No, The President's Authority Is Not 'Total'

President Donald Trump had an absolute meltdown while in a press conference on Monday (April 13), in which he mentioned he doesn't "take responsibility at all" for the lackluster governmental response to the coronavirus pandemic and falsely claimed that his "authority is total" as president, something the other two branches of government, the founding fathers, and constitutional scholars probably would not agree with.


The press conference began on rocky footing, as it was the initial press conference following the New York Times' harrowing story that showed just how misguided the government's response was to the pandemic. The report — packed with documents, email threads, and on-and-off-the-record quotes from government officials — showed that the president "was warned about the potential for a pandemic" nevertheless had a startlingly slow response due to "internal divisions, lack of planning and his faith in his own instincts." As a substitute opposed to owning up to the government's mismanagement of the pandemic, the president shifted the blame onto the media, saying he hopes newspapers like the Times will all "go out of business" in the second five years. He then played clips of TV news anchors talking about the virus with the title, "The media minimized the risk from the start."


And that was all before Trump's most bizarre claim throughout the press briefing: any time somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total," the president mentioned. "And that’s the way it’s gotta be. It’s total."


Reader: The president's authority isn't total, even during a world pandemic. In back of the fact that the government was set up with a series of checks and balances — hello, Congress and the Supreme Court — to make sure that no one individual or legislative body has complete power, states have an immense quantity of power in the U.S. All those school and business closures that cascaded across the country came at the will of governors, not the president; the choice to halt entries into the juvenile justice system as a result of COVID-19 came from the governors' office, not the president's desk; work from residence orders and important company designations are the results of state-level legislation, not orders from the White House.


So as soon as Trump was pushed to define just what legal justification he had for saying his power was absolute, he came up empty-handed — and the resulting exchange between him and CBS journalist Paula Reid was powerful.


His assessment came just hours after two groups of governors reported that they will be planning with each other how to ease restrictions related to the pandemic, the New York Times announced. Trump argued that the decision was his to prepare. The state leaders, Trump argued, "can’t do anything without the approval of the president of the United States." Vice President Mike Pence said later that the administration would provide suggestions for states.


In response, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf, who gathered with seven other Northeast governors to prepare build a plan for easing restrictions, told the New York Times: "Seeing as we had the responsibility for closing the state down, I think we probably have the primary responsibility for initial it up."