President Donald Trump has a favorite justification for everything he does: “It’s a national security matter.”

After 9/11, the United States built a vast, powerful, and generally unchecked national security apparatus. Twenty-five years later, Trump is using agencies and emergency powers that sprung up in the aftermath of the 2001 attacks—and have never been abolished or repealed—to threaten domestic dissidents and anyone else he views as an enemy, claiming that those who oppose his policies constitute threats to America.

Of course, American presidents have been using “national security” as an excuse to expand surveillance and start wars since before the smoke from the Twin Towers cleared, and Trump is no exception. In his first term, his long list of national security “threats” included Japanese cars, Chinese telecom equipment, and briefly, the gay hookup app Grindr.

But in his second term, Trump—whose constantly shifting stories about his own actions at Ground Zero defy credulity—has taken this tactic to even more absurd, and sometimes catastrophic, extremes. Here are some highlights.

Threatening to annex Greenland: Trump has periodically obsessed over “acquiring” Greenland, and, in various Truth Social posts, he has made his case for annexation. “The National Security of the United States, and the World at large, is at stake,” he wrote in a series of early-morning Truth Social posts in January. “The United States needs Greenland for the........

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