Mark Wilson/Getty Images Soapbox Trump’s National Emergency Is Great News for Future President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez The president’s latest decision will backfire on conservatives.

Matt Latimer is a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush. He is currently a co-partner in Javelin, a literary agency and communications firm based in Alexandria, and contributing editor at Politico Magazine.

I hope President Donald Trump and his short-sighted supporters have been enjoying the fun they’ve had at the Green New Deal’s expense. Unfortunately for them, the president’s plan to declare a national emergency, which the White House announced Thursday and which could allow Trump to build his wall without congressional approval, may have just made a Green New Deal inevitable in 2021—or whenever he’s out of the White House.

By now, we’ve all become numb, alarmingly so, to the nutty ideas the president of the United States has floated or in some cases enacted to undermine the basic norms of our democratic institutions: firing FBI personnel on various pretexts, discounting election results he doesn’t like, befriending vicious dictators, claiming judges are biased based on their ethnicity, alleging massive voter fraud without evidence, ignoring intelligence findings he doesn’t agree with, and on and on and on. But as bizarre and dangerous as these have been, his plan to declare a national emergency is by far the absolute worst.


Shame on any “conservatives” who roll their eyes, shrug their shoulders and let him take this path because they are sick of arguing with him. (You know who you are.) This is going to backfire on them in a major way—and the tragedy is that every one of them knows this. The core of conservatism has always been a distrust of a powerful national government and the necessity of imposing restraints on it. That’s out the window now, like nearly every other tenet that held the movement together.

I used to laugh when my more progressive friends warned me that Trump wanted to turn America into a third-world banana republic. He’d never pull that off, I’d tell them. The Constitution will stop him. Members of Congress will stop him. The GOP will stop him. Now, I’m the one who is the fool. I’ve tried very hard to restrain myself from frantic pronouncements, but this national emergency declaration is the closest my friends have ever come to seeing their worst fears realized. Is there any other way to see it?

The notion that a president of the United States can simply circumvent the national legislature out of pique, declare something that has been going on for years as an “emergency,” and then implement policies our elected representatives did not vote for, allocate money for or in any other way authorize is totally antithetical to representative democracy and the checks and balances system. If Trump is correct constitutionally, which he isn’t, then what did the Founders create a Congress for in the first place? I’d like to think that the Supreme Court will call a stop to this nonsense in a 9-0 decision, as they did in 1974 when they forced the executive branch to turn over to Congress tapes of President Richard Nixon’s private conversations. Unfortunately, I’ve lost so much faith in conservatives’ ability to draw any red line against Trump that I find it easy to believe that the conservative majority of the court will go along with this, anyway. As a result, Congress will no longer matter. As a result, the Supreme Court will no longer matter, either.

You would think that a president of the United States would care about the long-term threats his actions might have on our democracy. But obviously Trump—a man who reportedly said that amassing more crippling debt doesn’t matter because he’ll be out of office when we have to deal with it—doesn’t care about any of this. Obviously, the Republican Congress is too scared of their own voters to care about that. But here’s what they should care about: They are making their most vivid, frenzied nightmare come true.

For a decade now, the right has warned about a progressive “dictator” like Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton forcing the United States to pursue policies that the majority does not want. Now they are making it so much easier for the next Democratic president to do exactly that. Shortly after learning of Trump’s decision to declare a national emergency to build his beloved border wall, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said a left-wing president might just as well declare an emergency to impose any policies they want, too. As Elizabeth Warren tweeted: “Gun violence is an emergency. Climate change is an emergency. Our country's opioid epidemic is an emergency.” You see where this is headed.

But maybe I’m missing something. Maybe Trump has a plan to stop all of this, too. Maybe we are only a couple of months away from Trump donning a scary robe, declaring another “emergency” and postponing the 2020 elections. If Emperor Palpatine can do something like that, why can’t he? Is there anyone with the courage to stop him? We will find that out very shortly. And I’m not sure we are going to like the answer.