(Washington) Donald Trump, who has been trying to push the limits of the presidential power since his return to the White House, said he did not know if he should respect the Constitution, the Supreme Legal Standard of the United States.
Posted at 10 a.m. Updated at 11:54 a.m.
Pierre HARDY Agency France-Presse
“I do not know,” replied the American president, interviewed on Sunday by NBC to find out if he thought he should respect the Constitution, which guarantees fair legal proceedings for all people on American territory.
“I have brilliant lawyers working for me, and they will obviously follow what the Supreme Court said,” he added.
Since the start of his second mandate, in January, Donald Trump has exercised the executive power like no other president in modern history, signing more than 140 decrees to drastically reduce illegal immigration, fight against hate diversity or inclusion programs by conservatives and dismantle federal bureaucracy.
Photo taken from the X account of MEET THE PRESS
Donald Trump in an interview with journalist Kristen Welker on the show Meet the Press of the NBC network.
But even the authority of the president has his limits and several of his decisions were blocked by judges, which regularly arouses the fury of the Republican.
Federal courts and courses of appeal and the Supreme Court in particular, provisionally blocked the use of a law of 1798 on “foreign enemies”, hitherto used exclusively in wartime, and exhumed by the Trump administration to be able to stop immigrants accused of belonging to gangs and expeling them manu militari to Salvador without any other form of trial.
This procedure was also denounced by associations for the defense of rights and international organizations.
-Asked to find out if the foreigners present on American soil should benefit from regular legal proceedings, as provided for in the Constitution, the republican billionaire said: “I am not a lawyer. I don’t know. »»
No third term
The very personal conception of power shown by the Republican worries part of the Americans, who fear an authoritarian drift.
“Are you leading the country on the path of authoritarianism?” “Asked the NBC journalist on Sunday.
“Why don’t you ask the question differently?” Many people want to come to our country. Many people love Trump. I won the elections, ”said the interested party.
He also said that the Americans had “absolutely” the right to criticize him without fear of reprisals, before qualifying some of his detractors as “malicious people”.
He took the opportunity to attack again at the best of his enemies, the former Democrat-President Joe Biden, responsible according to him of the “bad sides” of the American economy, of which Donald Trump attributes the “good sides”.
The president also seemed to reject in his interview the hypothesis, that the Constitution prohibits a third term: “This is not what I seek to do,” he said.
However, he had multiplied since his return to the White House the allusions to this possibility, claiming that there was “methods” to do so, and going so far as to offer clothing bearing the inscription “Trump 2028”-the year of the next American presidential election-on his online store.
“I want to spend four very good years and give way to someone else, ideally a great republican,” he said.
The president cited his vice-president JD Vance and his secretary of state Marco Rubio as potential successors.
But it is still “far too early to say,” he also estimated.
