Not long after his second inauguration — and still-riding high on his return to power, President Trump issued a stark proclamation on social media. “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” he wrote on both X and his Truth Social platform, paraphrasing Sergei Bondarchuk’s 1970 film “Waterloo.” Since Trump saw himself as saving the country, the message was simple: He was beyond the law, if not above it outright. This wasn’t a feint; in the weeks and months to follow, his administration would break, skirt and ignore the law in pursuit of the president’s agenda.
As he nears the end of the first year of his second term, Trump has turned his attention to the world abroad. Days after the start of the new year, he launched an attack on Venezuela that killed dozens of people and ended with the “kidnapping” — a word the president said was “not a bad term” for what happened — of Nicolás Maduro, the nation’s authoritarian ruler. Flush with the glow of a successful operation, Trump then threatened military action against Cuba — demanding that the nation’s regime negotiate “BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE” — and raised the possibility of strikes on Mexico. He has also begun to talk threateningly again about Greenland, in what appears to be a naked land grab fueled by dreams of 19th century-style territorial expansion. (And why Greenland? Well, it is the nearest large landmass on the Mercator projection and Trump is nothing if not a simple man.)
Defending all of this in a recent interview with four of my Times colleagues, Trump declared that he was not subject to international law, or really any law, in his conduct of foreign affairs. “I don’t need international law,” he said, “I’m not looking to hurt people.” Asked if there were any limits on his power, Trump named his own conscience. “Yeah, there is one thing,” he said. “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
In his 2024 campaign for the White House, Trump told cheering audiences that he would be a “dictator,” but only for one day. This interview, to say nothing of his actions over the past year, makes clear that Trump sees himself as something like a dictator, and he wants to be one for a bit longer than 24 hours. Trump is, in his mind, an elected monarch — although not an enlightened one — whose whims are law and whose power extends to every inch of the United States and every corner of the Western Hemisphere.
It should go without saying that this is not how a normal president speaks. Virtually all previous presidents have understood themselves as they are: agents of the federal Constitution. Even Andrew Jackson, condemned as “King Andrew the First” by his Whig opponents for his unapologetic expansion of presidential authority, described himself as an “instrument” of the Constitution and promised, in his first inaugural address, to “keep steadily in view the limitations as well as the extent of the Executive power trusting thereby to discharge the functions of my office without transcending its authority.”
Trump’s assertion of unlimited authority — subject only to his moral judgment and his mind (whatever that means) — is a total rejection of popular sovereignty and the logic of the Constitution. And for as much as the Trump administration speaks of defending “Western civilization,” the president’s MAGA absolutism is also a challenge to the foundations of the Anglo-American political tradition — to the settlement of the Glorious Revolution and the defeat of Stuart claims of divine right and parliamentary subordination.
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Another way to understand this is that Trump does not see himself as a constitutional officer. His power, as he sees it, flows from his own person — not the office and certainly not the people, whose only role, in his view, is to legitimize his desires. Trump is an anti-constitutional figure — whose very presence on the American political scene is nothing less than a full-spectrum assault on republican government and democracy. And it is a testament to the rot in our political system that in a little less than a year, he has — with the help of Republicans in Congress — put the American republic on life support, where it struggles with the creeping sickness of despotism.
In fairness to Trump, however, he is not solely to blame for the present state of affairs. His claim to unlimited president power rests significantly on the work of the chief justice of the United States, John Roberts. In Trump v. United States, Roberts and his Republican colleagues anointed the office of the presidency with immunity from criminal prosecution for “official acts,” defined — somewhat vaguely — as anything extending from the president’s “core constitutional powers.”
Never mind that this language had no basis in the constitutional text or its drafting and ratification. Never mind that the framers, in fact, seemed to accept the possibility that a president might be criminally prosecuted for actions in office following impeachment and removal. For Roberts, judicial accountability for wrongdoing was secondary to separation of powers and the “energy” of the executive. The president, in his view, has to be able to act, and the aim of Trump v. U.S. was to allow the president to perform the full breadth of his duties without ever needing to look behind his back.
I think Roberts saw this as a modest effort to make government work better and preclude the prospect of tit-for-tat prosecutions after each presidential election. But to Trump, Roberts’s ruling was a license to unleash himself on the constitutional order. Perhaps this is why, after delivering his first speech to Congress last year, Trump thanked Roberts: gratitude for a Supreme Court that gave him license to act as sovereign.
The American public, then, is left not with a president but with a man who imagines himself master and behaves like a tyrant. A man whose agents brutalize ordinary citizens and then defames them in the wake of their deaths; who has turned the nation’s law enforcement apparatus against his political enemies and who threatens the nation’s allies with military force. A man who takes no interest in the work of government but welcomes corruption and who treats half the country as conquered territory — vassals to abuse as he sees fit.
If the only thing Trump thinks can stop him is his own morality and his own mind, our task — at least for those of us who view the state of things with outrage and anger — is to show him the folly of his words.
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