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“I Alone Can Solve”: Carl Schmitt on Sovereignty and Nationhood Under Trump

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Trump and Political Philosophy

Abstract

As a candidate Donald Trump styled himself uniquely equipped to enact the will of a thickly racialized national community. His campaign may thus be read alongside Carl Schmitt’s key concepts: the friend/enemy distinction fundamental to politics, a popular sovereignty founded in an organically united Volk. But what of Trump’s presidency? Here, too, Schmitt’s thought is helpful, particularly his work on commissarial dictatorship as a response to a state of emergency—we will read in this light the “Muslim Ban” and the pardon of Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Rather than creating new executive powers, this chapter argues that Trump is exploiting existing ones. This is inevitable: Presidents will seek to exercise the powers available to them, and the US Constitutional tradition fails to provide effective tools for distinguishing between the executive’s legitimate and baseless emergency actions. Schmitt’s thought and career are marred by precisely the same failure.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Donald J. Trump, Twitter post @realDonadTrump, 27 March 2016, available at http://mobile.twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/714189569793646597. For their comments on earlier drafts of this essay, I am grateful to Peter Catapano and the editors of this volume.

  2. 2.

    This paragraph and the next adapt material from my “Arendt, Schmitt, and Trump’s Politics of ‘Nation,’” which appeared in the series “The Stone,” edited by Simon Critchley and Peter Catapano, NYTimes.com , 22 July 2016.

  3. 3.

    Tacitus, The Annals, trans. John Jackson, Loeb Classical Library (1937; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 14.44 (“Postquam vero nationes in familiis habemus, quibus diversi ritus, externa sacra aut nulla sunt, conluviem istam non nisi metu coercueris”).

  4. 4.

    Graeme Wood, “His Kampf,” The Atlantic, June 2017; available at theatlantic.com. Admiration of Schmitt certainly informs Spencer’s core political yearning for “something as robust and binding as Christianity had once been in the West.”

  5. 5.

    Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, Expanded ed., trans. George Schwab (1996; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 26.

  6. 6.

    David Dyzenhaus, Legality and Legitimacy: Carl Schmitt, Hans Kelsen and Hermann Heller in Weimar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 41.

  7. 7.

    Schmitt, Political Theology, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 51. See also 49 on the “organic unity” of a people.

  8. 8.

    Schmitt, Concept of the Political, 26.

  9. 9.

    Schmitt, Dictatorship: From the Origin of the Modern Concept of Sovereignty to Proletarian Class Struggle, trans. Michael Hoelzl and Graham Ward (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), 2. For brief but detailed background on Schmitt’s views of dictatorship, see Duncan Kelly, “Carl Schmitt’s Political Theory of Dictatorship,” in The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt, ed. Jens Meierhenrich and Oliver Simons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 217–244.

  10. 10.

    Ibid., 4.

  11. 11.

    Ibid., 180. Schmitt includes an extended commentary on Article 48 as an appendix to Dictatorship.

  12. 12.

    Ibid., 154.

  13. 13.

    Schmitt, Political Theology, 5. The Schwab translation has “Sovereign is he decides on the exception,” though commentators on Schmitt tend to prefer “Sovereign is he decides on the state of exception.” See, for example, Giorgio Agamben, The State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 1.

  14. 14.

    See Orin Kerr, “Four Federal Judges Issue Orders Blocking Parts of Trump’s Executive Order on Immigration,” WashingtonPost.com , 29 Jan 2017; Benjamin Wittes, “Malevolence Tempered by Incompetence: Trump’s Horrifying Executive Order on Refugees and Visas,” Lawfare, 18 Jan 2017, available at lawfareblog.com. See also my “The Trump Entry Ban: Is it Legal? (Or, the Toddler-in-Chief Beats the Drum of War),” HuffingtonPost.com , 30 Jan 2017. Full text of Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States, Exec. Order No. 13769 (27 Jan 2017), is available at whitehouse.gov. This order was later superseded by Exec. Order 13780 (6 Mar 2017); text also available at whitehouse.gov.

  15. 15.

    For video of the oral arguments before the Ninth Circuit, see Tim Harris, “Full Replay: Oral Arguments for Trump Immigration Ban Hearing, Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals,” RealClearPolitics.com , 7 Feb 2017. See also my “Trump Entry Ban: The Ninth Circuit Lands a Stiff Jab, but the Fight is in the Early Rounds,” HuffingtonPost.com , 10 Feb 2017.

  16. 16.

    Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, 561 U.S. 1, 34 (2010); cited in State of Hawaii v. Donald J. Trump, 859 F.3d 741, 769 (2017).

  17. 17.

    For statistics on the Supreme Court’s decisions, see the “Stat Pack Archive” at SCOTUSblog, available at scotusblog.com/reference/stat-pack/.

  18. 18.

    Inadmissible Aliens, 8 USC 1182 (f).

  19. 19.

    Presidential Proclamation Enhancing Vetting Capabilities and Processing for Detecting Attempted Entry Into the United States by Terrorists or Other Public-Safety Threats, 24 Sep 2017, available at whitehouse.gov.

  20. 20.

    See Mark Hensch, “CNN Host: ‘Donald Trump Became President’ Last Night,” TheHill.com , 7 Apr 2017. On these airstrikes, see my “Trump’s Syria Air Strikes: A Perverse Advance in International Law?,” DissentMagazine.org , 14 Apr 2017.

  21. 21.

    See Julie Hirschfield Davis and Maggie Haberman, “Trump Pardons Joe Arpaio, Who Became Face of Crackdown on Illegal Immigration,” NYTimes.com , 25 Aug 2017. For an argument that the pardon is unconstitutional, see Laurence H. Tribe and Ron Fein, “Trump’s Pardon of Arpaio Can—and Should—Be Overturned,” WashingtonPost.com , 18 Sep 2017.

  22. 22.

    See the annotated code on Inadmissible Aliens, 8 USC 1182, available at http://uscode.house.gov.

  23. 23.

    For a recent, full-length study of this event, surveying evidence of Nazi responsibility, see Benjamin Carter Hett, Burning the Reichstag: An Investigation into the Third Reich’s Enduring Mystery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

  24. 24.

    See Gopal Balakrishnan, The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt (London: Verso, 2000), 181.

  25. 25.

    Schmitt’s association with the National Socialists from 1933–1936 is oft-discussed. See Balakrishnan, 176–208; Stephen Holmes, The Anatomy of Antiliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 37–39; Ellen Kennedy, Constitutional Failure: Carl Schmitt in Weimar (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 11–37. Joseph W. Bendersky, “Carl Schmitt at Nuremberg” and translations of Schmitt’s Nuremberg testimony, special issue “Carl Schmitt: Enemy or Foe?,” ed. Paul Piccone and G.L. Ullmen, Telos 72 (Summer 1987): 91–129, as well as Bendersky’s generally sympathetic biography of Schmitt, Carl Schmitt: Theorist for the Reich (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 195–218.

  26. 26.

    Schmitt, Dictatorship, xliii.

  27. 27.

    On Schmitt in the context of constitutional failure, see Kennedy, 154–183.

  28. 28.

    Alexander Hamilton, “The Federalist No. 70,” in The Federalist, intr. Edward Mead Earle (New York: Modern Library, n.d.), 455.

  29. 29.

    United States v. Curtiss-Wright, 299 U.S. 304, 320 (1936).

  30. 30.

    Harisiades v. Shaughnessy, 342 U.S. 580, 588–589 (1952); see Louis Henkin, “Is There a ‘Political Question’ Doctrine?,” The Yale Law Journal 85 (1976): 597–625.

  31. 31.

    See Paul W. Kahn, Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 7.

  32. 32.

    Ibid., 86. Kahn’s Political Theology is the culmination of his applications of Schmitt’s thought to an American context, and especially the politics of the war on terror. See also his Putting Liberalism in its Place (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005) and Sacred Violence: Torture, Terror, and Sovereignty (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008). Also relevant is Ashraf H.A. Rushdy’s work on lynching, which argues that throughout American history extralegal collective violence has often been deemed a legitimate expression of popular sovereignty; see his American Lynching (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012a) and The End of American Lynching (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012b).

  33. 33.

    Sanford Levinson, Constitutional Faith (1988; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). The 2011 Afterword takes into account the “constitutional fundamentalism” of such movements as the Tea Party.

  34. 34.

    Schmitt, Political Theology, 45.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CUNY Graduate Center, New York, NY, USA

    Feisal G. Mohamed

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  1. National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico City, Mexico

    Angel Jaramillo Torres

  2. Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City, Mexico

    Marc Benjamin Sable

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Mohamed, F.G. (2018). “I Alone Can Solve”: Carl Schmitt on Sovereignty and Nationhood Under Trump. In: Jaramillo Torres, A., Sable, M. (eds) Trump and Political Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74445-2_17

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