2025: Trump’s year of ’emergency’, ‘invasion’ and ‘narcoterrorism’ - Al Jazeera

Title: 2025: Trump’s year of ’emergency’, ‘invasion’ and ‘narcoterrorism’

Source: Al Jazeera Media Network

Date of Publication: December 29, 2025

Author: Joseph Stepansky

Introduction: For United States President Donald Trump, 2025 was a year of crisis.

Roaring into office on January 20 on the heels of a raucous political comeback, the president’s own telling describes a series of actions that have been swift and stark.

To name a few, he has envisioned rooting out a migrant “invasion” that includes staunching legal immigrants, and, potentially, targeting US citizens; he has touted a hard reset of uneven trade deals that pose “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security”; and, in the final months of the year, he has gone on the military offensive against “narcoterrorists” that he claims seek to topple the US through illicit drugs, possibly used as “weapons of mass destruction”.

For legal observers, Trump’s approach has been a yet-undecided stress test on presidential power, cranked by the gears of broadly interpreted emergency statutes and untrammeled executive authority.

Decisions by the court, lawmakers and voters in the 2026 midterm elections could determine how that strategy resonates or is restrained.

“The use or abuse of emergency powers is only one corner of a larger picture,” Frank Bowman, professor emeritus of law at the University of Missouri, told Al Jazeera.

“In many cases, the administration is simply doing stuff that certainly any pre-existing understandings of executive authority would have said you cannot do,” he said.

The full article can be found in here.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash.