Nine months into the second Donald Trump administration, the legal and political issues underlying nearly all the conflicts between Trump and his critics boil down to his claims of extraordinary executive powers, which are allegedly required to deal with an extraordinary set of horrifying conditions in the country. This president, of course, arrogates to himself the exclusive right to determine whether and when such circumstances exist and then treats resistance to his edicts as another emergency requiring even more executive power. We are seeing this pattern repeated in the Trump administration’s battle with a federal judge who has banned the president’s deployment of National Guard units to Portland on the grounds that the president’s claim that Portland is a “burning hellhole” besie

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