The only national emergency is the law that empowers a mad king

They descended on Philadelphia from all over, determined to act against a king and his “establishment of absolute tyranny over these states.” Their long list of grievances included:

“For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world;

For imposing taxes on us without our consent;

For depriving us, in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury;

For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses;"

Those could have been signs carried on Saturday by the thousands of protesters who circled Philly’s City Hall on a raw, windy April afternoon — marching up Market Street with a banner proclaiming “No King” as part of a nationwide “Hands Off!” protest that brought at least 3 million and maybe as many as 5.2 million Americans out into the streets.

But actually these are quotes from the Thomas Jefferson-penned Declaration of Independence, reminding us of the tragic irony that America under President Donald Trump has, in many ways, become the kind of tyranny that citizens on this soil rebelled against in 1776.

On Saturday, the huge anti-Trump protests included roughly 100,000 on D.C.’s National Mall and another 100,000 in New York City who stretched down Fifth Avenue — yes, the street where Trump famously claimed he could shoot somebody and not lose any supporters — almost as far as the eye could see. But arguably more impressive were the gatherings in smaller towns across America, including a few thousand who lined both sides of the street in little Geneva, Ill., a large rally outside the courthouse in Pittsboro, N.C., population 4,839, and even a healthy turnout in Kalispell, Mont., in a community Trump won by 33 points.

One of the Montana demonstrators carried a sign that read “Hands Off Our Money Medicare Social Sec,” reflecting the initial main focus of the 50501 Movement and other protest organizers against mass federal worker layoffs and looming budget cuts directed by Elon Musk, the world’s richest person and a close Trump adviser.

But undoubtedly the crowds were swelled Saturday by Trump’s autocratic diktat last week that may prove the turning point of his 47th presidency — his sweeping, unilateral imposition of tariffs on goods from more than 100 nations, at astronomical rates from 10% in many cases to as high as 54% on China, a major trading partner.

Suddenly, the 1776 colonists’ beef with Britain’s King George III about “imposing taxes on us without our consent” had found a loud echo in a U.S. president’s seemingly arbitrary and capricious implementation of what could amount to a more than $2,000-a-year tax hike on a typical American family, since consumers will ultimately pay for these levies.

» READ MORE: After 248 years, America prepares for life under a king | Will Bunch

Indeed, the Boston Tea Party-level of anger and grievance in America’s streets this weekend was amplified by the instant fallout: one of the steepest two-day declines in the history of Wall Street, with major stocks losing more than 10% of their value as investors contemplated a future of higher prices and shortages or product cancellations caused by trade barriers.

The Dow’s implosion was, arguably, a way for the nation’s captains of industry and masters-of-the-universe financiers to vote by secret ballot on a trade policy that many, if not most, consider bat-guano crazy It’s tanking an economy that just six months ago was the envy of the developed world, despite what millions heard on Newsmax or whatever. And yet, no major capitalist was willing to tell America’s mad king the truth about his nonexistent new clothes.

When America’s CEOs and finance leaders had a chance to voice their fears about tariffs or the sweeping federal layoffs to the president at a Business Roundtable Event last month, “They sat there like docile parishioners in a church while Trump pontificated from the pulpit,” Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a professor at the Yale School of Management, told Vanity Fair. No business leader wants to find themselves on the receiving end of wrath from either the White House or the MAGA movement. “There is zero incentive for any company or brand to be remotely critical of this administration,” a public affairs operative told Politico.

Likewise, political commentators have struggled over the last five days to come to terms with the seemingly immense impact of the tariffs, because the self-defeating and inexplicably dumb nature of the levies — including tariffs on an island only inhabited by penguins, and a formula that includes Greek letters to help pretend the numbers weren’t pulled from thin air — defies rational explanation.

“If it endures, Donald Trump’s decision on April 2, 2025 to enact sweeping ‘reciprocal’ tariffs on U.S. trading partners will go down as one of the greatest acts of self-harm in American economic history,” wrote the staid Financial Times, a publication not known for its raving left-wing lunacy.

Historians will surely continue debating amid the likely rubble for an explanation of why the Trump regime did this, but the more important question Americans need to be asking at this moment is not why, but how. How could one man make such a disastrous and dictatorial decision for 335 million Americans, in a nation that — as the faded ink on the Declaration of Independence makes clear — was created for the express purpose of preventing this from happening.

The sad reality is that we gave him this power.

In the fall of 1976 — ironically, America’s Bicentennial year — Congress passed the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, which grants the White House authority to take strong economic measures against foreign nations without either an investigation or seeking prior approval from Congress. Like a lot of laws passed in the years immediately after Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal, Congress thought that IEEPA was a way to reign in an imperial president, when in reality it did the exact opposite.

The idea behind the law was to end a raft of ongoing emergencies declared by Nixon and other past presidents and create a better-spelled-out, more democratic process for any future ones. Instead, the declaration of national emergencies has expanded under every president, Democrat or Republican, over high-profile events like the 1979 Iran hostage crisis or the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

In the bigger picture, Americans have become way too numb to sweeping uses and, arguably, abuses of presidential powers, whether that’s dropping bombs on Yemen with little more debate than an emoji-laden Signal chat, or imposing economic sanctions or, before last Wednesday, more targeted tariffs. This development is completely the opposite of the version of America sought by its founders, who envisioned a republic in which Congress — a large deliberative body, elected by the citizenry — would have the power to declare war or levy taxes, including tariffs.

Trump’s absurd claim of a “national emergency” when clearly none existed — either in what used to be a flourishing economy, or anywhere else — makes a mockery of the existing laws. It should sound the alarm for everyday Americans that our presidency has become way too powerful, even before the current self-proclaimed strongman marched on Washington.

“This was done through the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) because of the major threat of illegal aliens and deadly drugs killing our Citizens, including fentanyl,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post on Saturday. But unauthorized border crossings are at their lowest level in years, and the notion that wrecking the global economy can curb fentanyl abuse is beyond laughable. The president has cited fentanyl trafficking from Canada in his on-again, off-again trade war with our formerly friendly neighbor, even though only 43 pounds of the illegal drug were seized at the northern border last year.

Even some conservatives who were presumably elated over Trump’s victory last November are appalled over his abuse of the emergency law, including the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a conservative legal outfit supported by the likes of industrialist Charles Koch and Supreme Court influencer Leonard Leo. This week, the group filed a complaint against the president’s new tariffs. But this moment should serve as a much bigger wake-up call for how far America has gone down the wrong track.

If Congress wants to listen to the more than 3 million people in the streets — and it should, if it wants to cling to any lingering claim on legitimacy — then it should first act immediately to use the power it has under the 1970s law to reverse the taxation-without-representation of a mad king, as soon as possible. Then it should repeal IEEPA and draft new legislation that severely restricts a president’s emergency-declaration powers, since we’ve now seen how badly these can be misused and abused by a power-hungry dictator.

Saturday’s marchers did a great job in boiling the essence of the American Experiment hatched right here in Philadelphia down to just those two words: “No King.” The restoration of a monarchy on U.S. soil is perhaps the inevitable result of years of neglecting what this nation is supposed to be all about. We’ve now betrayed the legend of Benjamin Franklin in keeping the republic, but there is a path for winning it back.

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