Trump quietly claims power even King George wasn’t allowed to have

Vox - 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.” It was an old prerogative of English kings, one in which they could simply assert that the law doesn’t apply to their friends (a power not limited to foreign affairs). Dispensations were basically proactive pardons, telling someone they can feel free to ignore specific laws and never suffer any consequences.

The dispensation power was so sweeping, and so anti-democratic, that it was abolished by name in the 1689 English Bill of Rights.