Commentary by Stephen Macaulay
We all know what an “emergency” is. Generally, it is something both urgent and unexpected.
A simple way is to think about the emergency room in a hospital as distinct from an in-patient room. While people going into both may need to have surgery, it is in the case of the first one that it needs to happen stat, while the second one is put on a schedule.
An emergency is bounded by time: it is a distinct period when something out of the ordinary occurs and requires immediate action.
Were an emergency not bounded by time it would essentially be the status quo, normality, the way things are.
For many of the tariffs that have been applied to trading partners the Trump Administration is using the International Economic Emergency Powers Act of 1977.
It, in part, allows the president, after declaring an emergency, to “deal with any unusual and extraordinary threat, which has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States, to the national security, foreign policy, or economy.”
“They’ve been ripping us off for years!” is a refrain Donald Trump has repeatedly used.
What was unusual about the network of trade that was established? What was the extraordinary threat?
If General Motors wants to build pickup trucks in Mexico and if you want to buy one, is this odd or threatening?
What is the emergency?
If “They” have truly been “ripping us off for years,” it hardly seems to be an emergency situation. Rather, it is how things are.
One of the things that Donald Trump claimed was happening, for example, was that Canada was letting deadly fentanyl into the US. An emergency?
From October 2023 to September 2024 the US Customs and Border Protection operation seized 43 pounds of fentanyl coming in from Canada.
Meanwhile, during the same period 21,100 pounds of fentanyl were seized coming over the border from Mexico. That could be construed as something of an emergency. But 43?
One of the ways the Trump Administration calculated tariffs was based on whether a trade deficit existed with the other country. Or said more simply: the US bought more stuff from the other country than the other country bought from the US.
In 2023 the total trade deficit — that is, goods and services — with Canada was $40.6 billion.
In 2024 the total trade deficit with Canada was $35.7 billion.
Because the US likes to buy lots of Canadian oil, there was a trade deficit being run — for several years. But that trade deficit was going down.
Emergency?
The Ontario Government ran an ad during the television broadcast of a World Series Game that included Ronald Reagan’s observations as to why tariffs aren’t good.
An incensed Donald Trump immediately reacted, posting that he’d raise the tariff on Canadian goods by 10%.
Pique or emergency?
Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ) participated in a video with other elected representatives* during which he and the others stated that American service personnel should not carry out “illegal orders.”
Kelly is a retired naval officer who flew military combat missions during the first Gulf War. He knows more than a little something about orders.
In the video Kelly states: "Our laws are clear. You can refuse illegal orders.”
Yes, the Uniform Code of Military Justice makes it clear that service personnel must obey lawful orders, but not unlawful ones.
Doesn’t illegal = unlawful?
Donald Trump, incensed by the video, put on his social media posts including “This is really bad, and Dangerous to our Country. Their words cannot be allowed to stand. SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR FROM TRAITORS!!! LOCK THEM UP??? President DJT” and “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by death.”
Sedition means, in part, resistance against lawful authority.
Kelly and his colleagues are recommending resistance against unlawful (a.k.a., “illegal”) orders.
Just as the Trump Administration seems to be defining “emergency” as any conditions they deem to be so, here they are taking exception to people telling other people to obey the law. Is this to suggest that service personnel should obey illegal orders?
In October 2016 during a campaign rally at the Iowa State Fairgrounds, then-candidate Trump said: "Don't believe what you see and don't believe what you hear, believe what I tell you.”
He still believes that, and he wants the American people to, as well.
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*Other participants in the video are Senator Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), Representative Chris Deluzio (D-PA), Representative Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA), Representative Maggie Goodlander (D-NH), and Representative Jason Crow (D-CO). It is worth noting that Deluzio, Goodlander, and Crow are all attorneys, so they undoubtedly know a bit more about the law — civil and military — than former TV personality Pete Hegseth.
Macaulay is pundit-at-large for The Hustings where he writes primarily for the right column.