As he lionizes a strongman, Trump exercises authority over the law, prestigious colleges, and the media.

Only three months into his new term, President Donald Trump is escalating a battle against institutions that challenge his strongman instincts, such as the courts, the legal profession, elite education, and the media. As he lionizes a strongman, Trump flexes power over the law, top colleges, and the media.

The administration is projecting presidential authority in a broader and more overt way than any modern White House. Its expansive interpretation of statutes and questionable interpretations of judges’ rulings is causing alarm about its impact on the rule of law, freedom of expression and the Constitution.

“There’s something broken,” Trump said in the Oval Office on Monday. “The liberal establishment – but they’re not running things anymore in this country.”
He sat beside President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador, who brands himself as the world’s “coolest dictator” and whose huge popularity is based on a brand of elected authoritarianism Trump admires. The warmth lavished on a leader who’d have been treated as a pariah by a conventional US administration was an ominous window into the 47th president’s future intentions.
In an effort to combat crime, Bukele has imprisoned tens of thousands of people without due process and suspended portions of the Salvadoran constitution. He suggested Trump might try something similar. “Mr. President, you have 350 million people to liberate, you know. But to liberate 350 million people, you have to imprison some. You know, that’s the way it works, right?”
Trump’s own hardline aspirations were revealed in the meeting through the prism of his increasingly ruthless deportation policy, which is raising profound questions about apparent abuses of due process and human rights.
Both presidents relished the chance to publicly refuse to release an undocumented migrant who was seized in Maryland and deported to a notorious mega-prison in his native El Salvador without a court hearing and despite a judge’s order that he should not be sent back to the country.
The White House is refusing to act on another judge’s order that Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia should be brought back to the US and is walking a fine line on a Supreme Court decision saying it must facilitate his return. It says Abrego Garcia is a gang member and terrorist despite producing no public evidence.

It also argues that US courts have no jurisdiction because Abrego Garcia’s fate is bound up in Trump’s power to set foreign policy.
The Supreme Court ruled 9-0 last week that the administration must “facilitate” the return of Abrego Garcia after it admitted expelling him over an administrative error. But the White House is using its rather imprecise language – perhaps motivated by a push for unity or a desire to avoid a direct constitutional showdown – to claim the justices endorsed its position, rather than rebuking it.

“I think the Supreme Court is responsible to some extent because they diced words,” retired judge Shira Scheindlin told CNN’s John Berman on Monday. But Scheindlin warned the administration was entering dangerous ground. “What we have here is a defiance of the Supreme Court order. The Supreme Court said facilitate his return and expedite it.”
Scheindlin added: “It’s defiance which puts us on the edge of a constitutional crisis between the judicial branch and the executive branch.”
Laurence Tribe, a renowned constitutional scholar, told CNN Monday that the administration’s defiance made it likely the case would end up back before the Supreme Court – which would then face a fateful choice. “It is not just immigrants who are subject to this kind of game. It is a deadly game that could be played with any citizen,” Tribe, professor emeritus at Harvard Law told Kaitlan Collins, who had earlier questioned Trump and Bukele in the Oval Office. “The president has already begun to play it. That is not the country that any of us I think grew up in.”
Indeed, Trump is mulling an even more flagrant challenge to the law. He suggested that his scheme to deport those who he says are gang members and terrorists to harsh El Salvadorian prisons could be widened.
“I’d like to go a step further, I mean … I don’t know what the laws are. Trump said, looking at Attorney General Pam Bondi on a sofa in the White House, “We always have to obey the laws.” “However, we also have homegrown criminals who are absolute monsters and push people into subways, hitting elderly ladies on the back of the head with a baseball bat when they are not looking. To get them out of the country, I’d like to include them in the group. The idea that the administration would ignore constitutional protections available to all Americans, even those who are incarcerated, and deport them to draconian prison camps overseas might strain credulity. However, Trump’s remarks came amid an apparent determination to reject constitutional restraints on his behavior and an atmosphere of growing authoritarianism within his White House.

In this photo given by El Salvador’s presidential press office, prison guards take deportees from the United States, claimed to be Venezuelan gang members, to the Terrorism Confinement Center in Tecoluca, El Salvador, on March 16, 2025.