With the election approaching, Trump tries to portray himself as a lone ranger taking on entrenched bureaucracies.
When President Trump announced last week that he would unilaterally allocate billions of dollars of federal and state funds for an expanded unemployment benefits system; that he would push a federal evictions moratorium and delayed repayments on student loans; and — the kicker — that he would give employees a payroll tax deferral until year’s end, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi responded by calling the moves “absurdly unconstitutional.” After all, the Constitution is clear that Congress controls the nation’s purse strings. There are limits to how far the federal government can go in compelling states to pay for federal programs. And there is simply no precedent for a president to decree, without legislative input, that the complex funding mechanisms for programs as vital to the national well-being as Social Security and Medicare should be put on hold. Trump’s actions, according to some legal observers, may be legal so long as they have no real teeth, so long as they are considered more as advice to agencies and departments rather than orders. But if these executive orders and memoranda were to be interpreted in an expansive way that would actually deliver genuine and speedy financial supports to struggling Americans, at that point they would start to cross the bounds into illegality. In other words, Trump is talking a big talk here, but, as is often the case with him, he’s walking a much more fragile walk. Getting into the constitutional law weeds in parsing Trump’s actions, however, largely misses the point. In calling Trump out in the way that she did, Pelosi may have fallen into a Trumpian trap. Trump doesn’t really care whether the policies he proposes are “unconstitutional.” In fact, part of his political persona involves a calculated pragmatism when it comes to the Constitution: He fetishizes the Second Amendment because it suits his political needs to pander to gun owners. But, in his violent language against the press, for example, he has corroded respect for the First Amendment. And when it comes to big-picture policy and regulatory changes around immigration, taxation, and so on, he operates largely in an extra-constitutional mental universe, and conveys to his audience that he doesn’t care a whit for the nuances and complexities of constitutional limits. Politics is always, at least in part, about optics; and with Trump what is, and has always been, more important than genuine policy successes is the illusion of action. These days, with the country hobbled by a pandemic and by economic contraction, and with Trump’s popularity waning, that illusion has swallowed all other parts of the process. Trump doesn’t want to do the tedious work of political negotiations; rather, with the election fast approaching, he is desperate to portray himself as a man of action, as a lone ranger taking on the entrenched bureaucracies. To achieve this illusion, Trump increasingly wants to rule by fiat — or at least to pretend to rule by fiat.
