Donald Trump's impotent tyranny

Everything is a show with Donald Trump.

He was never really a successful businessman — he just played one on TV. Now, as president, a similar pattern has emerged: Trump wants to perform the role of autocrat in front of TV cameras, but cannot or will not act effectively to protect the country from the economic and health challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. He's a Potemkin strongman.

The latest example of this phenomenon came over the weekend. With the House and Senate hamstrung on a pandemic relief bill, President Trump announced he would act unilaterally — signing executive orders to extend unemployment benefits, continue a moratorium on evictions, defer payroll taxes, and pause student loan payments.

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"I'm taking executive action," he said. "We've had it. And we're going to save American jobs and provide relief to the American workers."

Trump's executive orders combined two paradoxical elements: overreach and impotence.

Let's take overreach first. As The Washington Post noted, Trump's orders "attempt to wrest away some of Congress's most fundamental, constitutionally mandated powers — tax and spending policy." The Constitution plainly gives Congress, not the president, taxing and spending power. One Republican senator called Trump's orders "unconstitutional slop."

But this isn't the first time Trump has tried to usurp the legislative branch's financial prerogatives: After his failed government shutdown at the start of 2019, he signed an emergency decree diverting defense funds to build his border wall with Mexico. That is plainly unconstitutional, but the courts have so far let him proceed, drifting leisurely toward a final question on the matter. Their failure to act in due haste has given the president an opening for additional transgressions.

Perhaps the sidestepping of Congress and the Constitution would be understandable if Trump's acts would actually help Americans trying to survive the pandemic and its economic fallout. After all, President Lincoln disregarded habeas corpus during the Civil War, and Americans mostly love him.

Then again, Lincoln won the Civil War. Trump is losing the pandemic. And his executive orders probably won't help him win it. There is less here than meets the eye. Let's take them one-by-one:

All of this means that President Trump is undermining the constitutional order — again — but will probably have little to show for it.

This is in keeping with his now-tedious habit of prizing appearance over substance and ratings over effective action, his love of claiming "total authority" while often leaving states and cities to their own devices as they battle the coronavirus. Trump's attempts at tyranny do nothing to solve the country's problems, but they do compound the crisis of American democracy.

It's the worst of both worlds.