Capo-in-Chief
This essay was first published at The Free Press.
We need to recognize — and name — the form of government we are living with right now. Its closest analog is the Mafia. President Trump is using extortion to achieve his objectives. Too many are yielding to his extortion because they believe that to be the less costly alternative. For some it is; for the world, it is not. The only way to respond to a Capo-in-Chief is through full-on resistance, regardless of the cost, for however long it takes.
I mean the word extortion precisely. In context after context, Trump is threatening illegal action as a way to induce a deal. He has threatened to impose huge penalties on universities — without due process of law — as a way to induce them to accept his demands. He has threatened to destroy law firms whose lawyers have opposed him in the past — without due process of law — as a way to build free legal resources to advance his ends. And though some believe the law technically gives the president the power to declare an “emergency” when there clearly is none, so as to trigger the power to impose crippling tariffs on friends and opponents alike, I do not believe the law, properly interpreted, gives him that power. So here, too, he deploys illegal action to bully nations and corporations to do what he wants. (See, e.g., Vietnam bragging that it is close to a deal for a $1.5B Trump resort when reporting on its negotiations on the tariffs.)
Never has a president behaved like this. It’s not even close. Sure, during actual wars, presidents have walked up to the line of executive authority. Maybe FDR and Lincoln crossed those lines. Legal historians are on both sides of those debates. But this president threatens with power he knows he does not have, because he believes he will get away with threatening it. And in the face of this threat, the truly tragic reality is that the key institution designed to resist this threat — Congress — is incapable of mustering any resistance. The courts will do what they can, but courts were never built to address this kind of threat.
Trump knows that. Or the architects of Trump’s chaos know that. Which is why, on so many fronts, extortion is working.
