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On this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with a warning about the coming Supreme Court battle over President Donald Trump’s use of tariff powers. If the Court endorses Trump’s claim that anything he deems an emergency allows him to impose tariffs, Frum argues the United States will face a constitutional crisis unlike any before. The president will, in effect, have staged a “constitutional coup,” stripping Congress of its most fundamental Article I powers.

Then Frum speaks with Quico Toro of Caracas Chronicles about the Trump administration’s escalating pressure on Venezuela. They explore what American intervention might look like, the realities of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s hold on control, and whether any foreign power could truly bring his rule to an end.

Finally, Frum closes with a reflection on Lion Feuchtwanger’s The Oppermanns and the rising tide of conspiracist anti-Semitism seen on both the left and the right today.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

David Frum: Hello, and welcome back to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be Quico Toro. Quico was the founder and remains the editor of a website called the Caracas Chronicles, which is the best English-language source of information on goings-on in Venezuela. And as the United States seems to be moving toward a war in the Caribbean against Venezuela, I thought it was indispensable to talk to Quico about what is happening: Why is the United States on the verge of war, apparently, with Venezuela, apparently about to carry out air strikes on the South American mainland? How did we get here, and what does it mean? Quico will be the man to enlighten us.

My book this week will be a novel written in 1933 by a writer called Lion Feuchtwanger, and the novel’s The Oppermanns, a family saga of a German Jewish family destroyed by the rise of the Nazis.

But before I get to these two subjects, let me open with some preliminary thoughts about something quite different, which is the soon-to-be-heard oral argument in the Supreme Court about President [Donald] Trump’s use of tariff powers. Specifically, the court is going to consider whether Donald Trump has exceeded the authority delegated to him by Congress by the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977.

As I hope we all know, the Constitution of the United States vests power over tariffs and trade in Congress. But over the years, since 1934, Congress has delegated more and more of that power to the president. President Trump has chosen to interpret the International Emergency Economic Powers Act—which I’ll call IEEPA, which is what most people do, from here on—as a delegation of broad authority over tariffs to him, allowing him to create a one-man tariff show all of his own for almost any reason. And the Supreme Court is going to hear and decide whether that is valid.

The key word in the act is the word emergency—that is, these are powers that the president would not normally have; normally, the power to create tariffs rests in Congress. He would not normally have these powers, but in an emergency, the president can use them. That’s what Congress wrote in 1977 when they passed the law. And the question the Supreme Court will have to evaluate is: Is that delegation itself valid? And if it is valid, do we, in fact, have an emergency? Can the president simply proclaim an emergency for any reason, including having his feelings hurt by an ad he saw in a baseball game that he didn’t like, or is there some kind of objective constraint?

Now, as we think about what the court should do, there’s a little historical context here that’s really necessary to understand to guide the court as to what is the right thing. And remember, a conservative court is supposed to look to history.

In 1917, when the United States went into the First World War, Congress passed a law called the Trading With the Enemy Act. They gave the president vast powers over the American economy. And it was meant to last for the duration of the World War I emergency. After the end of the First World War, Congress never repealed the Trading With the Enemy Act, and it remained on the books through the Great Depression and through the Second World War. It was under the powers given him by the Trading With the Enemy Act that President [Franklin D.] Roosevelt not only took the United States off the gold standard—that he could have done with his regular powers—but prohibited the private ownership of gold by American citizens. He used the powers under the 1917 Trading With the Enemy Act. And during World War II, those powers were used again. And during the Cold War, they were used, and those powers became very, very large during the Cold War period.

In the 1970s, after Watergate, Congress decided, you know, it was time to declare the First World War over. And so they passed a series of laws ending the emergency proclaimed in 1917, and creating new and theoretically more limited emergency powers through a series of statutes in the middle 1970s, of which IEEPA, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, was just one. There were others too. All of them to say, Look, we understand that the president needs emergency powers. The powers we granted in 1917 were too big, and anyway, that war is over. So here are new powers, more limited than the 1917 powers, that the president should use subject to more modern ideas of power, including judicial review.

So that is what Trump used to try to say, I can do anything. I can impose any tariff for any reason at any time. Anything I say is an emergency—whether it’s fentanyl use, whether it’s an ad in the World Series—anything I say is an emergency is an emergency. No one can second-guess me. And I can then put any tariffs in the way that I like.

Now, what Trump is here creating is a unilateral power to tax—and not just tax, because at the same time, he’s claiming unilateral powers to spend. He says he wants to take some of this tariff money and give it to the farmers; that’s a spending power. That money could be used for anything. Congress normally decides where money goes. But Trump is saying, I will unilaterally take these taxes I have imposed and spend it the way I want. And meanwhile, other spending that Congress voted [for], like foreign aid, I’m going to refuse to spend it because I have the power to decide what to tax, what to spend, and I have the power, in effect, to veto spending that Congress has passed and that I or my predecessor signed—so unilateral powers to tax, spend, not spend. Oh, and one more thing: I’m claiming unilateral power over the money supply because I am claiming the right to fire any member of the Federal Reserve for any reason, no matter how obviously specious. That’s another case going to the Supreme Court, where Trump fired a governor of the Federal Reserve, alleging all kinds of fraud. Federal Reserve governors are not supposed to be removed except for very good reason. But basically, he says, I can remove any Federal Reserve governor I want and appoint anyone I want, and that gives me control over the monetary as well as the fiscal side of the economy.

So we’re putting together powers that are exactly the powers that were repudiated not only in 1776 by the American Revolution—“no taxation without representation”—but in the English Civil War of the 1640s, where the English cut off the head of King Charles I because he claimed the power to tax without vote of Parliament.

It cannot be right that the president of the United States has the power to tax without Congress, to spend without Congress, to refuse to spend monies that Congress has voted [for] and that his predecessors or he have signed without Congress, and to control the entire monetary system without Congress, even though the Federal Reserve is a creature of Congress. But this is, apparently, a close call because the Supreme Court is very disposed to a large use of presidential power, especially the powers of this president. And they’ve also given him, of course, if he does abuse any power, this extraordinary new doctrine of criminal impunity.

It’s hard for me to believe that the court will validate any of this, but if [it] does, Americans are going to be left with a really “no exit” dilemma. The president has made a kind of constitutional coup. He’s effectively repealed the most important powers in Article I—taking away the taxing power, taking away the spending power, taking away the power to refuse to spend money the Congress voted [for], taking away the power over the money, which is also given to Congress—and concentrated that power in himself and his own personal judgment for any reason, no matter how trivial.