In an extraordinary interview broadcast on Sunday in “Meet The Press” by NBC, Donald Trump repeatedly proclaimed that, as president of the United States, he does not have to defend the Constitution.
“I don’t know,” Trump said in response to the question: “Don’t you need to defend the constitution of the United States as president?” when the presenter Kristen Welker pressed him asking if “all people” in the United States are entitled to due process according to the Constitution, Trump replied again: “I don’t know. I am not, I am not a lawyer.”
In this exchange, Trump is in effect a presidential dictatorship. The United States is led by a political criminal who sees the Constitution, and with it all democratic rights, as something that he can grant and take to taste.
What are those rights in the Constitution? They include the Charter of Rights, also known as the first 10 amendments to the Constitution. These amendments detail the protections to individual freedoms with respect to the power of the government. Among them are freedom of expression and meeting, freedom of conscience, the right of the individual to know the positions presented against himself in a criminal case, the right to a rapid public trial before a jury of peers, the right to be sure in the home of police raids and arrests, and the freedom of torture.
The Constitution also includes the great amendments of the civil war that prohibit slavery (13th amendment), guarantee the protections of due process of state regimes and guarantee citizenship by birth right (14th amendment) and protect the right to vote (15th amendment).
By stating that they are not obliged to stick to the Constitution, Trump is saying that the American people have no rights that they think they have won for 250 years of struggles and that he believes that he can torture at will, banish political opponents and even undo the repeal of slavery.
To take only one example, the due process clause, with which Welker begins his interview, appears in the fifth amendment. Drastically limits the government’s police powers, stating that “no person will be … deprived of life, freedom or property, without due legal process.” Language does not distinguish between the basic rights of due process of citizens and non -citizens.
But a choice of words as carefully studied as Madison’s and the other editors of the Constitution means anything for Trump. The deportation to concentration fields of El Salvador of not only non -naturalized immigrants is actively plotting, who is expressly due to due process under the fifth amendment. He is also conspiring to summarily deport nationals. In fact, Trump has already deported small citizens, including one fighting for stage 4.
Contrary to Trump’s reflections, there is no doubt that the president is obliged to defend the Constitution. Article II establishes in a simple language that the position itself is based on said garment. Trump himself swore to defend article II as recently as on January 20 in his inauguration. Declared, with his hand in the Bible:
“I swear solemnly that I will faithfully execute the position of the president of the United States and, in the best possible way, I will preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States …”
All US presidents have lent the same oath since April 20, 1789, when George Washington assumed his first mandate. Trump thinks it’s a farce. As already stated in 2019: “I have an article II, where I have the right to do what I want as president.”
The US revolution, which gave rise to the Constitution, established just the opposite principle. He established the concept that people are born with “inalienable” rights that neither the monarchs nor their magistrates give them or take them away. In fact, it is only to defend such rights that “governments are instituted among men,” according to Jefferson, “deriving their righteous powers from the consent of the governed.” In Trump’s vision of things, rights are granted or removed at the will of the king, in the manner of the absolutist Louis XIV of France, with whom Trump would totally agree: The state is me! The state is me.
In a monarchy, sovereign power ultimately resides in the crown, invested by the divine sanction of the Church. But the US and French revolutions ended with the domain of the Kings: in the first, cutting the subordination ties of the colonies to Jorge III; In the second, cutting the head of Louis XVI.
The dictatorship that Trump is building is not only a danger to the American people. As Commander in Chief of the US Army, the President has an authority without control in nuclear war and weapons. The entire world is threatened by the rise of an American Führer.
Trump’s comments in the “Meet the Press” program are not his first dictatorship statement. On February 25, he published on social networks: “He who saves his country does not violate any law”, echoing his historical idols: Hitler (“Führer’s authority is not limited by laws”), Mussolini (“Everything within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.”), Pinochet (“the armed forces have acted … to save the country”) save Spain ”).
The American Republic, which is approaching its 250th anniversary, is being consumed step by step by a fascist cabal that acts in accordance with an elaborate plan. Warning lights flash in red:
· Trump’s interview on Sunday coincides with his announcement that he is considering appointing the fascist advisor Stephen Miller as national security advisor. In a recent right -wing podcast, Miller threatened the judges by calling them “radical leftists” and warned that Trump could even ignore the Supreme Court, controlled by the extreme right. “There are many other options in which I will not enter here about what are the president’s authorities and powers,” said Miller.
