One of the first things that will happen is websites such as this will be disabled, as well as operation of social media and that 80% of the mass media that Trump has described as the enemy of the people. Based on a pretense of an imminent cyber attack from a foreign entity, the President on his sole discretion can activate a wide array of existing laws authorizing him to “protect” the American people.
What the President can do if he declares a state of emergency is the title of the article in The Atlantic that starts with:
It would be nice to think that America is protected from the worst excesses of Trump’s impulses by its democratic laws and institutions. After all, Trump can do only so much without bumping up against the limits set by the Constitution and Congress and enforced by the courts. Those who see Trump as a threat to democracy comfort themselves with the belief that these limits will hold him in check.
But will they? Unknown to most Americans, a parallel legal regime allows the president to sidestep many of the constraints that normally apply. The moment the president declares a “national emergency”—a decision that is entirely within his discretion—more than 100 special provisions become available to him. While many of these tee up reasonable responses to genuine emergencies, some appear dangerously suited to a leader bent on amassing or retaining power. For instance, the president can, with the flick of his pen, activate laws allowing him to shut down many kinds of electronic communications inside the United States or freeze Americans’ bank accounts. Other powers are available even without a declaration of emergency, including laws that allow the president to deploy troops inside the country to subdue domestic unrest.
Those who feel that avoidance of the danger described in the article will come from winning elections are probably wrong. It may have worked if Trump had never won in the first place, but given he now controls the levers of emergency authority, the emergency being that he would be removed from office, he has access to every tool designed to defeat an enemy of the American People -- those whom he has defined as such. That’s us!
The article cited above in the Atlantic seems to have been taken, in some cases almost verbatim, from this compendium of national emergencies laws at this website of the Brennan Justice Center. The Editors of Atlantic made a decision that this is a serious enough danger that vulnerability of our democracy must be put out in the public domain, with the legitimacy of their pre-civil war provenance that weathered the breaches of the constitution under Lincoln.
The article doesn’t describe how the greatest danger is the next four weeks, during the period with the Disney like name of “lame duck” session. As we see happening in Wisconsin, it is a period when a regime that has been refuted by the electorate retains the power to vitiate the incoming officials and principles that had been won by the democratic process.
