{"id":21734,"date":"2025-06-26T08:02:17","date_gmt":"2025-06-26T12:02:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=21734"},"modified":"2026-03-01T21:16:24","modified_gmt":"2026-03-02T02:16:24","slug":"trumps-iran-bombing-is-the-latest-in-presidential-absolutism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2025\/06\/26\/trumps-iran-bombing-is-the-latest-in-presidential-absolutism\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump\u2019s Iran Bombing Is the Latest in Presidential Absolutism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Trump\u2019s Iran Bombing Is the Latest in Presidential Absolutism<\/a><\/h2>\n

by James Bovard, American Conservative\u00a0<\/strong> \u00a0 \u00a0June 26, 2025<\/p>\n

Does President Trump have any legal basis for his foreign policy actions aside from his personal entitlement to absolute power<\/strong>? Presidents have been scorning congressional leashes on their foreign interventions since at least the Korean War. But Trump\u2019s erratic behavior and fevered comments almost make President Richard Nixon look mild-mannered.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Democratic members of Congress and Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) are pushing for a vote on a War Powers Act resolution to put a leash on Trump.\u00a0But in the same way that President George W. Bush found lawyers that assured him the president was authorized to order torture, so Trump supporters are denying the validity of any law restricting the White House\u2019s warring. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) declared on<\/a> Tuesday: \u201cMany respected constitutional experts argue that the War Powers Act is itself unconstitutional. I’m persuaded by that argument. They think it’s a violation of the Article 2 powers of the commander in chief.\u201d Johnson is blocking any vote in the House of Representatives on that resolution.<\/p>\n

Some Trump apologists are claiming that the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force<\/a> (AUMF), enacted in response to the 9\/11 attacks, provides all the legal justification that Trump needed. Since President George W. Bush listed Iran as part of the \u201caxis of evil\u201d in his 2002 State of the Union address, that entitles subsequent presidents to scourge Iran forever. There was no justification for putting Iran in that 2002 trifecta, but lack of evidence rarely impedes presidential prattle.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Besides, the AUMF seems as archaic nowadays as a balanced budget amendment.<\/strong> In the same way that congressmen can perpetuate deficit spending by promising decades hence to balance the budget, so the AUMF allows politicians to perpetually pummel any group or nation accused of wrongdoing.<\/p>\n

Trump appears to be claiming unlimited power to intervene abroad. In February, Trump posted on Truth Social a saying attributed to Napoleon: \u201cHe who saves his country does not violate any law.\u201d Sounding like he was entitled to rule the world,\u00a0Trump proclaimed in February: \u201cWe\u2019ll own Gaza.\u201d<\/strong> Trump signaled support<\/a> for forcibly expelling more than a million Palestinian refugees in order to create \u201ca Riviera of the Middle East.\u201d In 2023, he boasted to<\/a> Jewish donors that \u201cI gave you Golan Heights,\u201d signaling his prerogative to dispose of Syrian territory and redraw national boundaries as he pleased.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s pattern of issuing sweeping demands is driving his response to the Israel\u2013Iran clash. Trump demanded \u201cunconditional surrender\u201d from Iran, as if he were General Ulysses S. Grant in 1862 waiting outside a fort commanded by a dimwitted Confederate general. Trump decreed that Iran must completely end all its efforts to enrich uranium, regardless of prior international approval and the lack of evidence for an active weapons program.\u00a0At\u00a0one point, Trump ominously warned Tehran\u2019s 10 million residents to \u201cimmediately evacuate\u201d\u2014though he didn\u2019t specify any locale where they would be safe from Israeli bombing. Perhaps Trump\u2019s most bizarre utterance was his Truth Social post Saturday night.\u00a0After announcing that the U.S. had bombed three sites in Iran, Trump concluded<\/a>, \u201cNOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE! Thank you for your attention to this matter.\u201d On Wednesday morning at the NATO summit, Trump scoffed at Defense Intelligence Agency doubts on knocking out Iran\u2019s program and compared his bombing attack with Hiroshima and Nagasaki that were \u201cessentially the same thing that ended that war.\u201d That comparison is not expected to boost Trump\u2019s popularity in Japan.<\/p>\n

