PIERS MORGAN: America doesn’t want a King Trump, still less a deluded, boastful, petty and spiteful Emperor with no clothes

My favorite fairy tale when I was a kid was Hans Christian Andersen's 'The Emperor’s New Clothes'.

It's about a narcissistic, deluded, arrogant, materialistic and detached Emperor of a city who loves expensive new clothes.

Two conman weavers persuade him they can create beautiful suits made of such fine fabric that they would be invisible to people who are unfit to hold office, incompetent or just very stupid.

Of course, the conmen have made this all up, playing to the Emperor’s gigantic ego and chronic lack of self-awareness.

There are no invisible suits, but the manipulative weavers present them to people as it if they really exist - so everyone, including the Emperor, refuses to admit the truth, because to do so would be to expose their ignorance.

The Emperor is so determined to hide the truth even from his own eyes that he parades before his subjects wearing the new 'suit' when in fact he’s stark naked and nobody dares say anything for fear that they will be branded unfit for office, incompetent or stupid.

From the start of this crisis, President Trump has tried to rely on his usual political methodology – attacking opponents, trashing the 'fake news' media, blaming anyone and everyone but himself, pretending things are better than they are, and congratulating himself repeatedly for making all the right decisions. But his tactics aren’t working this time

Finally, one young child cries out: 'But he isn’t wearing anything at all!’

This breaks the spell of fearful silence and the air is suddenly filled with everyone shouting the same thing, thus destroying the Emperor’s vain delusion and conceit.

But even when confronted with cold, hard reality, the Emperor continues to pretend he is wearing an amazing suit, holds his head high and marches on prouder than ever.

The moral of this story is simple: pride come before a fall.

From the start of this crisis, President Trump has tried to rely on his usual political methodology – attacking opponents, trashing the 'fake news' media, blaming anyone and everyone but himself, pretending things are better than they are, and congratulating himself repeatedly for making all the right decisions.

But his tactics aren’t working this time, because Americans are dying in their droves from coronavirus at a rate faster than anywhere else in the world, and they’re seeing the stark, horrific reality in the shape of mass open-air graves being prepared and field hospitals being set up in parks.

They’re also seeing the US economy tank like never before, jobs being destroyed in historically bad numbers, and vast swathes of the American public being plunged into poverty, homelessness and misery.

This is as bad as it gets; a grim Ground Zero for most Americans who’ve never had to even contemplate such terrible hardship, let alone actually endure it.

Yet every day their President pops up for several hours on TV to pontificate about how it’s not really that bad, how things will all bounce back quickly, and how he couldn’t possibly be doing a better job.

Blah blah bloody blah.

It’s become an increasingly nauseating spectacle and last night, President Trump reached a new low with a press briefing performance that was frankly an utter disgrace.

First he played a ludicrous, shameless campaign-style video to prove how his 'stable genius' had already saved thousands of American lives.

Then came the questions from a press corps who thought they’d seen it all from the Trump White House but must have been slack-jawed with amazement.

Time and again reporters asked him perfectly legitimate questions about his administration’s handling of this crisis, and time and again Trump furiously abused, denounced and dismissed them with sneering contempt.

He ranted, raved, mocked and derided in such an appalling manner that by the the time he finished, the hashtag #TrumpMeltdown was No1 trending topic on Twitter in America.

This was worse than just a meltdown.

This was the most undignified and pathetic display I have ever seen from any world leader, let alone the President of the United States – in the middle of a global crisis. 

And where once I could occasionally defend his combative, abrasive style against what I have often felt has been an unfairly hostile media, I cannot defend this.

America is now the epicenter of the coronavirus crisis, and what is abundantly clear is that President Trump and his administration, like the government of my own country Britain, was shamefully late to recognize the severity of the COVD-19 threat and as a result has played catastrophically bad catch-up ever since.

This complacency left the US, and Britain, woefully underprepared when it’s come to having enough of the right tools to fight the virus – from Personal Protective Equipment for health workers to tests, ventilators, masks and other vital pieces of kit.

My favorite fairy tale when I was a kid was Hans Christian Andersen's 'The Emperor’s New Clothes'. It's about a narcissistic, deluded, arrogant, materialistic and detached Emperor of a city who loves expensive new clothes

Yet when CBS White House Correspondent Paula Reid rightly challenged him about this inarguable lack of preparedness, Trump branded her disgraceful, a 'fake', and boasted he’d 'done a great job'.

But that wasn’t even his worst moment.

In a preposterous claim, Trump announced he has 'total authority' as President to make any decision he likes.

When asked if he could order state governors to remove lockdown restrictions and reopen the US economy, Trump replied: ‘When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total and that’s the way it’s gonna be. It’s total. It’s total. The governors know that.'

He was immediately challenged by CNN’s Kaitlan Collins who said, 'that is not true', and asked him which governors had agreed that he could overrule them.

'I haven’t asked anybody,' Trump snarled back. 'You know why? Because I don’t have to.'

When Collins courageously persisted, saying 'but who told you the president has total authority?’ Trump simply raised his finger and said: 'Enough.'

Yet she was right, and he was wrong.

The 10th amendment to the US Constitution makes is crystal clear that all powers not expressly delegated to the federal government reside with the states and the people.

State governors have specific power to regulate the lives of their citizens, especially during public health emergencies. The federal government does have special powers granted to it in a national emergency but they do not include opening or closing state economies.

That is why many states have responded differently to the Coronavirus pandemic, because different parts of the country require different strategies.

New York governor Andrew Cuomo, whose calm, authoritative leadership during the crisis has been a masterclass in how to handle such a seismic event, was quick to deny Trump’s absurd claim.

'The president does not have total authority,' he said. 'We have a constitution, we don’t have a king.'

Exactly.

Still less does America have an Emperor, much as Donald Trump likes to think he’s one. 

In fact, his assertion that he has 'total authority' was precisely the kind of tyrannical nonsense that drove Americans to reject being ruled by an English monarch and violently march to independence.

And for the Founding Fathers to craft a constitution precisely engineered to prevent an American dictator from ever seizing power.

Now, by trying to assert a non-existent authority over individual states, Trump is testing that constitution to destruction at a time when a national emergency demands national unity more than ever.

His power play has already forced eight governors to form informal alliances to coordinate their emergence from lock-down in open defiance of whatever he and his ludicrously oversized committee decides.

As the President stood at his podium last night, berating all and sundry, and making outlandishly untrue claims to his power, I saw an emperor with no clothes trying to pretend he was wearing a great suit.

The nakedness it exposed was not a pretty sight.