Asshole of the Month: Emil Bove

Ever since Trump stormed back into the White House last January, he’s been on a mission to prove that the limitations imposed on the Presidency by our Constitution are obsolete. Damn what the Founding Fathers prescribed; almost every issue now is defined as a “national emergency” that only a dictator sending in the National Guard can solve.

In August, while answering questions about his administration’s military takeover of Washington, D.C., Trump claimed, “A lot of people are saying maybe we’d like a dictator.” MAGA loyalists in Congress have proposed declaring his birthday a national holiday and even carving his face onto Mt. Rushmore. And former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon told Chris Cuomo in an interview on NewsNation that there are “many different alternatives” to install Generalissimo Trump in office for a third term.

This is getting to be a dangerous “cult of personality,” as they called it in the old Soviet Union. All hail the Supreme Leader! Trump’s Republican Party controls both houses of Congress, a majority of state legislatures and governorships, and has a 6-3 conservative majority in the Supreme Court. So far, the only thing stopping him from actually ruling like Caesar is the integrity of federal judges around the country, including some appointed by Trump himself. They have blocked many of his most outrageous excesses: withholding federal funds duly allocated by Congress and so violating the Impoundment Control Act; trying to kill the whole Department of Education, which only Congress can do; deporting residents to hellhole foreign prisons without due process; inappropriately federalizing state National Guards for bogus “emergencies” and “foreign invasions.” And the list goes on.

So how does a wannabe tyrant overcome the last bulwark of democracy, the judiciary? He starts populating it with his henchmen—judges sympathetic to him, or whom he owes something to, or who are just out-and-out corrupt. As of this writing, Trump’s latest appointee was Emil Bove to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. Of course, Bove had served as Trump’s personal attorney beginning in September 2023.