Turn back the clock two decades, and defenders of a bellicose president insisted that George W. Bush was smarter than he sounded<\/strong>.\u00a0But many Trump supporters seem to think 47 is omniscient. Trump\u2019s posts on Truth Social are now presumed to be vastly more accurate than any U.S. government intelligence report. As Vice President J.D. Vance said on Sunday<\/a> on Meet the Press<\/em>, \u201cOf course we trust our intelligence community, but we also trust our instincts.\u201d But what if the strongest instinct is to gratify pro-Israel donors?\u00a0Secretary of State Marco Rubio provided<\/a> the lodestar for Trumpian foreign policy: \u201cForget about intelligence.\u201d DOGE missed a great chance to save over $80 billion a year by abolishing the intelligence agencies that the White House is determined to scorn. (Meanwhile, both the Washington Post<\/em> and New York Times<\/em> reported that Trump actually made the final decision to bomb Iran after seeing Fox News hosts lauding Israeli successes attacking Tehran.)<\/p>\n

Presumed presidential omniscience is razing constraints on the Oval Office. Trump\u2019s lawyers are touting the same legal nitroglycerine that helped destroy George W. Bush\u2019s presidency.<\/strong> The Trump administration is echoing Bush\u2019s \u201cunitary executive theory\u201d to assert that the president effectively has untrammeled power over almost everything in the solar system. Bush issued more than a hundred signing statements announcing that he would disregard specific provisions in legislation, thanks to \u201cthe President\u2019s constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch and to withhold information\u201d from Congress and the American people.\u00a0Bush used that invocation to justify scorning congressional prohibitions on torture<\/a>. His administration presumed that \u201cchecks and balances\u201d were archaic<\/a>. But Bush\u2019s legal power-grabs helped make him intensely unpopular by the end of his reign and opened the door for Barack Obama to win the presidency by masquerading as a<\/a> civil-liberties savior.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Trump-style legal absolutism appears to be the mirror image of tolerance\u2014if not also common sense. Trump\u2019s National Park Service wants to delete any material at national parks that \u201cinappropriately disparages<\/a> Americans past or living,\u201d so official history will become an even bigger fairy tale.<\/p>\n

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These legal doctrines are not a hypothetical threat to freedom. On March 25, masked ICE agents seized<\/a> R\u00fcmeysa \u00d6zt\u00fcrk,<\/strong> a Turkish graduate student, off the streets outside Boston.\u00a0\u00d6zt\u00fcrk was locked up for 45 days and her student visa covertly canceled because she coauthored an op-ed criticizing Tufts University for failing to divest from Israel in response to its actions in Gaza. Rubio vilified her as a \u201clunatic\u201d and implied that the feds had ample evidence of her crimes and abuses. A leak to the Washington Post<\/em> revealed that the feds had nothing on her\u2014except that op-ed. Federal Judge William Sessions ordered \u00d6zt\u00fcrk released because<\/a> her arrest \u201cpotentially chills the speech of the millions and millions of people in this country who are not citizens.\u201d Uh, judge… maybe that was the whole point.<\/p>\n

No matter how many bombs Trump drops or how many freedoms he skewers, he will retain an iron core of MAGA supporters who view Trump\u2019s own power as the best hope for America.<\/strong> The New York Times<\/em> noted a similar pattern<\/a> in 1973 at the start of Nixon\u2019s second term:\u00a0\u201cConservatives who have traditionally favored a strong Congress and a weakened Presidency are now advocating the reverse.\u201d Nixon\u2019s attempt to \u201cfix\u201d Washington by radically centralizing power in the White House did not survive the Watergate scandal.<\/p>\n

On Monday, Trump proclaimed a ceasefire between Iran and Israel. On Tuesday morning, after ceasefire violations, Trump raged: \u201cWe have two countries that have been fighting so long that they don’t know what the f*ck their doing.\u201d Millions of Americans reached the same conclusion about Trump\u2019s own foreign policy. Unfortunately, citizens cannot rely on Congress, the Constitution, or federal law to curb Trump\u2019s interventions at home or abroad.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n