Washington, DC – For United States President Donald Trump, 2025 was a year of crisis.Roaring into office on January 20 on the heels of a raucous political comeback, the president’s own telling describes a series of actions that have been swift and stark.Recommended Stories list of 3 itemsend of listTo name a few, he has envisioned rooting out a migrant “invasion” that includes staunching legal immigrants, and, potentially, targeting US citizens; he has touted a hard reset of uneven trade deals that pose “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security”; and, in the final months of the year, he has gone on the military offensive against “narcoterrorists” that he claims seek to topple the US through illicit drugs, possibly used as “weapons of mass destruction”.For legal observers, Trump’s approach has been a yet-undecided stress test on presidential power, cranked by the gears of broadly interpreted emergency statutes and untrammelled executive authority.Decisions by the court, lawmakers and voters in the 2026 midterm elections could determine how that strategy resonates or is restrained.“The use or abuse of emergency powers is only one corner of a larger picture,” Frank Bowman, professor emeritus of law at the University of Missouri, told Al Jazeera.“In many cases, the administration is simply doing stuff that certainly any pre-existing understandings of executive authority would have said you cannot do,” he said.Emergency powers and ‘national security’The US Constitution, unlike many countries, has no catch-all emergency power authorisation for presidents. Advertisement In fact, the US Supreme Court ruled in 1952 that presidents have no such implied authorities, explained David Driesen, professor emeritus at Syracuse University College of Law. Still, Congress has passed “numerous statutes that grant the president limited emergency powers under limited circumstances to do specific things”.Nearly every modern president has used emergency powers with varying degrees of gusto, with Congress and the Supreme Court historically war …
