“Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” -Former President Richard Nixon during an interview with British journalist David Frost, 1977
“He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” -President Donald Trump, Truth Social and X, February 15, 2025
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While Trump may believe he posted an original statement, his precise quote is attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, the French general who installed himself as emperor from 1804-1814 and then again briefly in 1815.
The idea has come to be known in the United States as the “unitary executive theory,” a controversial Constitutional law theory granting the president sole authority over the executive branch. It is “an expansive interpretation of presidential power that aims to centralize greater control over the government in the White House,” as the New York Times explains.
Napoleon, Nixon, and Trump used this concept to rationalize their extraordinarily controversial actions that were well outside legal or ethical norms.
Unfortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court codified the unitary executive theory in Trump v. United States. The ultra-conservative “justices” ruled in favor of “presidential immunity” in federal cases: “Under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of Presidential power entitles a former President to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority. And he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts. There is no immunity for unofficial acts.”
Maybe we, the people, need another “Tea Party” like that which took place on December 16, 1773 to protest unfair taxation by the British, which had not granted the “colonies” representation. This time, we might want to think of organizing a tea dumping in the Gulf of Mexico in protest of Trump’s unfair and unprecedented takeover of the U.S. government against the interests and wishes of the people and in conjunction with his apparent immunity from the law. (We don’t have to dump real tea, but we can release our anger and rage).
Previously, federal prosecutors from several districts indicted Trump on numerous felony counts over his involvement in instigating violent insurrectionists to storm the Capitol on January 6, 2021; his transfer of official documents, some of which were classified, from the White House to his Mar-a-Lago resort home; and his attempt to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia.
But the ruling by the Supreme Court, in addition to Trump’s election victory in 2024, effectively sealed him from prosecution and essentially indicated that the president of the United States is above the law.
His 34 felony convictions for election fraud in his “hush money” case, though, remain in force. However, Trump did not receive any penalties for his crimes. As stated by Judge Juan Merchan, the protections shielding Trump from legal liability are afforded to “the office of the President of the United States.”
Throughout his entire adult life, Trump has presented the facade that he is above the law. Banking on his sense of entitlement and believing he is smarter and wiser than everyone around him, he pushes through laws and people like an enormous heavy snow plow pushes through even the most encrusted snow and ice.
Though he has faced charges and legal penalties from lawsuits in the past – for example, those stemming from convictions of racial discrimination in the sales of rentals of his and his father’s properties – he has generally slotted these as unfair and politically motivated vengeance against him.
One iconic image that most epitomizes Trump during his first regime is his disgustingly insensitive parody of a disabled journalist who was trying to interview him.
Another occurred on May 25, 2017, at a summit of NATO leaders in Brussels, when Trump forcefully pushed the Prime Minister of Montenegro, Dusko Markovic, out of his way so he could place himself in front of the pack for a photo op.
Some liken Trump to a wrecking ball targeting our democratic institutions. I like the analogy of the snowplow since it has a wider focus and more detailed destruction range. Possibly, Trump embodies both of these devices, plus the force of a firehose as he is flooding the zone with his broken dam of executive orders and pronouncements to keep us all distracted and exhausted.
We must remain, however, forever alert and forever vigilant.
I have read numerous messages on a variety of social media platforms saying, “Oh, just ignore Trump. He only wants attention,” or “I’m not listening to him. Just chill and everything will be fine.”
This is exactly the opposite of what we must do because IGNORING is IGNORANT.
That sentiment is the same one many residents of Germany and Italy expressed in the 1920s and 1930s. Everything wasn’t fine.
The same way fascists scapegoated and targeted Jews, homosexuals, Roma and Sinti, Jehovah’s Witnesses, people of color, communists, socialists, and non-white immigrants is the same way neo-fascists in the United States and other Western countries are targeting immigrants of color, Muslims, Jews, homosexuals, communists, socialists, and all progressives for causing all the evils of their nations.
So, where do you stand?
This question brings to mind the civil rights activist Eldridge Cleaver’s call to action: “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.”
It also calls to mind the words of Rabbi Joachim Prinz, a Berlin-based rabbi who fled Nazi Germany in 1937: “The most important thing that I learned under those tragic circumstances was that bigotry and hatred are not the most urgent problem. The most urgent, the most disgraceful, the most shameful and the most tragic problem is silence.”
No truer words were ever uttered, for on the spectrum from occasional microaggressions to full-blown genocide, there is no such thing as an “innocent bystander.”
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