President Donald Trump has made a habit of declaring emergencies.  

Since he took office for his second term, Trump has issued declarations of emergency at the southern border. On energy and trade. About drug trafficking and cartels, and even the International Criminal Court. In all, he’s declared eight emergencies in his first 100 days, a rate that far outstrips any previous president, including his own first term. 

It’s unclear whether all these things meet the legal standard for an “emergency” — a situation so unusual and extraordinary that it can’t wait for congressional action. The US trade deficit with China, for instance, has been the status quo for decades. But by declaring it an emergency, Trump unlocks special authorities that wouldn’t otherwise be available to him. 

The question of whether Trump can use his emergency powers this way is currently making its way through the courts, and our colleague Ian Millhiser has been following along as proceedings kicked off in the Court of International Trade. 

In the meantime, we at Today, Explained wanted to understand why Trump is so keen to tap these powers to achieve his agenda, so we called up Elizabeth Goitein. She’s a senior director at the Brennan Center for Justice and an expert on presidential emergency powers. 

Goitein spoke with Today, Explained co-host Noel King about the history of national emergencies, what Trump can do with his powers, and whether Congress should do something about it. An excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

I don’t think most Americans feel like we’re living in a time of eight distinct emergencies that we weren’t living in six months ago. Why does the president do this? 

A national emergency declaration is an extraordinarily powerful thing. It unlocks enhanced powers that are contained in 150 different provisions of law, all of which say something like, “In a national emergency, the president can do X,” or, ”In a national emergency, the president doesn’t have to do Y.” These are powers that allow the president to take actions that go beyond what Congress has authorized in nonemergency situations. In some cases, they allow him to take actions that Congress has expressly prohibited in nonemergency situations. 

This can be a very tempting tool in order to implement policy in situations where there’s not sufficient support from Congress or where Congress has actually prohibited that policy. You can see why the temptation is there for presidents to use these powers rather than go through the normal policy-making and law-making process.

President Trump sometimes behaves as if the emergency powers were granted by God, but actually what you’re saying is: They come from Congress. This is Congress saying, “We will allow you to have additional power in times of emergency.” When and why did Congress initially do this?  

Congress has been providing these powers to the president since the founding. 

Our current system, in which the president declares a national emergency, and that declaration unlocks powers that are included in other statutes, dates back to World War I. This system where Congress would talk about national emergencies and then the president started issuing declarations of national emergency evolved organically. In fact, the organic nature of it turned out to be a problem, because there was no overarching law that governed the process. There was no time limit on how long an emergency could stay in place. There was no reporting to Congress. 

This is why Congress, in the 1970s, enacted the National Emergencies Act. It placed a time limit on how long an emergency declaration could stay in place without being renewed by the president. The NEA also, as originally enacted, gave Congress the power to terminate an emergency declaration using a legislative veto. That’s a law that goes into effect with a simple majority of both houses of Congress and without the president’s signature. That was a ready means for Congress to shut down an emergency declaration that was either inappropriate or was lasting too long. 

But then in 1983, the Supreme Court held that legislative vetoes are unconstitutional. So today, if Congress wants to terminate an emergency declaration, it basically has to pass a law by a veto-proof supermajority, which is next to impossible in today’s political climate. 

How far can the president go with emergency powers? What kinds of things could he do? 

If you look at these 150 powers that are at the president’s disposal in a national emergency, a lot of them really do seem reasonable on their face. They seem measured, something that you would want and expect the president to have. 

But others seem like the stuff of authoritarian regimes. There is a law that dates back to 1942 that allows the president to take over or shut down communications facilities. This was last invoked in World War II. Today, it could arguably be used to assert control over US-based internet traffic. 

There’s another law, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, that allows the president to freeze the assets of almost anyone, including a US person, if the president deems it necessary to address a foreign or partially foreign threat. 

In fact, the president can also make it illegal for anyone to engage in any financial transactions with that person, including something as simple as renting them an apartment or giving them a job or even selling them groceries. So these are some really alarming authorities in terms of the potential for abuse.

