Maggie Haberman Calls BS on Trump for Declaring Emergencies to Grab Power
New York Times White House correspondent Maggie Haberman called out President Donald Trump for using national emergencies to “grab” power when no emergency seems to exist.
Trump held a press conference Monday to announce the deployment of National Guard troops in D.C. — and floated the idea of spreading that approach across the country. The president has already used “national emergencies” to claim trade and deportation powers.
On Wednesday night’s edition of CNN’s The Source with Kaitlan Collins, anchor Kaitlan Collins and Haberman discussed the issue, and Haberman noted Trump’s habit of declaring “some kind of a national emergency in play, when a lot of evidence would suggest otherwise”:
COLLINS: Do you think that he’s serious when he suggests that he might do this in other cities in the United States?
HABERMAN: I do. I mean, I think that — first of all, I think that, for the most part, I think the lesson over the last 10 years is that when he floats something, yes, sometimes he won’t do it, but oftentimes he is just softening the ground to get to it. I do think it appeals to him.
I don’t know that taking over, say, New York necessarily appeals to him, for a variety of reasons. New York is a very complicated city. He would be looked at, in a different way, because it’s his hometown, I suspect is in his head.
But I do think that he would be open to doing this elsewhere. There are — we’ll see how this experiment goes. Washington is relatively small, in terms of being a major city. Other cities, this could be more complicated in.
COLLINS: Well, and I also when he — he was talking about having to go to Congress, about, basically, for people who aren’t tracking this as closely as we are, after the 30 days, which now he’s on, you know, he’s got 28 days left–
HABERMAN: Right.
COLLINS: –he’d have to go to Congress to continue the federal takeover of the police force, here in Washington, to get — to get authorization for that. Today, he seemed to suggest that maybe, in his view, he doesn’t, if he declares–
HABERMAN: Right.
COLLINS: –a national emergency.
HABERMAN: There’s a very wide number of issues on which Trump has said there is some kind of a national emergency in play, when a lot of evidence would suggest otherwise.
President Trump has always taken the approach to power, long before he was a candidate, Kaitlan, that if you have powers before you, you are wasting them, if you don’t use them, even if you have to create sort of a circumstance by which you are grabbing them.
And so, there — the administration has been criticized for emergent — using emergency powers for a number of instances, where they have been — it’s not clear there is an emergency, or it’s clear there isn’t one. I don’t — I wouldn’t be surprised at all, if he declares an emergency. He said he doesn’t want to.
COLLINS: Yes.
HABERMAN: We’ll see.
Watch above via CNN’s The Source with Kaitlan Collins.
