Over the past two years, President Donald Trump has tested the limits of his executive authority — and infuriated his opponents in the process. | Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images White House ‘It’s his universal solvent’: How Trump sidelines Congress by invoking national security Moving unilaterally to fund a border wall would be the latest use of one of the president’s most powerful tools.

Time and time again as President Donald Trump has sought to make monumental changes to U.S. policy, he’s relied on the same justification: national security.

When he restricted travel from several majority-Muslim countries days after his inauguration in January 2017, his administration argued that the ban was necessary to protect Americans from terrorists. When he launched a global trade crackdown, his advisers insisted that steel imports from longtime American allies like Canada and the European Union threatened the United States. When his team proposed a now-defunct plan to boost the ailing coal industry, it asserted that America’s growing dependence on natural-gas-fired electricity was making it too vulnerable to pipeline attacks.


Now, Trump and his senior aides are arguing that there’s a security crisis along the U.S.-Mexico border as they weigh whether to move forward with an unprecedented national emergency declaration that could grant the president the authority to unilaterally build a wall.

Before he became president, Trump repeatedly attacked his predecessor, President Barack Obama, for embracing the powers of the executive branch in the face of an obstinate Congress. But like many presidents before him, Trump has learned that governing is a whole lot easier when you can do it on your own.

Trump and his advisers now see raising the specter of a national security threat as one of the most powerful tools in their arsenal, allowing them to make decisions carrying massive consequences with little oversight from Congress. Over the past two years, Trump has tested the limits of his executive authority — and infuriated his opponents in the process.

“It’s his universal solvent,” said Bobby Chesney, a national security law expert at the University of Texas at Austin, referring to the administration’s inclination to cite national security to justify major policy moves.





But by relying on the rationale so often, Trump risks endangering the long-term credibility of the executive branch, some experts warn. Judges weighing the merits of inevitable court challenges to his moves might not believe the White House’s national security justifications, and lawmakers might take steps to limit the power of the presidency, as they did in response to frustrations with President Richard M. Nixon.

“The long-term impact is an erosion of trust in the executive branch, which may come back to bite,” Chesney said.

The origins of Trump’s national-security-focused strategy date back to the months after he won the election, when his top aides were scrambling to come up with a plan to make good on his campaign promises without running afoul of the law, according to people familiar with the matter.

Steve Bannon, then a top presidential adviser, instructed Trump’s team — including policy aides like Stephen Miller, who focused on immigration, and trade adviser Peter Navarro — to come up with ways to stretch the president’s executive power, aware that Trump’s agenda would face resistance from Congress.

By the time Trump took office, it became clear that justifying key policies on national security grounds could lend the president the expanded authority he sought.

“The president is at the apex of his authority when operating in the context of national security and in times of a national emergency,” a former White House official said. “It’s the best legal argument.”

Bannon, in an interview, said the national security rationale helped pave the way for the central policy successes of Trump’s presidency so far.

“Trump won the presidency on two issues — immigration and trade, especially trade with China,” he said. “You have to find a forcing function for both of these, and that was national security. Solutions to both issues are undergirded by national security concerns — whether that’s steel production, technology theft or the wall.”

Bannon and other hard-line backers of the president are among the leading public advocates for declaring a national emergency at the border, arguing that it’s the only way to overcome the stalemate in Congress. But some in the White House and in Congress are urging caution, warning that the move might not survive court challenges.

“It’s more than just optics, it’s more than just an exit ramp,” Bannon said. “This is the way you actually get your wall built.”

For decades, lawmakers have included provisions in statutes that allow the executive branch to waive parts or all of certain laws on national security grounds. And courts, generally speaking, are reluctant to second-guess a president’s national security rationales.

“This administration, perhaps more than prior administrations, doesn’t feel bound by the political risks” of making frequent national security determinations, said Scott Anderson, a legal expert with the Brookings Institution.

The president’s opponents accuse him of exaggerating national security threats in order to push through his agenda without the input of Congress, a co-equal branch of government.

Critics of the travel ban, for example, said the administration was using national security to justify a discriminatory act aimed simply at keeping Trump’s campaign pledge to bar Muslims from entering the United States.

“This administration uses national security as a foil so that it can pass draconian policies that the American people don’t agree with and go against our values,” said Sirine Shebaya, a senior staff attorney at Muslim Advocates, a legal group.

Several court challenges to the initial travel ban forced the administration to adjust it multiple times; ultimately, the Supreme Court allowed a version to stand.

Trump’s decision to impose tariffs on steel and aluminum imports infuriated longtime allies, with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada last year calling the idea that Ottawa posed a national security threat to the United States “insulting” to U.S. and Canadian soldiers “who had fought and died together on the beaches of World War II, on the mountains of Afghanistan and have stood shoulder to shoulder in some of the most difficult places in the world.”

In imposing the tariffs, the White House dusted off Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, which allows the president to unilaterally impose trade barriers if the Commerce Department finds that imports threaten national security. The administration argued that unfair trade imports were threatening to wipe out the U.S. steel and aluminum industries, which are important to the country’s military industrial base.

The national security trade law has been invoked 30 times between 1962 and 2018, but there have been no previous cases that resulted in tariffs.

Energy Secretary Rick Perry took a similar approach in pushing a plan to protect money-losing coal and nuclear power plants out of a concern that the nation’s growing dependence on natural gas created an increased threat of physical and cyber attacks on pipeline infrastructure.

A leaked draft proposal pitched to the National Security Council last year laid out how the White House might invoke national security to prop up power plants for as long as two years, a rationale that many congressional Republicans balked at. However, POLITICO reported that the scope of the Energy Department’s proposal proved too broad for some in the White House, which put the plan on ice last fall.

While Trump has regularly used national security as a justification for major policy moves, he has occasionally declined to employ it when some hoped he would.

For instance, Obama used his waiver authority to lift sanctions on Iran as part of an international nuclear deal, arguing that adhering to the deal was critical for U.S. national security. Trump ultimately refused to waive the sanctions as a result of his desire to exit the nuclear deal.

While Trump has not yet decided whether to declare a national emergency to build his wall, administration officials spent the week making the case to the public that the situation at the border amounted to a crisis — a contention that many experts dispute, noting that apprehensions of people trying to cross the southern border are much lower than in past years.

During a prime-time address from the Oval Office on Tuesday night, Trump made no mention of declaring a national emergency. But he called the situation at the border a “growing humanitarian and security crisis.”

Arguing that some illegal immigrants are a threat to the public, Trump asked, “How much more American blood must we shed before Congress does its job?”

Adam Behsudi and Darius Dixon contributed to this report.