You’ve laid out why granting some of these powers does make sense in times of emergency. Some of them, though, seem like a lot of power. Donald Trump is a highly unusual American president. Is it possible that Congress made a mistake in assuming that every American president would be like the guy who came before?

Yes. Congress made a mistake. 

To be fair, Congress did give itself a ready means of terminating emergency declarations, and Congress did not foresee that the Supreme Court was going to take that off the table. 

However, I think it was a mistake to leave the law in place as it was without that safeguard. I think it is time — past time — for a reckoning for Congress, to not only reform the process of national emergency declarations and the termination of those declarations, but also to look at some of these individual powers like the Communications Act, which allows the president to take over or shut down communications facilities, and the power over domestic transportation. Congress should put some limits and safeguards on those powers.

The Trump administration has been arresting and detaining protesters who participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations. They have justified the action by calling those protesters — without evidence — “Hamas supporters.”  

In so doing, the administration appears to be following Project Esther, a plan from the Heritage Foundation with the stated purpose of cracking down on antisemitism. Published in October, it is seen as an addendum to Heritage’s better-known Project 2025.

Project Esther — which appears to have been written by evangelical Christians with almost no Jewish input — asserts that the country is facing a collection of “virulently anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and anti-American groups” that it calls the “Hamas Support Network.” It names organizations like the left-leaning nonprofit Tides Foundation and Jewish Voice for Peace among the perpetrators.  

Project Esther calls for the administration to rebrand pro-Palestinian supporters as Hamas supporters. It suggests public firings of pro-Palestinian professors and the deportation of student visa and green-card holders who have spoken critically of Israel, and advocates using anti-racketeering laws to break up pro-Palestinian groups. 

To be very clear, there has been a rise in antisemitic incidents in the U.S. since the outset of the war in Gaza. But Project Esther suggests that any protest — any critique of Israel — is likely antisemitic and should be dealt with accordingly. 

While some Jewish groups have come out in support of Project Esther’s proposals, others have rejected it as a Christian nationalist project. 

Dove Kent is among those who reject Project Esther. Kent is the US senior director of the Diaspora Alliance, a nonprofit that aims to combat antisemitism and its distortion. Kent joined Noel King on Today, Explained to discuss her response to the plan — and why she thinks it will ultimately stoke antisemitism, not mitigate it. 

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.

One thing that we’ve learned over the last 18 months or so is that there are different definitions of antisemitism. How do you and the Diaspora Alliance define it?

Sure. What I’ll say is that there’s actually not a lot of difference in how most Jews or scholars define the basics of antisemitism. [From Diaspora Alliance: “The term antisemitism describes hostility, discrimination, prejudice, and violence toward Jews as Jews.”] What people disagree on is how and when that is applied to Israel. And so a lot of the fights over the definitions are actually proxy fights for people’s politics about Israel and Palestine.

Okay, you nailed it there, the really important thing: There’s a spectrum of beliefs even within the Jewish community about how questioning Israel relates to antisemitism. Where do you personally fall on this spectrum?

I think that whether speech or conduct about Zionism in Israel is antisemitic should be based on the standards for speech or conduct that apply to antisemitic behavior in general. But as a general rule, criticism of Zionism and Israel, opposition to Israel’s policies, nonviolent political action directed at the state of Israel or its policies are not inherently antisemitic. 

All right, let’s get into the topic at hand, which is Project Esther. Do you remember when you first heard about Project Esther?

Yes. It was published on the one-year anniversary of October 7. So it was published on October 7, 2024, and right away, my colleagues and I were very alarmed by this plan.

When Project Esther was rolled out, most Jewish institutions that you might imagine might be aligned with this had nothing to say because they’d never heard of it. There are basically no Jews involved in this plan to supposedly dismantle antisemitism: The Heritage Foundation is the core author and other allied organizations [contributed], many of them Christian nationalist organizations. 

Throughout the plan, they misuse Jewish text, they refer to Jewish groups with the wrong terms, they call Jewish positions on antisemitism “inexplicable.” In an interview with a member of the Heritage Foundation, they said something along the lines of, “If Jews were doing their job countering antisemitism, we wouldn’t be in the position we’re in now.” So the plan really derides Jews throughout it. 

