Trump quietly claimed a power even King George wasn't allowed to have

[Eugene]

Source: Vox

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

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

by Zack Beauchamp
Jul 10, 2025, 7:00 AM EDT

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.

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Read more: https://www.vox.com/politics/419393/trump-tik-tok-letters-dispensing-power-king

Alternate link: https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-quietly-claimed-power-even-110000043.html

[progressoid]

1. It's the "quietly" part that is most frightening.

Trump loves attention. Why is he hiding this?