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.

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.

A heavily redacted version of the memo responding to that, dated December 23, 2025, was released on January 13th, 2026. It frames the sending of U.S. special forces and air power into Caracas, the Venezuelan capital, to capture the Maduros as a law-enforcement action to arrest a fugitive, not a military invasion (despite all the Venezuelans who died).

It argues that, because of the limited duration and narrow scope of the operation, the action falls under the president’s constitutional authority and isn’t an act of war that would require congressional authorization. Although the memo did avoid making a definitive argument that the operation didn’t violate international law, it essentially tried to make that determination inconsequential by deeming the actions legal under domestic law.