\n Asked if there were any limits that existed on his global power, Trump said: \u201cYeah, there is one thing: My own morality. My own mind. It\u2019s the only thing that can stop me.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n When pressed, Trump conceded that he needed to abide by international law. But that came with a catch: He got to decide what international law constraints applied. (This is a theme with Trump, which we\u2019ll get to.)\n <\/p>\n
\n The Times called this Trump\u2019s \u201cmost blunt acknowledgment yet of his worldview.\u201d But it\u2019s certainly not the only one.\n <\/p>\n
\n The administration has in recent days taken to describing Trump\u2019s efforts to dominate the Western Hemisphere in remarkably blunt terms \u2013 in which about all that matters is power and leverage.\n <\/p>\n
\n White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has said the United States\u2019 leverage over a sovereign nation, Venezuela, means its \u201cdecisions are going to continue to be dictated by the United States of America.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
![\"Government](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/gettyimages-2254673550.jpg\")
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\n In an interview with CNN\u2019s Jake Tapper<\/a> early this week, White House adviser Stephen Miller described a \u201creal world\u2026 that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cThe future of the free world, Jake, depends on America being able to assert ourselves and our interests without apology,\u201d Miller said.\n <\/p>\n \n And repeatedly, Trump and those around him have suggested this power is largely or wholly unconstrained by the law.\n <\/p>\n Miller in another CNN interview in October about Trump\u2019s domestic deployments of the National Guard said Trump had \u201cplenary authority\u201d<\/a> \u2013 meaning absolute or unqualified.<\/p>\n Before his Venezuela strike, Trump claimed that he didn\u2019t need Congress\u2019s approval<\/a>.<\/p>\n The administration has since justified the strike not as a military operation, but a law enforcement one (to bring the indicted Maduro to justice), with the military in support. In doing so, it relied in a controversial late-1980s Justice Department legal opinion<\/a> that, practically speaking, gives the president extraordinary power to send the military into a foreign country, as long as an indicted person is being pursued.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s actions arguably go even further than the administration did back then. While the Maduro operation has been compared to the military operation that soon followed that late-1980s DOJ memo \u2013 the ouster of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega \u2013 there are some key differences<\/a>. Congress, for instance, had authorized the removal of Noriega, if not the use of military force to do it. And Panama had declared war on the United States.<\/p>\n After the Senate, including five GOP senators, voted this week to advance a war powers resolution restricting Trump\u2019s ability to continue striking Venezuela, Vice President JD Vance called it a \u201cfake\u201d and \u201cunconstitutional\u201d law. He added: \u201cIt\u2019s not going to change anything about how we conduct foreign policy over the next couple of weeks or the next couple of months.\u201d<\/p>\n The administration has claimed the authority to kill suspected drug-traffickers on the high seas without judicial review, even outside the context of a declared war.<\/p>\n After Democratic members of Congress suggested Trump might give the military illegal orders and urged soldiers not to follow them, Trump and his administration called it seditious and treasonous \u2013 as if it were unthinkable that this could ever happen.<\/p>\n \n That last one is particularly remarkable. That\u2019s because Trump has publicly floated<\/a> giving soldiers apparently illegal orders before.\n <\/p>\n \n During the 2016 presidential campaign, he advocated torture and killing terrorists\u2019 families and, when challenged on the illegality of such orders, assured that soldiers would follow them<\/a> (before backing off). He in 2020 floated bombing Iranian cultural sites<\/a>, which would be a war crime. Advisers have said that he frequently floats illegal things privately.\n <\/p>\n \n But the administration wants to treat it as unthinkable that Trump would float illegal orders.\n <\/p>\n \n And indeed, the administration\u2019s posture often seems to be that such orders simply cannot be illegal, because they come from Trump.\n <\/p>\n \n Early in the administration, Trump signed an executive action that effectively sidelined the Justice Department\u2019s Office of Legal Counsel<\/a> \u2013 the same entity that issued the late 1980s memo and which is normally charged with evaluating the legality of administration actions.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cThe president and the attorney general\u2019s opinions on questions of law are controlling on all employees in the conduct of their official duties,\u201d Trump\u2019s executive action said.\n <\/p>\n \n And the administration has walked up to the line of saying it\u2019s simply not a soldier\u2019s place to evaluate the legality of Trump\u2019s orders.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cAll orders, lawful orders are presumed to be legal by our service members,\u201d Leavitt said in November.\n <\/p>\n \n Now, in the Times interview, Trump suggests there really isn\u2019t any law that\u2019s binding him in such orders \u2013 and his broader campaign in the Western Hemisphere.\n <\/p>\n \n These are hardly the first instances of Trump claiming extraordinary and even unchecked powers.\n <\/p>\n \n During his first term, he repeatedly made such comments<\/a> about domestic matters \u2013 including in 2019 claiming that Article II of the Constitution gave him \u201cthe right to do whatever I want as president<\/a>.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n And Trump, this term especially, has repeatedly pressed the bounds of his authorities, taking actions that sometimes appear transparently illegal and challenging the courts to stop him.\n <\/p>\n \n But Trump is now taking this sensibility to the broadest stage yet: the world stage.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Two months ago, President Donald Trump and his allies ridiculed Trump\u2019s opponents for their massive \u201cNo Kings\u201d rallies.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":401290,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":{"0":"post-401289","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401289","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=401289"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401289\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/401290"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=401289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=401289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=401289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"US](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/gettyimages-2243335298.jpg\")
<\/p>\n