Project Esther is named after a figure, Queen Esther. What’s Queen Esther’s story?

The Book of Esther is a text the Jews read once a year on the holiday of Purim. In the story, Queen Esther makes an intervention with the king. [As a result], a mortal decree that the king’s adviser had made against the Jewish people is instead turned against the adviser. So the victims become the heroes. But within the story is also the idea that those lines are not so binary and that what is good and what is evil may change. 

The story of Esther has been repurposed by far-right Christian political movements. There’s a phrase from the text that Esther was “put into a position of power for such a time as this.” And that phrase has been used by extremist groups like Moms for Liberty, protesters at the US Capitol on January 6, the Esther Call to the Mall that brought hundreds of evangelical women to DC to protest reproductive rights.

Queen Esther is invoked for this idea of spiritual warfare that must be waged against evil in the world, this battle against demonic forces that Christian nationalists believe they are in. So it makes sense that the Heritage Foundation would invoke this Christian nationalist frame for a kind of warfare against liberal civil society. 

Your reaction on reading [Project Esther] is what, exactly? Do you think what they’re suggesting will work, would work?

No. We cannot terrorize or incarcerate or deport or fire or infiltrate our way out of antisemitism. That’s just not how it works. And we certainly can’t dismantle constitutional protections as a way to combat antisemitism when we know that Jewish safety in the U.S. depends on constitutional democracy and minority protections. 

So deporting international students doesn’t combat antisemitism. Public firings don’t combat antisemitism. Withholding funds from research institutions doesn’t combat antisemitism, arresting activists doesn’t combat antisemitism. And there is no city or country in the world where these kinds of actions have been applied that have seen any increase in Jewish safety or decrease in antisemitic ideas or behaviors.

We’ve seen the Trump administration come out and, for example, insist that Mahmoud Khalil is a supporter of Hamas. When asked for evidence, the administration hasn’t been able to provide anything. Now, Project Esther names a “Hamas Support Network” as the root of a lot of antisemitism. This is not a real organization. So what is the goal of saying Mahmoud Khalil and people like him are part of the “Hamas Support Network”?

This phrase, “Hamas Support Network”, was made up by the Heritage Foundation and its allies as a smear for any organization that supports Palestinian rights and humanity. This is part of an effort to completely conflate support for Palestinian rights and humanity with support for Hamas. 

Project Esther’s scope extends well beyond these groups to target a wide spectrum of liberal donors, foundations, and organizations that also do not in any way support Hamas. The plan even names anti-capitalist groups, claiming that they align with America’s overseas enemies. All of this just sets the stage for guilt by association and exposes the true intent of Project Esther, which is dismantling civil society institutions such as universities and nonprofit organizations as a way to get rid of any domestic opposition to the administration, all under the guise of protecting Jews. 

There’s another important note here. What they’re doing with the term “Hamas Support Network” is trying to create in the minds of Americans a whole class of people who are associated with terrorism and violence and therefore do not deserve the protections of US law, including immigration law. So when the administration starts to detain and deport people through illegal means as they are currently doing, they are banking that Americans won’t protest. It’s directly connected to what they’re doing in sending immigrants to prison in El Salvador under the false premise that they’re all connected to a violent gang.

One other thing I’ll say is that Project Esther has literally nothing to say about the firehose of antisemitism and conspiracy theories coming out of the far right in this country, which are the leading drivers of antisemitic violence in the US according to any and every serious study. So the sole target of this is pro-Palestinian groups and beyond who they accuse of being not just antisemitics but also anti-American.

What does all of this mean for Jews in the United States?

Well, the Trump administration’s initial attacks that we are seeing as the very clear rollout of Project Esther don’t just not work against antisemitism. They actively stoke antisemitism by making Jews the face of authoritarian crackdowns. 

