For Team Trump, ‘national security’ becomes the answer to every question

It’s not exactly a secret that Donald Trump is fixated on his White House ballroom vanity project, but it was of interest to see the president start emphasizing a national security element to the initiative. The New York Times reported:

President Trump offered a surprising justification last month for forging ahead with construction of his White House ballroom: Halting the $400 million project would pose a grave threat to national security.

‘Everything is drone-proof and bulletproof,’ Mr. Trump said, listing the security features of a bunker being built beneath the ballroom to protect the president in the event of an emergency.

The article noted that this was “hardly the first time the administration had invoked national security to justify a contentious decision,” which got me thinking about just how long the administration’s list has become:

In December, after the administration took new steps to destroy the wind energy industry, with moves that even some of the president’s allies saw as radical, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said the move was necessary “due to national security risks.”
Around the same time, Trump renewed his effort to annex Greenland and told reporters, “We need Greenland for national security.”
As part of a weird online harangue against the Times, the president justified his offensive by claiming that the newspaper is “a serious threat to the National Security of our Nation.”
The White House tried to defend its trade tariffs agenda in part by pointing to “national security” concerns.
When administration officials decided to ignore protections for endangered species and allow additional oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, they justified the move on national security grounds.
When the president targeted collective bargaining contracts for hundreds of thousands of federal employees, the White House defended the decision by saying their functions touch on national security.

With increasing frequency, in other words, the White House sees “national security” as the answer to every question. (I’m tempted to describe it as officials’ “Trump card,” though that might be a little too on the nose.)

The political implications are unsubtle: No prominent voices in the American political mainstream would deliberately choose to undermine the nation’s national security needs. So when the president and his administration insist that one of their goals is necessary for national security reasons, it’s intended to shut down debate.

At least, that’s the idea. Part of the problem in these cases is that there’s little reason to accept such claims at face value. The other part of the problem is that the list keeps metastasizing to the point that it’s difficult to take the go-to justification seriously.

Patrick Parenteau, an emeritus professor at the Vermont Law and Graduate School, told the Times, “When you look under the hood, they’re fake national security emergencies. This is a power grab.”

On Thursday, a federal judge issued a new order halting construction on the ballroom project, concluding that White House officials were not fully complying with an earlier ruling. U.S. District Judge Richard Leon explained that national security “is not a blank check to proceed with otherwise unlawful activity.”

It was exactly the kind of rebuke the White House has been desperate to avoid.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

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