As the Jeffrey Epstein scandal continues apace, and MAGA grapples with the gaslit reality they live in, the Trump Administration continues to negotiate so-called trade deals, which are negotiated and implemented using pure executive fiat, under emergency powers, under an emergency declaration which has no rational basis, while everyone pretends this isn't an example of a constitutional coup. It's actually an exercise in sedition, if one were to avoid putting a finer point on it.

The mechanism is breathtakingly brazen: declare a fake national emergency, invoke emergency trade powers designed for genuine crises, bypass Congress entirely, and conduct billions of dollars in international agreements through personal presidential decree. When Japan agrees to invest $550 billion based on Trump's “Strategic Trade Agreement,” they're being asked to legitimize constitutional fraud that exists only through Trump's personal authority rather than constitutional process.

Our allies aren't stupid. They understand perfectly that what Trump is doing is illegal. The Constitution explicitly grants Congress the power “to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations”—not the president. Foreign governments have constitutional lawyers who can read Article I, Section 8 as clearly as anyone. They know there is no emergency, no “unusual and extraordinary threat” that justifies bypassing Congress to negotiate trade policy through executive decree. They must be horrified by how few Americans seem to care that their government operates through systematic constitutional violation.

They're also not holding out hope that the Supreme Court's conservative majority, with its expansive view of executive authority, will do much to stop this constitutional arson. Foreign leaders understand that when courts create doctrines of presidential immunity and presumptive constitutionality, they're watching American institutions actively eliminate their own constraints rather than enforce them.

Congress could terminate these fraudulent emergencies at any time under the National Emergencies Act. Instead, Republican leaders have chosen to become active accomplices in constitutional destruction. They literally suspended the flow of time itself—declaring that calendar days would not constitute calendar days—to avoid voting on Trump's fake emergency tariffs. When that proved insufficient, Speaker Mike Johnson simply shut down the People's House entirely to prevent oversight votes. Senator Markwayne Mullin confessed the conspiracy on the House floor: “What we're simply trying to do here is give President Trump cover.”