Trump’s Boast of Unlimited Presidential Power Defies the Constitution
September 3, 2025
“I have the right to do anything I want to do,” President Donald Trump said of the prospect of deploying federal troops into cities. “I’m the president of the United States.”
Trump’s radical assertion of absolute power—by now, a familiar, though indefensible, refrain—during a three-and-a-half-hour cabinet meeting on August 26 finds no footing in our constitutional architecture. There is, in the text of the Constitution, no mention of unlimited presidential power.
There was, in the Constitutional Convention, no train of discussion and no flirtation with the doctrine, which delegates regarded as repugnant to republicanism; indeed, there was not a scintilla of evidence in the debates in Philadelphia to support his outrageous claim. No delegate, moreover, to any of the various state ratifying conventions ever promoted the concept of monarchical absolutism, which was the centerpiece of the Stuart Kingship in the 17th Century that triggered the English Civil Wars. There is no mention of unbounded executive authority—sometimes characterized as prerogative power, emergency power, or inherent constitutional authority—in the Federalist Papers or, indeed, any of the writings contemporaneous with the framing of the Constitution.
No Supreme Court decision has ever squinted in the direction of absolute executive power, no treatise on the Constitution or American law has ever invoked it, and no previous president has asserted this sweeping power, which is wholly antithetical to the principles, values, and norms of American Constitutionalism. In sum, Trump’s revolutionary claim, not remotely related to the historic parameters and teachings of both conservatives and liberals, lacks paternity and is without intellectual pedigree.
The framers of the Constitution categorically rejected Trump’s Doctrine, the concept of unchecked presidential prerogative powers. James Madison observed that executive power would be “confined and defined,” a technique that reminded presidents, and citizens, that presidential powers were enumerated and cabined by Article II of the Constitution. James Wilson declared that the “prerogative power” was of no guide to the establishment of a republic and added that the president would enjoy no privileges or rights beyond those annexed to the character of every citizen. George Washington warned against presidential usurpation of power, which would represent “contempt” for the right of the people to draft a constitution that reflected their wish for a limited allocation of power, a principle reinforced by James Iredell, who reminded his colleagues in North Carolina that the government has only those powers granted to it by the Constitution. Alexander Hamilton nailed the point: “no agent may new model his commission,” a reminder to presidents that they have no authority to revise their constitutional powers. The mere wish for power, say an exclusive presidential power to make treaties, rather than a shared power with the Senate, Madison reiterated, was not sufficient to create it. In short, where no inherent constitutional power was granted, none may be assumed.
In decisions rendered this week by federal courts, the judiciary repudiated Trump’s authoritarian claims that he “can do whatever” he “wants to do.” On September 2, a federal district judge, Charles Breyer, rejected as unconstitutional, and a violation of federal law, Trump’s deployment in June of 700 active-duty Marines and 4,000 members of the National Guard into the streets of Los Angeles to “ensure that federal immigration law was enforced.” Trump’s deployment was illegal under the Posse Comitatus Act, which generally prohibits use of the military to enforce domestic law. Trump, Judge Breyer wrote, had turned nearly 5,000 soldiers into a “national police force,” in defiance of the law. In a measured opinion, the judge rebuked Trump’s absolutist pretensions. The Guard, however, may remain in the state so long as the administration uses them for “legal purposes,” such as protecting federal property.
On the same day, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, headquartered in New Orleans, and known as one of the most conservative appellate courts in the country, ruled that Trump had unlawfully invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to swiftly remove Venezuelan migrants, concluding that their presence did not amount to the type of invasion or “predatory incursion” that the wartime statute envisioned in permitting presidential deportations. The imposition of constitutional and statutory constraints on the president reflects the aims of the framers and serves as a reminder that the American Presidency is, indeed, an office of limited powers conferred by citizens who were anxious to cut all roots to monarchical powers.
-David Adler