The Trump administration is enmeshed in a long and rapidly growing list of legal challenges to the novel powers it has claimed for itself. But to try to understand the situation in terms of the individual cases, and the legal questions they implicate, is to miss the forest for the trees. The larger picture is that Donald Trump refuses, or is simply unable, to grasp any distinction between the law and his own whims.

That conflation was on display once again today at a meeting of governors at the White House. As Trump lectured the audience on his executive order banning transgender girls and women from participating in girls’ and women’s sports, he paused to single out Maine Governor Janet Mills.

“Are you not going to comply with it?” he demanded of her. “I’m complying with state and federal laws,” she replied. To this, Trump shot back, “We are the federal law.”

It is entirely possible that, if the state of Maine challenges the executive order, Trump will prevail legally. But what is important about this exchange is not whose interpretation of Title IX and the Administrative Procedure Act has a better chance to win five votes on the Supreme Court. It is that Trump is treating the law as coterminous with his own desires.

Trump then threatened Mills with the prospect of stripping away federal funding for her state: “You better do it, because you’re not going to get any federal funding at all if you don’t.” Legally, it is possible for the federal government to deny states certain funding streams under certain conditions. But Trump cannot simply cut Maine off financially because the state chooses to challenge a federal policy. Distinctions like this, however, seem totally lost on the president, who sees himself as national king—note his use of the royal we—and every other American, including each of the 50 states, as one of his quavering subjects.

[Jonathan Chait: Trump says the corrupt part out loud]

Trump has grown ever more brazen about his belief that his activities are by definition legal, and activities he opposes by definition criminal. That belief is implied by a long, long list of statements and actions, stretching from his career in business, when he routinely treated laws (forbidding him from discriminating against Black tenants or committing tax fraud) as suggestions; to the final days of his presidency, when he attempted to overturn his election defeat; to his post-presidency, when he flagrantly disregarded requirements that he turn over classified documents. It is also implied by his habit of describing a long list of political opponents as criminals.

Trump recently summarized this belief by writing on X, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” (The possibly apocryphal quote is commonly attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, who was, famously, a dictator.) His statement to Mills is utterly consistent with this belief: Since Trump cannot violate the law, it follows that the law means whatever he says. He has progressed from demonstrating his disregard for the law to stating it as a doctrine.

Trump’s supporters have followed his lead. When the White House announced a spending freeze last month, Matthew J. Vaeth, acting director of Trump’s budget office, wrote, “Career and political appointees in the Executive Branch have a duty to align Federal spending and action with the will of the American people as expressed through Presidential priorities.” Of course, the Constitution does not say that the will of the people is expressed exclusively through the president. It divides legitimate authority between three branches of government, resting the spending authority in the hands of Congress.

Paula White, the newly appointed White House faith adviser, has gone further, once stating, “To say no to President Trump would be saying no to God.” Far from reassuring the American people that they continue to live in a democratic republic, Trump and the White House have lately leaned into the divine-right theme with a series of social-media posts depicting Trump as a king for overruling New York City’s congestion-pricing system.

[David A. Graham: The world’s most powerful unelected bureaucrat]

Last week, the Wall Street Journal editorial board, which has occasionally scolded Trump for his naughtiness, dismissed fears that the country is entering a constitutional crisis as “overwrought.” Trump, the editors insisted, was merely testing the bounds of his executive authority, in this case by destroying a series of federal programs and agencies authorized by Congress. It is true, as the Journal argues, that previous presidents have tested the boundaries of their authority. But there is a point at which the executive branch moves so far and so fast that the eventual promise of legal redress means little. If you fire all the employees of a department and cancel its contractors, they’ll go broke waiting for the Supreme Court to rule in their favor. Imagine a Democratic administration setting out to replace every white Evangelical church in America with EV-charging stations—even if they agreed to abide by the courts in the event of an adverse ruling, this wouldn’t offer much comfort.

But the larger dynamic is that Trump isn’t merely pushing to redefine the boundaries of the law or even the Constitution. He is rejecting the principle that the law constrains him at all. The existence of a constitutional crisis cannot be understood solely in terms of the discrete claims of the executive branch vis-à-vis the other two. A president who maintains that the law means whatever he wants it to mean is a constitutional crisis.

George Mills wins the men's 3,000m title at the 2025 British Indoor Championship in a record time for the event.

Last June, the popular UFC fighter Sean Strickland surprised onlookers when, immediately following a victory, he ducked into the audience and took a photo with a bystander: Donald Trump. “President Trump, you’re the man, bro,” Strickland declared in his post-match interview with Joe Rogan. “It is a damn travesty what they’re doing to you. I’ll be donating to you, my man. Let’s get it done.” Video of the moment rocketed across social media, serving as an early indicator of Trump’s enduring strength with his base, despite his recent felony convictions.

Strickland went viral last week for a very different reason: opposition to the president and his plan to take over Gaza. “Man if Trump keeps this bs up I’m about to start waving a Palestinian flag,” the fighter posted on X. “American cities are shitholes and you wanna go spend billions on this dumpster fire. Did we make a mistake?! This ain’t America first.” Strickland’s lament racked up 159,000 likes and 13.2 million views.

Strickland is far from the only one expressing buyer’s remorse. A month after Trump’s inauguration, the honeymoon is over; some of his backers are waking up next to the man they voted for and wondering if they’ve made a terrible mistake. With every policy he implements and offhand remark he makes, Trump is falsifying the imaginary versions of himself that inspired many of his supporters.

