martial law to fight communists, Alberto Fujimori in Peru to fight terrorists, Park Chung-hee of South Korea and the pretext of North Korean tensions, Nicolás Maduro in Venezeula, Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus, etc., etc. When you see a guy inventing a disaster to invoke emergency powers, the guy wants to be a dictator.

There is no emergency. Trump’s actions are in the process of manufacturing one, but that’s also straight from the tyrant’s playbook: create the disaster you claim you’re trying to solve. (3) Trump is manufacturing a crisis to act unilaterally, which is to say, dictatorially. The tariffs themselves are the distraction. Claiming a fake emergency to seize unilateral power is the significant part.

Notes:

(1) When I say it that way, simply and clearly, it sounds like an obvious recipe for disaster, doesn’t it? The same person who is responsible for declaring emergencies is the same person who sees their power grow by declaring the emergency. That’s obviously a recipe for tyranny.

(2) Apropos all that Roman noise, everyone should look up American caesarism. There are a lot of people who think that the US should follow the Roman example and leave republicanism behind for monarchy. And, perhaps related, Zuckerberg has a hard-on for Augustus, which is why his hair is like that. Seriously.

(3) An example is protection rackets. Some goons come into a shop and say, “It’d be a shame if someone came and messed up your place, so give us a cut.” Of course, they’re the ones who would mess up the shop. It is an underexplored principle in politics, I think, that reactionaries do the same thing: they create the problems they say their policies will fix when the only thing that is “fixed” is that they get what they want. It’s a form of gaslighting.