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Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
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The disapproval resolution will almost certainly pass the Democratic-controlled House. If four or more Senate Republicans join with the chamber’s Democrats on it, they can force a presidential veto. The resolution almost certainly won’t ultimately undo Trump’s emergency declaration — it seems unlikely that it would attract the necessary two-thirds support in each chamber to override a veto. But it would nonetheless constitute a stinging and public rebuke to the president. And some Republicans who vote against the resolution will be upset that they had to take this vote at all, while others who vote for it will have become further accustomed to breaking with the White House on important votes.
Last but certainly not least, the emergency declaration will face https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/an-emergency-declaration-by-trump-will-lead-to-lawsuits-lots-of-them/2019/02/14/4aef5828-3098-11e9-8781-763619f12cb4_story.html?utm_term=.31b8dfb3e20d (widespread challenges) in the courts. Although federal courts are generally reluctant to challenge unilateral presidential actions — especially actions that come characterized as involving “emergencies” or “national security” — the courts overall (and especially the lower courts) have proven https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/10/19/the-trump-administrations-crazy-losing-streak-in-the-courts-no-jeff-sessions-its-not-about-the-judges/?utm_term=.892c8812bed3 (remarkably) hostileto the Trump administration on a wide range of issues. Something as brazen as the emergency declaration will certainly face deep skepticism. And even if Trump were to ultimately prevail, it would likely take a long time to finish litigating, making it difficult to even begin, much less complete, wall construction before the 2020 election.
All of these forms of weakness are mutually reinforcing: Trump’s low public standing makes it easier for Congress and the judiciary to oppose him; elite pushback from the other two branches of government signals to the public that something fishy might be going on and that there might be good reason to be skeptical of the administration’s moves. This constellation of forces makes it unlikely that Trump’s sweeping declaration ever actually leads to the construction of any wall, concrete, “Steel Slat” or otherwise. And even if Trump does ultimately prevail on the issue at hand, it could come at a considerable political cost to himself and his party.
So Friday’s declaration is not the diktat of a despot, after all. It’s simply the behavior of a president who holds authoritarian tendencies, but has shown no indication that he has the power to be authoritative — much less authoritarian.
WASHINGTON — America was on the brink of war. As President Barack Obama prepared to leave office, he was contemplating yet another conflict in Asia, where the United States had already fought twice since the 1950s without winning. This time, the enemy had nuclear weapons. The potential for devastation was enormous.
Wait a minute — don’t remember Mr. Obama’s near-war with North Korea? Neither do the people who were working for Mr. Obama at the time.
But President Trump has been telling audiences lately that his predecessor was on the precipice of an all-out confrontation with the nuclear-armed maverick state. The way Mr. Trump tells the story, the jets were practically scrambling in the hangars.
“I believe he would have gone to war with North Korea,” https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-national-security-humanitarian-crisis-southern-border/ on Friday. “I think he was ready to go to war. In fact, he told me he was so close to starting a big war with North Korea.”
The notion that Mr. Obama, who famously equivocated about a single missile strike against non-nuclear Syria to punish it for using chemical weapons against its own civilians, would have started a full-fledged war with North Korea seems hard to imagine, to say the least. But this presumption has become part of Mr. Trump’s narrative in patting himself on the back for reaching out to North Korea to make peace.
The argument is that if Mr. Obama were still in office or if anyone else had succeeded him, the United States would invariably have ended up confronting North Korea with armed aggression to reverse its nuclear weapons program. But Mr. Trump’s diplomacy has avoided this supposedly inevitable outcome, meaning it has been a success even though so far North Korea has not eliminated a single nuclear warhead or given up its missiles.
“That was going to be a war that could have been a World War III, to be honest with you,” Mr. Trump said at a cabinet meeting last month.
“Anybody else but me, you’d be in war right now,” he told reporters a few days later. “And I can tell you, the previous administration would have been in war right now if that was extended. You would, right now, be in a nice, big, fat war in Asia with North Korea if I wasn’t elected president.”
It is impossible to prove a negative, of course, but nobody who worked for Mr. Obama has publicly endorsed this assessment, nor have any of the memoirs that have emerged from his administration disclosed any serious discussion of military action against North Korea. Several veterans of the Obama era made a point of publicly disputing Mr. Trump’s characterization on Friday.
“We were not on the brink of war with North Korea in 2016,” Benjamin J. Rhodes, Mr. Obama’s deputy national security adviser, wrote on Twitter.
John Brennan, Mr. Obama’s C.I.A. director, told NBC News, “President Obama was never on the verge of starting any war with North Korea, large or small.”
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The performance really has to be watched to be believed. China, North Korea, Britain and trade policy found their way into the talk. One word seemed to spark a thought and off he would go chasing it, like a dog catching the scent of a truffle and wandering off into a forest in search of it. Other famous moments of presidential free association, like President Reagan’s much derided concluding statements in the first 1984 debate, are Shakespearean in comparison.
Like it or not, words matter when you are president. They are a president’s strongest weapon. With them, he or she can move nations and shift debates. Words can inspire trust between hostile leaders, such as the trust between Reagan and his Soviet adversary Mikhail Gorbachev. With words, a president can move mountains and change the world.
If words fail, a president is left with two weapons to achieve his goals: will and force. The Constitution constrains the president’s ability to achieve much with either of these tools, as the men who wrote it were well aware that these twin brothers are forever the weapons of potential tyrants even if patriots can use them to great effect in times of crisis. For every Lincoln, history shows us a hundred would-be Caesars who use will and force to exalt themselves at the expense of their people.
Trump’s critics have long warned that the president was Caesarean at his core, and they will surely raise that point again in opposing his declaration. But that concern now seems overwrought. Even the modern tyrants whom the president too often unctuously praises demonstrate more facility with language and more attention to governing detail than does he. To borrow from popular culture, Trump looks less like the sinister Emperor Palpatine and more like the hapless Jar Jar Binks.
CNN and MSNBC have separately decided to accept an ad for a film about American Nazis that Fox News rejected, the filmmakers told The Washington Post on Friday.
The news networks will run the 30-second spot during “The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer” and “The Rachel Maddow Show” on Monday. The ad is for the short film “A Night at the Garden,” which has been nominated for an Oscar in the category of documentary short and contains potent footage of a 1939 Nazi rally in New York.
“We decided to dig deep and pay for television ads we weren’t planning to buy because we wanted to make the point that Fox News is out of the mainstream,” the movie’s director, Marshall Curry, told The Post, adding that he believed the network’s rejection of the ad was politically motivated. “It says something that some news channels trust their audience to interpret American history while Fox distrusts its audience and doesn’t think it can do that.”
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