Trump’s Effort to become the Supreme Leader Has Roots in a Nazi Philosopher
His lawless view of his sovereign powers was articulated by Carl Schmitt
In a legal filing defending Donald Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act (of “Alien and Sedition Acts” notoriety) to send people to El Salvador’s notoriously brutal prison camp, government attorneys argued something astonishing: The president has “inherent” authority to deport anyone, anywhere, at any time—bypassing any limit imposed by Congress and beyond the reach of the courts. Although a Trump-appointed judge in Texas has for now blocked the use of this act, using it isn’t even necessary, in this view, since this power stemmed from Article II of the Constitution.
However, there is nothing in the Constitution that sees executive power as a kind of ultimate sovereignty.
This claim, along with similar ones being advanced on issues ranging from birthright citizenship to retaliation against law firms, signals something profoundly disturbing: an embrace of boundless, absolute, unchecked power. The notion is completely foreign to American constitutional law and the political philosophy on which the country was founded, which put the defense of individual rights at the center of its project and firm limits on an executive’s power to abrogate them. Its origins can be found, ironically enough, in the ideology of past “enemy aliens.”
The embrace of authoritarian notions isn’t just a matter of base emotional impulses dressed up in formalistic language. There’s a deadly serious set of ideas behind it, revealing the disturbingly widespread influence of Carl Schmitt, a German jurist and political philosopher who became a prominent propagandist during the early years of the Nazi regime. You might think a literal Nazi would be thoroughly discredited, but the grim reality is he has been embraced as a respectable thinker and even a laudable role model long after the regime he served died in a bunker in Berlin.
Trump himself has surely never studied Schmitt. But those around him, influencing him, and shaping the movement which supports him, certainly have. Many say so openly, which puts them in the notorious company of Vladimir Putin’s pet “philosopher,” Aleksandr Dugin.
Closer to home, Curtis Yarvin, for example, has based much of his neo-fascist philosophy on Schmitt, happily crediting him. Adrian Vermeule, the Harvard law professor who advocates an “integralist” Catholic theocracy and has been embraced by so-called “national conservatives,” likewise grounds his legal philosophy in Schmitt’s ideas. And even JD Vance has name-dropped Schmitt, in the odd form of implausibly accusing his enemies of embracing Schmittian ideas and thus implicitly justifying his own decision to do the same.
Schmitt coined two concepts vital to the new right’s worldview in the age of Trump. First is the friend-enemy distinction: the idea that all politics is fundamentally about deciding who belongs to the community and who doesn’t, who is a friend and who is an enemy, who’s in and who’s out. Second is the idea that, as Schmitt put it, “sovereign is he who decides on the exception,” the power to suspend laws altogether in the name of preserving the polity.
Neither of these concepts is mere academic curiosity, a philosophical thought exercise. They map with chilling clarity onto what we’re now seeing from those who argue Trump’s power must be unbound by law.
The Political Centrality of ‘Us versus Them’
This friend-enemy dynamic is not just rhetorical, or the anodyne observation that political disputes involve conflict. It’s the power to decide who even counts as part of the nation in the first place. You can call it the “volk” if you prefer, as Schmitt’s contemporaries did. That same logic places within the president’s grasp (or whoever the head of state is, but for us, the occupant of the Oval Office) the power to declare who is an enemy of the people, transforming even domestic citizens into foreign adversaries if he so chooses. It takes no stretch to see how claims of an “inherent” right to deport—untethered from any law—slide into a Schmittian notion that citizenship, too, can be revoked by fiat, as Trump has also claimed he can do.
We are not dealing here with some obscure footnote to 20th-century philosophy. Schmitt’s theories arose during the turbulent Weimar Republic, and they are central to understanding how democracy collapsed there. Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution, granting emergency powers, was twisted to allow leaders like Hindenburg, and then Hitler, to govern as autocrats. Schmitt praised the 1933 Enabling Act that allowed Hitler’s government to make laws without the consent of the Reichstag (German parliament), effectively suspending the Weimar Constitution and paving the way for Hitler’s dictatorship. It handed legalistic cover to what became the horrific machinery of the Nazi regime. Because of it, Hitler never formally repealed Germany’s old constitution. Instead, he was able to rely on Schmitt’s reading of it to give himself a blank check while keeping up the pretense of legal continuity.
Schmitt was so fervent and unapologetic in defending the Nazis that, after the war and until his death in 1985, German universities wanted nothing to do with him and he was unable to secure an academic post. It was an ignominious fate he amply deserved, if not a place on the gallows at Nuremberg.
