If Everything Is an Emergency, Nothing Is an Emergency

This began on inauguration day. The declaration of a “National Energy Emergency,” well trod here at Splinter in the months since, has given the Trump administration broad cover to try and reshape the energy landscape, kneecapping wind and solar power with the long-used and rickety tire iron of “intermittency” and propping up every dirty power source available. The idea is that our energy supplies, our power grid, all of it is somehow wobbling, and only burning more ancient carbon will set things right; there is literally no honest observer who could see an emergency in how that system was running, no matter how hard they looked.

But when every tool’s a hammer — downstream of the overall energy “emergency,” the president has instructed agency heads on “utilizing such emergency authorities as are available” to increase coal mining and various minerals production, among other things. If it is legally and bureaucratically hard to do — as the last few decades of environmental oversight and changing national priorities have prescribed — simply say the E word and make it happen.

And if the power grid wasn’t in some dire strait requiring dubious fixes, America’s international trade arrangement was right there with it. Trump’s obsession with tariffs, instruments he simply will never understand no matter what, inspire other emergency declarations. In an April 2 EO, the president found that existing bilateral trade relationships “constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and economy of the United States,” somehow. And so: “I hereby declare a national emergency with respect to this threat.” And so began his generally illegal, on-again-off-again dance with most countries in the world, playing an increasingly dicey game of Jenga with the global economy in service of “fixing” a historically strong American one.

And again, he keeps finding reasons to climb to the White House roof and shout “emergency” as an offshoot to the overall tariffs morass. Trump got so mad at President Lula of Brazil refusing to back down on tariffs — and for daring to continue prosecuting personal friend and Covid enthusiast Jair Bolsonaro — that he decided a new declaration was in order. “I… find that the scope and gravity of the recent policies, practices, and actions of the Government of Brazil constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat, which has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States, to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States and hereby declare a national emergency with respect to that threat.” The Bolsonaro bit is actually in the executive order; it is an emergency, as far as Donald Trump is concerned, that treasonous attempts to overturn elections get prosecuted, no matter what country we’re talking about.

Meanwhile, things that might reasonably be considered true emergencies are laughed off. Several states have asked for and been denied disaster relief through the Federal Emergency Management Agency — that word again, doing its best to dance to a different definition’s tune — after events that would have been uncontroversially “emergent” in the past. Other developments, like ominously dipping economic indicators, are dismissed as fraudulent, their progenitors unceremoniously fired.

There isn’t anything particular surprising about this president, and those who surround him, seizing on one particular tool or another to expedite their plans and smooth any rough waters that appear in the way. The word itself is nothing to him — nothing, in Donald Trump’s life, can really be said to have constituted an “emergency” in the sense that we plebs have long understood it. But his willingness to deploy a concept that in its past life carried largely appreciated weight for literally anything is yet another political innovation, one that virtually the entire history of the country from founders through the previous president — think of Biden’s unwillingness to declare a “climate emergency,” in spite of intense lobbying and even an admission that he had done so through action if not literal word choice — did not meaningfully anticipate.

He will keep declaring these, and sometimes he won’t be wrong — a hurricane that threatens Mar-A-Lago, say, along with the millions who live in its humid and tacky shadow. But for the most part the emergencies will pile up, like so many discarded cigarette butts in an ashtray, rancid and dangerous, eclipsing the meaning of all that preceded.