People are losing their jobs. They’re losing funding for critical scientific research. They’re losing their freedoms, supposedly in our name. This feeds into antisemitic conspiracy theories about shadowy, outsized Jewish power and makes Jews the one to blame for the longtime Christian nationalist goal of dismantling higher education. So the immediate and long-term impact of Project Esther, ironically, is an increase in antisemitism across the country, on top of the incredible harm being done to international students, educators, researchers, and all of us who benefit from free speech and academic inquiry. 

This is an effective strategy by the right because they’re executing the policies they want to anyway, but they’re doing so in the name of fighting antisemitism. The erosion of those rights makes all communities less safe, including Jews, and any work to carve out exceptions, whoever they target or claim to protect, undermines the universal protection that actually makes us all safe. 

I’ll also say that it is abundantly clear that the Trump administration is not truly working on behalf of Jewish safety. Trump’s right-hand man, Elon Musk, is working to dismantle the federal government while repopularizing the Nazi salute, running a platform rife with antisemitic conspiracies, and encouraging German politicians to abandon their post-Holocaust commitment to keeping far-right extremists out of power. The administration is filled with appointees who have long histories of spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories. They’ve defunded the Office of Civil Rights for universities, which is the very body that is tasked with reviewing and enforcing rules against antisemitism and other forms of discrimination on campus. It’s also clear that no one in this administration cares about bigotry or discrimination of any kind, unless it’s an invented and inverted anti-white or anti-Christian discrimination. And American Jews can see that this administration is not truly fighting for our safety.

The presidential changeover last week was accompanied by a flurry of pardons — stretching the power of the pardon about as far as we’ve ever seen it go. 

Outgoing President Joe Biden preemptively pardoned a group of people believed to be on the new administration’s “enemies list”: members of his family, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Gen. Mark Milley, the Congressional Select Committee to Investigate January 6 Attack, and more.  

Incoming President Donald Trump, meanwhile, pardoned 1,500 Capitol riot insurrectionists, plus two DC-area police officers and 23 anti-abortion activists. 

But even among the deluge, one pardon stood out: Trump granted clemency to Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the dark web drug marketplace Silk Road. In so doing, Trump fulfilled a campaign promise he made to libertarians and crypto fans alike, to whom Ulbricht is something of a folk hero.  

Nick Bilton, author of American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road, joined Today, Explained to talk about how Ulbricht was originally captured, break down Trump’s decision to grant him clemency, and explain what it tells us about the new administration.

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.

Sean Rameswaram

You say this pardon is inevitable. How come? 

Nick Bilton

Trump went to the Libertarian Convention in May. The room was filled with all these people, and they’re holding up these “Free Ross” signs. Everything that comes out of Trump’s mouth is met with a boo — except for when he says, “If you vote for me, on Day 1, I will commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht.” That was when the room burst into applause and cheers. And so for me, it was like: If he was going to win — I believed he was going to win — then Ross was going to be freed. 

Sean Rameswaram

Who is Ross Ulbricht, a.k.a. Dread Pirate Roberts?

Nick Bilton 

Ross Ulbricht is a guy who came from Austin, Texas. Upper-middle class, very nice, caring family. He was a really sweet kid. One of my favorite stories about him then is: He’s with a friend, walking down the street in Austin one day. He stops at the flower stall and buys some roses and then hands them back to the woman who works there and then continues to walk. His friend says, “Why’d you do that?” And he said, “Because no one ever buys flowers for the person who works at the flower stall.”

Ulbricht goes off to college and he gets into — not drugs, but the stuff we all do: smoking a little weed and taking some acid. The usual stuff kids these days do in college. 

He also falls deeply into the libertarian philosophy that the government should have no say in what you do with your own body: If you want to take drugs, you should be able to. He thinks that the problem with the war on drugs is that it has created a system where people only buy and sell these things in dark alleys and in dangerous places, which has led to so much crime around drugs and so on. And that if you legalized all drugs imaginable, you would essentially stop all the harm that happens to society. If you made it so that you could buy these drugs in an Amazon-like forum, people who sold bad drugs that killed people would get bad ratings, and you wouldn’t buy from them anymore. Good people that cut their drugs up really nicely would become the bestsellers, and so on.

He learns about this thing called the Tor Onion Browser. It’s an untraceable browser. Then along comes bitcoin, and he has this realization, like, “Oh my God, I can pair the Tor Onion browser with bitcoin, and I can create the website that is the Amazon of drugs.” That becomes the Silk Road.

Sean Rameswaram

What is Silk Road, beyond the Amazon of drugs? 

Nick Bilton 

To prove his thesis, Ross Ulbricht rents a cottage in Bastrop Park in Austin, and he secretly starts to grow magic mushrooms. He does it, ironically, while he is watching the show Breaking Bad.

Eventually, he gets enough mushrooms that he fills a big trash bag with them. He posts the mushrooms on his website and waits for a buyer. In the meantime, he goes to online forums and anonymously says, “Hey, has anyone seen this website, the Silk Road, where you can buy and sell drugs?”

Then one day, someone orders some. He mails them, and he’s like, “Holy shit, I sold some drugs. This is amazing. It worked.”

It started to spread, and soon people started listing other drugs, like marijuana and acid. A few months go by. 

Then, the website Gawker writes about it. And in that moment, it explodes. It’s covered in the national news. The Chuck Schumer set finds out about it. This national attention turns into international attention, and before you know it, he’s selling hundreds of millions of dollars of drugs. 

Silk Road starts to move to much more nefarious things than just basic weed and magic mushrooms. There’s a debate about whether they should sell body parts on the platform. They create another version of the site where they start selling guns. That proves to be more difficult because it’s harder to mail those to people. But it was a free-for-all. Anything you wanted to buy and sell was available on this marketplace, and all you needed was a few bitcoin and the Tor Onion Browser, and that was it. 

It gets to a point where Ulbricht is making so much money, and so much is being sold on Silk Road, that it captures the attention of people in China who were starting to make fentanyl at the time. Silk Road enabled them to mail fentanyl to the US. You start to see the beginning of the fentanyl epidemic, and the first people affected by it are kids.

Of course the government was desperately trying to figure out how to stop it while all this was going on. 

Sean Rameswaram

How do they catch the pirate?

Nick Bilton 

The FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the IRS are trying to solve the case. There’s a big meeting with all of the agencies, and they decide they’re going to do this big sting operation in San Francisco.

There was a little library there — just two stories tall. The Dread Pirate Roberts goes there to work, because he doesn’t like going on the internet to do his Silk Road work from his apartment in case it’s ever traced back. One day he goes to the local library in Bernal Heights, and he logs on. But two agents are sitting in the library across from him and they get into a fake screaming match. And when he looks up to see what’s going on, another agent swoops in, grabs the laptop, and the other agents arrest him.

He’s sentenced for distributing narcotics, using the internet to distribute narcotics, all of these different things. And the judge said, “I believe that there are good in people and there are bad in people.” And she says, “I believe that there is good in you and bad in you. But what you did started an entire new paradigm of crime in this country, and people died as a result of it.”

Sean Rameswaram

How quickly does a movement to free him spring up? 

Nick Bilton 

It starts during the trial in 2015, and it grows and grows as crypto and bitcoin grow into mainstream topics. There’s an argument to be made that before the Silk Road and the Dread Pirate Roberts, there was nothing that you could do with bitcoin that made any sense. A lot of people got incredibly rich as a result of the things that Ross Ulbricht did, and they see him as a sort of bitcoin deity. 

Sean Rameswaram

Nick, we know how this story ends. We know that Ulbricht, the Dread Pirate Roberts, gets a presidential pardon. When does Donald Trump enter the chat?

Nick Bilton

When he was president as number 45, there were discussions, funnily enough, about pardoning Ulbricht on his way out. From what I have heard, there were a lot of people in the White House that didn’t want that to happen, because it wasn’t law and order. Trump 45 was very anti-drugs.

But Trump 47 is so enmeshed with the tech community. The tech community sees anything anyone does with technology as a good thing, and they lock arms and sail off into the sunset together.