If the president or his donor-factotum can simply ignore the law—including the programs and spending Congress has approved—then we have literally swapped out the rule of law for something else: the rule of the last person to expertly blow smoke up the presidential bum. While we are debating whether Elon Musk is Donald Trump’s monkey-butler or it is the other way around (which is the way it is, if you’re wondering), we are very quickly losing sight of the fact that Donald Trump has no legal or constitutional power to do half the things he currently proposes to do. You may get some trivial satisfaction if a few GS-8 nobodies fall behind on their rent, but what’s being built is the infrastructure of dictatorship.

Kevin D. Williamson