Exploiting the Emergency Loophole
Why does this matter? Because to Schmitt and his modern admirers, the “concept of the political” (friend vs. enemy) sits above the state itself. Law becomes secondary, even disposable, once the sovereign decides there’s an “exception.” The so-called “state of exception” isn’t just emergency authority that kicks in under well-defined circumstances according to existing laws. It is the power to decide those circumstances and then suspend any law which might stand in the way of doing what’s deemed necessary. Deemed by who? The sovereign, which means the man at the top. For Schmitt, the notion of the people as sovereign, one of the foundational principles of liberal democracy and the bedrock of American constitutional law, is chimerical and fallacious. Instead, it is the sovereign who defines the people, excluding or including whoever the leader sees fit, and the existence of the state flows from this autocratic act of definition. Rather than the people creating a constitution which then creates various offices, the sovereign leader in this sense creates a people and their constitution is whatever he decrees.
In Schmitt’s formulation, the friend-enemy distinction defines the very boundaries of the community and precedes the state itself. Laws and constitutions don’t define that boundary so much as serve it, to be discarded when they don’t. And once you place “the political” in this sense above the state, and that state is allowed to discard the law whenever it sees fit, you’re left with a single individual who wields absolute, unaccountable power. Little surprise that this theory found a receptive audience in 1930s Germany. But it should deeply disturb us to see it revived in 2020s America.
That’s what we’re seeing hinted at when Trump or his allies assert that the president can do anything he wants, cancel any statutory limits on his power, and unilaterally nullify parts of the Constitution. It is a vision of presidential authority not as an office bound by the Constitution, but as a power above the Constitution, above the American people, even—free to declare at will who is a “real” American and who is an enemy subject to expulsion or worse. Schmitt did not coin the term Führerprinzip (“leader principle”) as used by the Nazis, but he was one of its staunchest and most rigorous defenders, dressing up brute force in legal and political theories that made the leader’s word supreme.
It’s tempting to dismiss all this as “un-American” and leave it at that. But such a label, though true, undersells the danger. Schmitt’s theories represent the hot molten core of Nazi ideology, the philosophical scaffolding which turned an advanced modern society with a republican constitution—albeit a young one—into a totalitarian, genocidal dictatorship. From these premises, unspeakable atrocities became allowable. Schmitt’s championing of the friend-enemy distinction and lawless power provided the intellectual justification for targeting entire categories of people—Jews, political dissidents, and others—for ostracism, persecution, and even murder on an industrial scale.
Unleashing Boundless Brutality
We should take heed of what it means when modern figures—no matter how polished their résumés—draw inspiration from a man whose legacy is inseparable from the Third Reich. They’re not flirting with some contrarian viewpoint on constitutional theory; they’re actively rejecting the American tradition that legitimate power comes from a constitution, created by “We the People,” and constrained by the rule of law and individual rights.
Instead, they favor power qua power: that a single individual can stand above statute and structure, determining who has what rights, if any, no matter what the law says. The White House’s assertion that a president has not just “inherent” but boundless authority to expel entire groups without congressional approval, or that he might unilaterally redefine the bounds of citizenship, takes a play straight from Schmitt’s playbook.
This might all sound cartoonishly evil, but that’s because it is. The idea that law is subject to power, rather than the other way around, has always led to tragedy. America’s Founders understood that principle well, writing a Constitution precisely to prevent the concentration of too much power in the hands of one man. When we see these Schmittian arguments—praising the abuse of emergency powers or lauding the unfettered ability of a leader to decide who counts as American—we must recognize them for what they are: an assault on our most fundamental principles, and on civilization itself.
© The UnPopulist, 2025
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Good essay. Schmitt was the philosopher of the “Total State,” totalitarianism. The US constitution and the philophy underpinning it (for all its faults) is the exact opposite of the total state. The constitution creates a fractured state —coequal branches in addition to 50 states. But do we read or teach Locke, Montesquieu or the Federalist? The Supreme court has had several chances to put the country back on its philosophical foundations and has consistently failed do so.
It is interesting to see that self-proclaimed conservatives, christians and libertarians are so enamored with their concept of sovereignty (e.g. Auron MacIntyre), derived from such thinkers as Schmitt, which seems to be completely anti-thetical to their self-proclaimed value and virtue hierarchy.
In the end it can be boiled down to rule of might (might makes right) instead of rule of law, which to me seems to lead necessarily and unavoidably into states of anarchy, balkanization, civil war, oligarchy, monarchy, corruption and instability. At best you can hope for some authoritarian stability through oligarchy.
These states of the polity seem to directly threaten the bonds (family, community, church etc.) and the individual liberties and wealth the self-proclaimed conservatives, christians and libertarians claim to want to protect from the acid of 21st century liberalism. That does not seem to be a very good deal to me, however they seem to think sovereignty is worth it.