Trump 'Thinks He Is A Dictator,' MA Congressman Says

President Donald Trump "thinks he is a dictator," U.S. Rep. Jim McGovern said Friday as he predicted that both Congress and the courts will react to Trump's announcement that he is declaring a national emergency at the southern border.

McGovern, speaking to WGBH's "Morning Edition" on Friday, said he hopes the U.S. House and Senate will pass resolutions disapproving of the president's action with enough support from Republicans to override a potential presidential veto.

"I think the president is in for one hell of a fight and I think he is not on solid ground here," the Worcester rep, who chairs the U.S. House Rules Committee, said. "I think he thinks he is a dictator and not a president, and maybe someone in his staff needs to give him a history book about the Constitution."

After a bipartisan Congressional panel recommended and then Congress passed a compromise on border security that included money for a border barrier -- but not the full $5.7 billion Trump had requested -- Sen. Mitch McConnell said the president would sign the deal to keep the government open but will also declare an emergency to direct funding towards a wall.

"Congress passed a bill to keep the government running and it purposefully denied the president the money he was asking for, so this flies in the face of what a bipartisan compromise on the budget deemed was appropriate yesterday," McGovern said. He added, "The way I understand my Constitutional history, this is a violation of the Constitution and if we can't do it legislatively, I hope and expect that the courts will act in a way that will stop him."

In the Rose Garden on Friday morning, Trump announced that he is "going to sign a national emergency" to deal with issues on the southern border.

"We're going to confront the national security crisis on our southern border and we're going to do it one way or another," Trump said. "We have tremendous amounts of drugs flowing into our country, much of it coming from the southern border ... [Democrats] say walls don't work. Walls work 100 percent."

Later, Trump said that his signing of a national emergency declaration is "a great thing to do because we have an invasion of drugs, invasion of gangs, invasion of people and it's unacceptable."

Photo: U.S. President Donald Trump speaks on border security during a Rose Garden event at the White House February 15, 2019 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)