It’s Trump’s face-saving condition for signing legislation to keep the government open and, in a way, entirely predictable. It’s the kind of finger-in-your-eye, me-but-also-me petulance that has become routine during his tenure: No matter what the issue is, if Trump doesn’t get to simultaneously declare himself the victor and his opponents the vanquished, he’s distressed. And after he got schooled by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) during the nation’s longest government shutdown, bursting the self-proclaimed myth of his dealmaking prowess, Trump’s desperation for any kind of win has driven him to this latest Constitution-shredding tantrum. And Republicans look like they’re going right along with him.

It’s bad enough they want to greenlight Trump’s power grab. Now they’re also putting out the welcome mat for the next Democratic president who tries to do the same.

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First off, there’s no emergency: As The Washington Post and the New York Times both recently reported, the number of apprehensions at the southern border has decreased in recent years. And the Trump administration’s oft-stated contention that the situation at the border is a national security crisis is, in the words of CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen, “a barrel of bunkum and balderdash served with generous helpings of hogwash.” When our nation’s intelligence chiefs recently briefed Congress on the actual threats we face, you know what alarm they didn’t sound? The one about Trump’s imaginary border crisis.

But ever since 2015, when he rode down on that Trump Tower escalator and announced his candidacy by describing Mexican immigrants as “rapists” (disclaimer: “and some, I assume, are good people”), he has cranked up the anti-immigration rhetoric to the point where he can’t turn it down, and to the point that the Ann Coulters and Sean Hannitys of the world won’t let him turn it down:

Trump knows they can turn the MAGA-hat-wearing crowd — the slice of the electorate that Trump long-term leased from them when he decided to run — against him with one all-caps tweet or one hyperventilating Fox News segment. And they know he knows it, so they keep playing their xenophobic, fear-the-brown-horde tune, and the president dutifully tap dances to it. Trump is running a con, but in Coulter and Hannity’s con of cons, Trump is the mark, and the key to the game is that they can never be satisfied:

Trump allowed himself to get played into a corner, and he will make an announcement Friday morning confirming three things: If you can get him to the conference-room table, he can be rolled; that the shutdown was a disastrous waste of everyone’s time; and that once again in his administration, intelligent governance takes a back seat to D-list showmanship and grade-A fearmongering.

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He’s also opening a door that Republicans will regret walking through if and when executive power changes hands: When future President Biden, President Castro, President Harris or President Warren can’t get push their agenda through Congress, they’ll be able to do an end-run on the Constitution, claim emergency powers and cite Trump’s precedent to justify it.

Climate change threatens life on Earth as we know it? No problem, just executive order a “Green New Deal.” Can’t get 60 votes in the Senate for single-payer health coverage? All good, just declare a national health care emergency. Need to defer law-enforcement action for undocumented immigrant parents of Americans? Just type up an order and . . . oh, wait. President Barack Obama already tried that, courts rejected it, Trump reversed it, and Republicans — rightly — cried foul. Don’t even get me started on a Democrat using emergency powers on gun control.

Until recently, Republicans were skeptical of executive action taken outside the boundaries of the Constitution and the law. But now, hypnotized by the rhythm of Trump’s authoritarian soft-shoe, they’ve forgotten that the whole point of being the conservative party was, or at least used to be, opposition to big government.

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Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution is unequivocal: “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.” But, according to reports, Trump will spend around $8 billion for a barrier at the border, only $1.375 billion of which is in Congress’s new budget deal. That’s something the late, great senator Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.) would never have choked down. McConnell, on the other hand, already said that he is willing to swallow it.

Trump once said: “We are going to need a little eminent domain to get that wall built” on private property, adding: “You have to take certain areas, okay? I hate to tell you.” But that’s like a schoolyard bully telling you he just wants a little of your lunch money, or Russia’s President Vladimir Putin saying he just wants to take a little piece of Crimea. Once the government starts, it’s unlikely to stop. Republicans used to understand that.

In Tuesday’s Cabinet meeting, Trump said: “We already have national emergencies out there. You know, President Obama, President Clinton, President Bush — they’ve declared many national — this is not unique. They’ve declared many national emergencies. Many, many. And you have some out there that we can use in addition to one that we can declare if we want to do it.” It’s a reference, apparently, to the seldom-invoked, but still influential come-on-just-try-it-everybody’s-doing-it dictum in the Supreme Court case of What the law is v. What we’ve decided is good for you.

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Trump has grafted the ends-justify-the-means approach that he has taken to everything in his life and so-called career onto the GOP and the federal government, and there is no end in sight (disclaimer: it’ll all be over in just two to six more years). The sycophants in the White House won’t stop him. Don’t hold your breath waiting for congressional Republicans to stop him. And, I’ll wager, when there’s a Democrat in the White House, the temptation to see how far he or she can get by applying the Trump doctrine will be too great to pass up.