Trump Alludes That Laws Don’t Apply To Him If He “Saves” The Country

In a Saturday post on Truth Social, President Donald Trump implied that any and all actions to “save” the country would not be in violation of the law.

“He who saves his Country,” Trump wrote, “does not violate any Law.” The quote is a version of a line often attributed to French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, though the origins aren’t clear.

Trump also shared the claim on Elon Musk’s social media site X, formerly Twitter, and the official White House account also published the message paired with the president’s official portrait. Musk, the richest person alive, has wreaked havoc on established federal funding practices in his short time as a special government employee, also shared the image.

In the replies to Trump’s Truth Social post, which is now pinned to the top of his account, users have been sharing their own exalting versions of photos of the president with the quote atop.

Trump’s post that a leader could be above the law comes after legal experts warned that the president is spurring a constitutional crisis just weeks into his second term.

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and U.S. President Donald Trump appear during an executive order signing in the Oval Office at the White House on February 11, 2025 in Washington, DC. Trump is to sign an executive order implementing the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE) “workforce optimization initiative,” which, according to Trump, will encourage agencies to limit hiring and reduce the size of the federal government.

Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

“There have been so many unconstitutional and illegal actions in the first 18 days of the Trump presidency. We never have seen anything like this,” Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley, told The New York Times in early February. Kate Shaw, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, described the administration’s early moves as demonstrating “maximum contempt for core constitutional values” like the separation of powers, the freedom of speech, and equal justice under the law.

Pamela Karlan, a law professor at Stanford, said in the Times article that a constitutional crisis occurs when the president “doesn’t care what the Constitution says regardless whether Congress or the courts resist a particular unconstitutional action.” “Up until now,” she continued, “while presidents might engage in particular acts that were unconstitutional, I never had the sense that there was a president for whom the Constitution was essentially meaningless.”

The backlash to Trump’s Saturday claims that a president could be above the law was swift.

In a post that doesn’t name Trump, his former vice president, Mike Pence, posted an essay he penned in 2010 about how presidents “must adhere” to the Constitution. “Spoken like a true dictator,” Senator Adam Schiff of California wrote on X. Norm Eisen, a lawyer who, like Schiff, worked on the first of Trump’s two impeachment trials, said Trump’s message was “a trial balloon and a provocation.”

Trump—who was convicted of 34 felonies by a Manhattan jury for covering up hush money payments made to adult film star Stormy Daniels during his 2016 bid for office, was found liable for sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll, and is currently facing a slew of other legal issues—has been playing with this idea, that he’s above the law, for years.

While Trump has previously and frequently faced the weight of the law in the courtroom, he’s also had substantial wins. Including when, in the summer of last year, the conservative wing of the Supreme Court ruled that, as a former president, he was entitled to “absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority.”

In her dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that her colleagues’ decision meant that “The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably.”

“In every use of official power,” she continued, “the President is now a king above the law.”

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