In late January, Tucker Carlson, arguably the most influential media personality on the American right, interviewed Curt Mills, the executive director of The American Conservative, a generally pro-Trump publication. Basking in the glow of the inauguration, the two men enthused over what they described as Trump’s commitment to a new policy of American restraint on the world stage. “It is an actual choice,” Mills said. “We cannot do the border if we do the Middle East.” Carlson quickly concurred: “We have to reorient toward our own interests.” Eleven days after this conversation aired, Trump announced his Gaz-a-Lago gambit. Shortly after, Mills published and promoted a piece declaring, “Trump’s Apparent Gaza Scheme Endangers His Entire Legacy.”

In February 2023, the Trump-curious journalist Glenn Greenwald claimed that “the energy behind opposing American interventionism … is actually much more on the populist right than the populist left.” In February 2025, he is now asking, “How does Trump’s intensifying fixation on ‘taking over Gaza’ promote an America First foreign policy?”

[Read: Nobody wants Gaz-a-Lago]

And the problem is not just the Middle East. Again and again, the fantasies that fueled Trump’s candidacy are colliding with the reality of his presidency, and the result is already dispelling the illusions of many who advocated for him.

“Elon Musk is a danger to Trumpism,” wrote the pro-worker, pro-Trump commentator Sohrab Ahmari earlier this month, calling on Trump to fire his billionaire sidekick and arguing that “it is becoming obvious that the oligarchs, and Musk especially, are taking advantage of justified public outrage against wokeness and DEI to ram through wide-ranging economic changes whose benefits beyond their own circles are questionable at best.” (Trump has not fired Musk.)

On Monday, Zachary Levi, one of the few Hollywood celebrities who openly endorsed Trump, went on Fox to plead for the “truly good, working people that work for the government that are getting lost in the cracks” amid Musk’s purge of the civil service. And after Trump’s administration banned the Associated Press from the White House briefing room for refusing to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, the heterodox Spectator columnist Bridget Phetasy had enough. “I voted against compelled speech,” she wrote on X. “You can’t just rename a body of water and demand everyone go along with it and call us liars if we don’t. Nope. Miss me with that shit.” Her post garnered 10,000 likes and 1.4 million views.

Of course, Trump was never a free-speech, pro-labor, anti-war paragon in the first place. Over the course of his political and business careers, he’s lobbed lawsuits at multiple media companies, reportedly stiffed contractors and customers, pushed tax cuts skewed toward the wealthy, and continued American drone strikes and arms sales in the Middle East. But the outrage of some influencers who believed he’d further their causes is a warning: As president, Trump is no longer the vessel into which people can pour their discontent with the status quo. With every disappointment, it will become harder for him to hold together the coalition that delivered him the narrowest popular-vote victory since Richard Nixon’s in 1968.

Every candidate runs to some extent on the idea of their presidency rather than its reality, promising to be all things to as many people as possible. The brilliance of Barack Obama’s “Yes We Can” slogan in 2008 was that it allowed voters to fill in the blanks afterward with whatever they most desired. But because Trump appears to have few, if any, core principles beyond retaining and expanding his own power, he was able to take this approach to the extreme. Voters knew he believed in nothing, which meant he could conceivably do anything, making him the perfect candidate upon whom to pin their wildest dreams. And because Trump was out of office for four years, his supporters had the unusual opportunity to spin self-serving—and often mutually exclusive—narratives around the former president’s plans without the inconvenience of having to explain his actual policies.

With Trump in the White House again, however, many of these pleasing fictions stand exposed. The president’s hobbling of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and National Labor Relations Board has upset the promoters of his domestic agenda in the intelligentsia, while his Gaza proposal has left many of his neo-isolationist boosters scrambling—or sidestepping the subject entirely. The reality of Trump’s presidency can no longer sustain the fantasies that were projected onto his campaign.

[Read: Trump doesn’t believe anything. That’s why he wins.]

Frankly, those who fell for these mirages should have known better. Trump is no conventional politician. He relies on instincts forged in the worlds of show business and real estate—an entirely transactional actor with an unparalleled penchant for self-promotion and flimflam. Attempts to fit him into a traditional ideological box will always fail, because he has never met a box he couldn’t sell for parts to the highest bidder. Attempts to cast him as a staunch proponent of American restraint or opponent of corporate greed do not reflect his pre-political career, never fit his first-term policies, and don’t describe his current ones. Rather, these bids to pigeonhole and appropriate Trump are best seen as efforts by intellectuals to impose order on what they don’t understand, or opportunistic attempts by ideologues to bootstrap their program to Trump’s ascendant brand.

There is a certain sadness to this state of affairs. Many voters were desperate for a straightforward alternative to what they saw as the stale establishmentarian liberalism of the Biden-Harris administration. So they projected its opposite, as they understood it, onto their only other viable option—and Trump, ever attuned to the needs of his audience, was more than happy to humor their hopes. But in actuality, the 2024 election was not a traditional binary choice between two coherently opposed political alternatives, the electoral equivalent of the Yankees versus the Red Sox. It was the Yankees versus a flaming tennis ball launched into orbit by a Tesla rocket—a choice not between two teams but between completely different sports. Many voters who thought they knew the rules to the game and that they would turn out the winners are now discovering that they didn’t and won’t.

This is why the more Trump’s presidency progresses, the more support he will lose. Back in November, Phetasy, the Spectator columnist, said that she was “voting for Donald Trump, but not really for Donald Trump—I’m voting against the left and many of the things that they stand for.” In 2024, Trump benefited from this dynamic. But come the 2026 midterms, he will have provided voters like her, who have been burned by their illusions, with something new to vote against. The problem with running as the candidate of people’s dreams is that, eventually, they wake up.