Donald Trump appears If he returns to office, he dreams of becoming an American dictator. The former US president secured enough delegates on Tuesday to win the 2024 Republican nomination with his plan to deport millions of undocumented immigrants and house dozens of them in massive refugee camps. He wants to invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy troops in cities across the country to quell civil unrest. He wants to prosecute his political opponents. An organized and well-funded effort to replace career civil servants in the federal government with Trump loyalists who will do his bidding and help him consolidate power.
Legal experts are also concerned, however, about the special powers he could possess that previous presidents have had but generally do not use. If Trump decides to go full-on authoritarian, he could use so-called “emergency powers” to shut down the Internet in certain areas, censor the Internet, freeze people’s bank accounts, restrict transportation, and more.
Using laws like the National Emergencies Act, the Communications Act of 1934, and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), he will be able to wield power in ways this country has never seen. Furthermore, America’s vast surveillance state has often been abused and could theoretically be abused further to spy on his perceived political enemies.
“There really are no emergency powers related to surveillance, and that’s because the non-emergency powers are so powerful and give the executive branch such broad powers. They just don’t need emergency powers to do that,” Brennan Justice, NYU School of Law said Elizabeth Goitein, senior director of the Center for Freedom and National Security Project.
Goitan said that as she considers whether a president might decide to act like a dictator, her biggest concern is what presidents could do with the emergency powers available to them. She said the laws surrounding those powers offer few opportunities for other branches of government to stop the president from doing whatever he wants.
“Emergency powers are designed to give the president extraordinary powers to be used in extraordinary circumstances. Because they provide very powerful authority, it is critical that they create checks and balances and prevent abuse,” Goitein said. “The problem with our current system of emergency powers, which is a system of many different laws, is that it really lacks those checks and balances.”
For example, under the National Emergencies Act, the president only needs to declare some form of national emergency to activate the powers contained in more than 130 different legal provisions. Those laws don’t define what constitutes a true emergency, so Trump can come up with many reasons to declare one, and he can’t easily stop abuses of that power.
“There is a provision in the Communications Act of 1934 that allows the president to shut down or take over communications facilities during a national emergency. There is a provision that allows the president to exercise little-specified control over domestic traffic that has been interpreted very broadly,” Gogo said. Etan said. “IEEPA allows the President to freeze the assets of any person and block financial transactions with any person, including U.S. persons, if the President deems it necessary to address an unusual or extraordinary threat that emanates, at least in part, from overseas.”