U.S. President Donald Trump mimics a weightlifter while he speaks at a dinner he hosts for Republican Senators at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, U.S., February 7, 2025.
t’s hard to remember that only 10 weeks ago, the American economy was quite good, our foreign relations were on the whole positive, we were on the way to dealing with climate change with subsidies for wind and solar energy, and we still lived in a democracy.
Today, all that is disappearing. The economy is in acute danger, our relationships with traditional allies are collapsing, we’re subsidizing fossil fuel polluters, and we’re turning into a dictatorship.
This has happened in part because of Trump’s continuing creation of fake national emergencies.
He has declared foreign trade a national emergency and used the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 to raise tariffs to levels not seen since the disastrous Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930.
During his 2024 campaign, Trump pledged to bring Americans immediate relief through lower prices. Scratch that. Americans now face higher prices for automobiles, groceries, clothes, and other goods.
He has declared immigration a national emergency and used the National Emergency Act and war power under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to authorize mass deportations.
Now, no one is safe — not even people legally in the United States, possibly not even American citizens.
Last week, Trump officials admitted they had made an “administrative error” in abducting a Maryland man whose wife and child are both American citizens and sending him to a notorious Salvadoran prison — despite a court order that he could remain in the United States because he might face torture in El Salvador. To make matters worse, the Trump regime says it has “no power” to get him out of that El Salvador prison.
What guarantee do we have that American opponents of Trump won’t be abducted and sent to El Salvador?
Once everything becomes an emergency, there’s no bottom.
All told, since taking office on January 20, 2025, Trump has declared six national emergencies, including a “National Energy Emergency” and an emergency declaration against Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Specially Designated Global Terrorists.
He has also in effect declared an emergency to justify his wholesale leveling of significant portions of the federal government and civil service and his virulent attacks on the pillars of civil society — our universities, the media, science, law, and the arts.
On Friday, Trump reposted a video saying he’s crashing the stock market on purpose — creating a national economic emergency in a “wild chess move” to “force” the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates and refinance a chunk of the federal government’s $36 trillion in debt “very inexpensively.”
To be sure, yields for U.S. Treasury notes, which are a starting point for loans from mortgages to corporate bonds, collapsed last week — as the benchmark 10-year Treasury fell more than 10 basis points to a six-month low of below 3.9 percent.
But that’s no cause for celebration. The economic collapse Trump is engineering is also pushing up prices and pummeling consumers, and it could easily tip America (and the world) into a recession.
Meanwhile, as Trump declares emergency after emergency to justify his reign of terror, he’s simultaneously eliminating America’s capacity to respond to real emergencies.
Just as vast swaths of Arkansas, Missouri, and Kentucky were underwater, Trump announced he’s ending a key program used by communities across the country to help prepare for natural disasters like flooding and fires.
By terminating the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s program for building resilient infrastructure, Trump has cut off funds to mitigate real disasters, such as raising roads to keep them out of floodwaters or building underground storage units to prepare for droughts.
Make no mistake about what’s really going on here. While the United States has plenty of real problems to deal with, Trump is ignoring them to manufacture the fake emergencies he needs to further enlarge and centralize his power.
Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.
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