Not long after his second inauguration — still riding high on his return — President Donald Trump issued a stark proclamation on social media.
“He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” he wrote on 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.
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.
Defending all of this in a recent interview with the New York Times, Trump declared 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 conscience. “My own morality,” he said. “My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
In his 2024 campaign, 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 whose whims are law and whose power extends to every inch of the U.S. and every corner of the Western Hemisphere.