Count on this: a hospital ship isn't the only thing Donald Trump wants to send to Greenland. In fact, from the Caribbean to Nigeria to Iran, he seems ever more intent on (dis)organizing the world into a Trumpian nightmare. And by the time he's done (whatever "done" might even mean on this planet of ours at this moment), it's not going to be pretty.
Count on this as well: it's not just in Iran, Greenland, Nigeria, and the world's seas and oceans that Donald Trump is going to raise Cain and cause havoc (and mind you, I'm not even thinking right now about what he's planning to do to heat this planet to the boiling point)! He's going to do it in the United States of America, too, and, unbelievably enough, he's not likely to stop for almost three more years. And count on one more thing, it's not going to look pretty, legally speaking (and I'm not even thinking about his urge to "nationalize" this country's elections).
Worse yet, as TomDispatch regular Maha Hilal makes all too grimly clear today, when it comes to the law, Donald Trump and crew have the potential ability to, in their own fashion, use what passes for "legality" in this country to undertake an almost unimaginable set of anything but legal actions. And with that in mind, let Hilal take you deep into Trump's lawless world, one legality at a time. Tom
Why the Trump Administration Doesn't Just Break the Law
But Uses Legality (in a Distinctly Lawless Fashion)
By Maha Hilal
In response to his sentencing following his conviction on 34 felonies in May 2024, President Trump stated that he had "won the election in a massive landslide, and the people of this country understand what's gone on. This has been a weaponization of government."
Despite his conviction, Judge Juan Merchan sentenced him to an unconditional discharge with no consequences like prison, probation, or even fines. The judge determined that this was the "only lawful sentence" that avoided infringing on the authority of the presidency. Had that been Donald Trump's first encounter with the law (which, of course, it wasn't), it would have been a stark lesson in impunity.
It's no surprise then that, in an interview last year with Kristen Welker on Meet the Press, when asked about his obligation to uphold the Constitution, Trump responded, "I don't know." In his conversation with Welker, he also defied a Supreme Court decision that ordered the return of immigrant Kilmar Armando Ábrego Garc-a from El Salvador, where he had been deported thanks to what the Trump administration termed "an administrative error." Blaming the deferral of that decision on Attorney General Pam Bondi, the president stated that he was "not involved in the legality or illegality" of the case.
Despite his seemingly ambivalent feelings in that interview, he has emphatically asserted his position with respect to the law elsewhere, especially when it came to him. For example, on February 16, 2025, he wrote on X, "He who saves his Country does not violate any Law." Nonetheless, outright violations of the law have been a signature characteristic of his administration writ large. For example, last March, when Judge James Boasberg ordered the return of planes carrying migrants being deported from the United States to El Salvador's CECOT prison (known for its brutality), Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem instructed the two flights to continue in clear violation of the court order.The Justice Department would subsequently argue in a court filing that the administration hadn't violated the judge's order because the flights carrying the migrants were no longer over U.S. territory when the ruling was issued.
In short, although the attitudes of President Trump and his administration toward legality have been guided by the belief that their power is in no way meaningfully constrained by the law, it would be a mistake to assume that they've governed through lawlessness alone. To focus solely on lawlessness would be to minimize the way the president and his administration have simultaneously relied on and weaponized the law itself to legitimize their violence and their violations. They have pursued an America First strategy that has centered on the expansion of executive power and the protection of narrowly defined national interests, while tossing aside both human rights and international legal norms. To fully grasp the depths of the Trump administration's violence, lawlessness must be examined alongside the strategic use of the law to manufacture a sense of legality and a facade of legal legitimation.
Legalizing Boat Strikes to "Save Americans"
On Tuesday, September 2, 2025, on President Trump's order, U.S. military forces conducted an airstrike against a boat that the administration claimed belonged to the Latin American gang Tren de Aragua, which he had previously designated a terrorist organization and described as "narcoterrorists." Since that first strike conducted in the waters of the Caribbean Sea, there have been 46 subsequent boat strikes in both the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific Ocean that have killed 147 people to date. Despite the view of legal experts that such strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings, the Trump administration has insisted on their legality. In late November, for example, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth stated on X that "our current operations in the Caribbean are lawful under both U.S. and international law, with all actions in compliance with the law of armed conflict -- and approved by the best military and civilian lawyers, up and down the chain of command."
The approval Hegseth referred to came in the form of a memorandum from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. Although that memo has not been made public, sources familiar with its contents report that it frames the strikes as acts of collective self-defense undertaken in the interests of the United States and several Latin American countries.The memo also argues that, because the U.S. is in an armed conflict with the drug cartels, the strikes don't require Congressional approval, being both in the national interest and sufficiently limited in scope, nature, and duration not to qualify as war-making. That memo has been criticized in numerous ways, with some experts insisting that the legal arguments are not only flawed, but were put together to legitimize a political decision already made by the White House.
In the last quarter-century of the War on Terror, weaponizing the label of terrorism has been repeatedly invoked to justify repressive interventions.As law professor Sirine Sinnar notes, "Through invoking terrorism, the Trump administration targets its political enemies, pushes an openly racist and xenophobic agenda, and flouts international law more brazenly than its predecessors. But it can do all this so easily because the concept of terrorism has long been selective, political, and racialized, and because Congress and the Supreme Court have largely shielded counterterrorism from accountability." The designation of individuals as "narcoterrorists" reflects the enduring currency of this post-9/11 framework, demonstrating how the language of terrorism can be redeployed in new contexts through strategically constructed threat narratives.
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