I’m someone who has spent more than enough time in difficult places around the world—places where there was nothing more welcoming than the sight of a USAID truck speeding to some crisis, or perhaps just with food to give away. I never saw the United States’ aid program as an enemy, but the agency has now been shut down and its employees put out of work, as of this week, by presidential fiat. President Donald Trump has abruptly put Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a longtime critic of the USAID when he was in the Senate, and one of his aides in charge of the agency, but we all know who is calling the shots. We shall see how that plays out. President Trump is now acting like a fly fisherman, casting about to see what he can catch. Something to keep in mind about the president is that his actions now are not original. Republican Presidents for more than five decades have come to office vowing to slash the bureaucracy, eliminating needed services for the citizenry, and finding ways to make piles of money for their financial backers. In 2008, at the height of the financial crisis, Thomas Frank, the bestselling author of What’s the Matter with Kansas, published The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Ruined Government, Enriched Themselves, and Beggared the Nation. The book was stunningly prescient: oligarchs are now flooding the zone and, with Trump’s blessing, taking the lead in both foreign and domestic policy issues about which they know little. The game plan, so I’ve gleaned from a rereading of Frank’s book, has its roots in the early days of the Reagan administration. That plan, replicated today by Trump, was enunciated early on by Grover Norquist, a conservative whiz kid who was precursor of Musk, not as wealthy but just as influential. Frank quotes Norquist’s initial playbook: “First, we want to remove liberal personnel from the political process. Then we want to capture those positions of power and influence for conservatives. . . . With this principle in mind, conservatives must do all they can to make sure they get jobs in Washington.” In language that seems eerily familiar today, Frank writes, that in the mythology of the American right, “federal rank-and-file workers are villains” whose “ tendency to join unions makes these public workers even more detestable. Once organized, civil servants support liberals with both votes and campaign contributions—and these liberals, once in office, return the favor by making generous contributions to their unionized employees.” Sounds a bit paranoid, no? In Monday’s Washington Post, Elon Musk was quoted as stating that USAID, which has ten thousand employees, is a “criminal organization” and called for its death. “USAID was a viper’s nest of radical left Marxists who hate America,” he said. The Post further reported that the agency’s web page was shut down by Sunday afternoon. The George W. Bush administration, which came to office in 2001 and responded to the 9/11 attacks by Al Qaeda by invading Iraq, also saw itself as a political enemy of the federal government, and, writes Frank, eventually suggested that half of all federal positions had to be open “to bids from the private sector.” How did that work out? Frank writes that in “each of the Bush administration’s great initiatives—antiterrorism, the recovery from Hurricane Katrina, and Iraq reconstruction—privatized government played a starring role and proved itself a gold-plated botch.” Frank concluded that the consequence of the conservatives’ “unrelenting faith in the badness of government is . . . bad government.” Flash forward to an innovative work by Mark Medish and Joel McCleary, two on-and-off advisers on strategic issues to the staffs of Presidents Jimmy Carter (McCleary) and Bill Clinton (Medish). Both men have worried and obsessed a great deal about President Trump and what they call “The Looming Crisis of Emergency Powers.” Their collaboration on that issue began before the 2020 election when then President Trump cited Article II of the Constitution, which outlines his powers as chief executive of the United States, as giving him “the right to do whatever I want as president.” Trump’s misreading of the Constitution—scholars agree he has no such authority—in his first term. Medish and McCleary eventually published an essay on JustSecurity.org., an online forum about law, rights, and national security, arguing that “the future of electoral democracy in the United States is, without exaggeration, at risk.” I have talked about this issue with Medish and McCleary over the years. Their primary issue is what is not known about the gravest secret of the United States: the emergency powers that Trump, and any president, would have if America was under dire attack. In their essay, the two men say that “most presidential emergency powers have been harnessed under a series of statues such as the National Emergencies Act of 1976 and the International Emergencies Economic Powers act of 1977.” “The thrust of these statues,” they write, “has been to define and limit emergency powers, for example, by requiring a formal declaration of emergencies by the president and mandating certain procedures for implementation.” However, they said, a Congressional Research Service report noted, alarmingly, in their view, that “in the American governmental experience, the exercise of emergency powers has been somewhat dependent on the Chief Executive’s view of the presidential office.” What this means, Medish and McClearly write, is that despite the express statutory limits. “There is room [for a president] for maneuver with or without congressional assent.” An example they cited was Trump’s proclamation in his first term of a national emergency and redirection of funding to allow military construction of the wall at the United States’ southern border with Mexico over strong bipartisan congressional objection. “Even more concerning,” Medish and McCleary write, “it appears that President Trump is correct that some claims to emergency powers are highly classified” and his lawyers “have likely reinforced his confidence that he has ‘the right to do a lot of things that people do not know about. . . . No presidential action document has ever been released or even leaked. And it appears that none has even been invoked.’” I recently asked Medish, who is now practicing law in Washington, how he and McCleary got interested in the issue of presidential emergency powers. Medish, who at one time ran the Russian, Ukrainian, and Eurasian Affairs desk for the National Security Council, said that the Covid crisis in 2020 led him and McCleary to begin “looking at ‘unconventional threats’—as the virus surely was—"to the inner workings to the American Constitutional architecture.” He said that the unfolding pandemic was “a concrete trigger to explore how emergency powers could be invoked in the context of the electoral process and general exercise of presidential authority. This led us to an array of war-gaming scenario exercises about what could go wrong [in a future election] and what checks and balances were available.” Medish and McCleary were encouraged in their research by William Miller, a former Senate aide and ambassador to Ukraine who was the chief counsel to a special Senate Intelligence Committee led by Democratic Senator Frank Church of Idaho that investigated CIA covert activities in the mid-1970s. (The committee was set up in response to a series of articles I wrote in December 1974 in the New York Times about secret illegal CIA spying on American citizens who opposed the Vietnam War.) Medish told me that Miller was an expert on English Civil War history who “used to warn that the party of the king would always try to grab power from the party of the parliament.” It seems evident that Trump's power grab—it is not his alone—is just beginning. 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