The Trump administration finds itself entangled in an ever-expanding array of legal battles concerning the unprecedented powers it asserts. However, analyzing the situation merely through the lens of individual cases and the various legal questions they raise obscures a larger reality. The fundamental issue is that Donald Trump seems unable, or unwilling, to differentiate between the law and his personal desires.
This conflation was evident once again during a governors’ meeting at the White House. While discussing his executive order that prohibits transgender girls and women from competing in girls’ and women’s sports, Trump specifically called out Maine Governor Janet Mills.
“Are you not going to comply with it?” he challenged her. “I’m complying with state and federal laws,” Mills responded. Trump retorted, “We are the federal law.”
It’s possible that, if Maine contests the executive order, Trump may win in court. Yet the significance of this interaction transcends whose interpretation of Title IX and the Administrative Procedure Act might secure a majority at the Supreme Court. The core issue is that Trump perceives the law as synonymous with his own wishes.
Trump then warned Mills about the potential loss of federal funding for her state: “You better do it, because you’re not going to get any federal funding at all if you don’t.” While it is legally feasible for the federal government to restrict certain funding to states under specific circumstances, Trump cannot arbitrarily cut off financial support to Maine simply because it challenges a federal directive. Such distinctions, though, seem completely ignored by the president, who envisions himself as the nation’s monarch—evident in his usage of the royal we—with all Americans, including the 50 states, as his reluctant subjects.
Trump’s attitude towards his actions has grown increasingly bold, firmly believing that whatever he does is always legal, while opposing actions are inherently criminal. This mindset has been evident throughout his career—from treating laws intended to prevent discrimination against Black tenants or tax fraud as mere suggestions, to his attempts to overturn his election loss during his final days in office, and even to his post-presidency, where he blatantly ignored obligations to return classified documents. He has consistently labeled many of his political adversaries as criminals.
Recently, Trump encapsulated this belief by posting on X, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” (This possibly apocryphal quote is often linked to Napoleon Bonaparte, who was, notably, a dictator.) His comment to Mills reflects this conviction: since, in Trump’s view, he cannot break the law, it necessarily means that the law aligns with his assertions. He has shifted from demonstrating a disdain for the law to enshrining this perspective as doctrine.
Trump’s followers have mirrored his stance. Following a recent spending freeze announced by the White House, Matthew J. Vaeth, acting director of Trump’s budget office, asserted, “Career and political appointees in the Executive Branch have a duty to align Federal spending and action with the will of the American people as expressed through Presidential priorities.” Yet, the Constitution does not state that the will of the people is exclusively represented through the president; it delineates authority among three branches of government, with spending authority vested in Congress.
Paula White, the newly appointed faith adviser at the White House, went further, claiming, “To say no to President Trump would be saying no to God.” Rather than reassuring Americans of their democratic republic, Trump and his administration have leaned into a narrative of divine right, with several social media posts depicting him as a king overturning New York City’s congestion-pricing system.
Recently, the Wall Street Journal‘s editorial board, which has occasionally reprimanded Trump for his misbehavior, dismissed concerns about the nation entering a constitutional crisis as “overwrought.” The editors argued that Trump was simply testing the limits of his executive authority by dismantling various federal programs and agencies authorized by Congress. While it’s true, as the Journal contends, that past presidents have stretched the bounds of their power, there exists a threshold beyond which the executive branch’s actions so exceed legal norms that the promise of judicial redress becomes negligible. If one were to terminate all employees of a department and eliminate its contracts, they would be left waiting for the Supreme Court to intervene without financial stability. Imagine a Democratic administration attempting to replace every white Evangelical church in the nation with electric vehicle charging stations—altogether, even if they agreed to respect court rulings following an unfavorable decision, the assurance offers little solace.
Yet the more significant pattern is that Trump is not only redefining legal boundaries or Constitutional interpretations; he is outright dismissing the idea that the law can impose constraints on him at all. The essence of a constitutional crisis cannot be grasped solely through the lens of the executive branch’s claims against the other two branches. A president who asserts that the law conforms to his own dictates is a constitutional crisis.
