A truly scary new revelation about Trump’s effort to circumvent the TikTok ban

Just before the July Fourth holiday, we learned that President Donald Trump secretly claimed a power so dangerous that even King George was prohibited from using it. The claim came in a series of identical letters that Attorney General Pam Bondi sent to 10 leading tech companies on April 5—each instructing the company to ignore Congress’s law effectively banning TikTok in the United States. The letters, released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, consist mostly of weakly argued claims about why companies do not have to stop hosting TikTok on their platforms (as the legislation explicitly requires). But when put together, those claims amount to a frighteningly raw assertion of power: that the president can exempt specific companies from complying with legislation if he believes it interferes with his control over foreign policy. This is called the “dispensing power.” In 1838, the US Supreme Court ruled that the president does not have dispensing power—a ruling that modern legal scholars across the political spectrum treat as obviously correct. Attorney General Bondi’s letters seem to directly contradict this basic principle of constitutional law.