Jack Goldsmith at Lawfare explains why much about Trump’s Fake Emergency is not abnormal or weird or even alarming, and then why much about it is one or all of those.

First, in stating that he “didn’t need to do this,” Trump acknowledged what so much of the run-up to his proclamation makes clear: there is no necessity in his action, and thus no “emergency” in the ordinary language sense of the term. As noted above, this is typically true of emergency declarations. But presidents don’t admit it, much less celebrate it. They tend to make emergency declarations in ways that do not highlight that the entire modern law of emergency power rests on the fiction that emergency powers can be invoked in the absence of what we normally think of as an emergency.

Second, in clumsily denying that the emergency declaration is about politics and the 2020 election, Trump confirmed what many people think: It is about politics and the 2020 election. That acknowledgment heightens and for many will confirm suspicions about mixed motives, pretext, and the like.

Trump is not by a mile the first president to invoke executive power aggressively for political purposes. But he might be the first plausibly to be seen to exercise emergency powers openly for political purposes. In this regard, as in many regards, Trump is undisciplined in his lack of hypocrisy. As I explained a few years ago:

A corollary to Trump’s shamelessness is that he often doesn’t seek to hide or even spin his norm-breaking. Put another way, he is far less hypocritical than past presidents—and that is a bad thing. Hypocrisy is an underappreciated political virtue. It can palliate self-interested and politically divisive government action through mollifying rhetoric and a call to shared values. Trump is bad at it because he can’t “recognize the difference between what one professes in public and what one does in private, much less the utility of exploiting that difference,” Henry Farrell and Martha Finnemore have noted in Foreign Affairs. He is incapable of keeping his crass thoughts to himself, or of cloaking his speech in other-regarding principle.

That’s an interesting point, and I suppose I have to agree it’s true. A major reason I hate Trump so intensely is his complete failure / refusal to acknowledge, much less heed, any norms about words and acts in prominent government figures. I suppose I have to agree that that means I think he should make an effort to pretend, and that means I think he should be more of a hypocrite. I do think he should keep his crass thoughts to himself, because his refusal to do so is an inspiration to millions of people who long to shout about their hatred for various appointed underlings. I do think he should palliate his loathsome actions with mollifying rhetoric and a call to shared values, when the alternative is his pissing all over the best of our shared values.

This is a counterintuitive idea. Many people see Trump as hypocritical since he often says one thing and does another (including things that he criticized his predecessor for). But he is profoundly not hypocritical in this sense: As in his border wall announcement, he is often guileless in asserting power, and doesn’t try to hide the tension between his political aims and his asserted constitutional justifications. This is one of Trump’s most remarkable and persistent norm violations. “The clearest evidence of the stability of our values over time is the unchanging character of the lies … statesmen tell,” Michael Walzer famously noted. “They lie in order to justify themselves, and so they describe for us the lineaments of justice. Wherever we find hypocrisy we find moral justice.” Walzer might have added that when we see in our statesmen an absence of hypocrisy in a contested context where principle normally matters, an absence of moral justice creeps in.

We are there.