- Trump and his advisors have made it clear that judicial sentences will follow only when they are convenient, an explicit rejection of judicial independence.
- Trump has also consolidated the subordination of the Legislative Power to the Executive, governing by decree, including a record of 142 executive orders in its first 100 days. These orders have imposed radical social cuts and destroyed fundamental democratic rights.
- The agents of the Immigration and Customs Control (ICE) and the National Security Department now operate as the White House Personal Shock Troops, attacking immigrants and legal residents. When Wisconsin Judge Hannah Dugan challenged ICE to defend an immigrant, Trump FBI director Kash Patel ordered her arrest.
- Masked ICE agents are kidnapping legal residents in broad daylight, denying due process, even any contact with lawyers and relatives. A memorandum of the State Department of Secretary Marco Rubio demanded the deportation of the legal permanent resident Mahmoud Khalil for his “past, current or expected beliefs”, Specifically for opposing the genocide in Gaza (our emphasis).
It is no less important than Trump’s statements that there has been no serious response of the Democratic party, which fears the revolutionary implications much more to tell the truth to the working class than the worst thing that the possible dictator Donald Trump could do. Trump is aware of the complicity of the “opposition party” and relies on this. In practice, Democrats are part of a long -range conspiracy against population rights. Attempts to make calls to such political formation are worse than useless.
An appropriate response of the Democratic Party to Trump’s announcement on Sunday that he is not obliged to defend the Constitution would be: “These are the statements of a political criminal. Now the question is his immediate dismissal of the position.” But no leader of the Democratic Party has demanded Trump’s resignation. None asked for a political trial to dismiss it, much less criminal charges. To be Franco, if the president’s open statement is not obliged to comply with the Constitution does not constitute “serious crimes and offenses”, then nothing is.
On the other hand, the general response in the media and among the main Democrats was indifference. The leader of the Senate Democrats, Charles Schumer, only had this to say:
It is difficult to imagine something more antiestadoNense than Donald Trump, the acting president, saying that “he does not know” if he needs to defend the Constitution.
Any belief that the Supreme Court will act to save the Republic ignores all its recent history, which dates back to its order to stop the vote counting in the Bush vs. case. Gore in 2000, delivering the choice to Bush. There is also its impressive expansion of the Executive Branch last summer in the Trump V case. United States, in which he ruled that the president has unlimited power when “acts in an official capacity”, whose parameters he can define.
Donald Trump arises from a prolonged process of political degeneration. Within the ruling class as a whole, there is no significant support for the defense of basic democratic rights. As explained by the president of the WSWS International Editorial Board, David North, at the international act online on May 1 this weekend:
In objective terms, the Trump administration attack on democracy means the violent realignment of the political forms of government in accordance with the class relations that exist in society. The White House floats on a stinky pile of fraudulent manure. Trump, the rough street vendor and master of the scam, is nothing more than the personification of a criminal oligarchy.
Marxists have never seen the US Constitution with pink lenses. It was a product of his time and as such he could only have had a contradictory character. When arising from the Enlightenment, he consecrated the republican and democratic principles, especially in his great declaration of rights and the amendments of the Civil War. He greatly advanced the cause of universal human liberation. But the Constitution also established the framework by which the US capitalist class would not only govern and expand throughout the continent and then in the world, with all the bloody crimes that this has implied, but would hide its real -class domain behind the appearance of legality.
The American ruling class, headed by Trump, is now burning the framework by which he has ruled during a millennium room. There are vast revolutionary implications. The American working class, unlike capitalists, still has a democratic mentality. He is now discovering, as he advances towards the opposition to the classes war that is fought from the White House, which to defend himself will be forced to also defend the great democratic traditions and achievements of the first two US revolutions, of 1775-1789 and 1861-1865.
More than that, what Trump demonstrates is that the defense of democratic rights has become inseparable from the overthrow of the oligarchy and the capitalist system he represents. Which is linked to the development of a movement of the working class for socialism, the expropriation of the ruling class and the establishment of democratic control over economic life.
(Article originally published in English on May 5, 2025)
