Is Trump a Schmittian Sovereign?
This is my latest for Wisdom of Crowds! :) I hope you enjoy it :)
He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.
— Donald J. Trump, Truth Social, Feb. 15, 2025
The words above are ominous. They speak of a man who does not believe in law but in action. This is arguably something unique in American history, although as the theorist Giorgio Agamben points out, American Presidents from Abraham Lincoln to George W. Bush have not been shy of abrogating the constitution to save the Union. Yet, Trump feels different not only from the obvious case of Lincoln but also from the Texan who set up Guantanamo. It appears as if the US has entered a new era.
The above has led some, such as David French, to explain away Trump as a modern-day representative of the fascist past. To do so, thesewriterstend to point to the juristCarl Schmitt. There are good reasons why, on the surface, this makes sense. Trump’s rhetoric of migrants moved from xenophobic to overtly threatening in the last election cycle, and his actions on January 6 should make us doubt his respect for the law. These things can be interpreted via Schmitt’s friend-enemy dichotomy and the notion of sovereign decisionism acting as direct attacks on the liberal values which underpin modern ethics and law.
Yet, Schmitt’s notions of politics and constitutionalism have been widely misinterpreted. The friend-enemy dichotomy is not about disagreement, no matter how strong. Rather, the dichotomy refers to the fight to the death to secure the body politic. When George Bush said that “You are either with us, or you are with the terrorists,” he was evoking the Schmittian notion of the dichotomy. For Bush, there was no possibility of a third position in the War on Terror. There was no possibility of compromise, because compromise would put lives at risk. Instead, when Trump talks about his enemies, he is talking in terms of personal vendetta, not the security of the body politic.
Neither is the sovereign decision merely about the sovereign doing as they please. Often people misinterpret Schmitt’s famous line from his book, Political Theology — “The sovereign is he who decides on the exception” — to mean just that. But this interpretation of Schmitt does not explain by what right the sovereign proclaims himself the sovereign in the first place. Yes, the sovereign can declare an emergency, and in that moment, he can act outside the law to defend the “people.” But this interpretation misses what constitutes a “people” in Schmitt’s work, thereby not only misinterpreting Schmitt’s ideas but also how to analyze modern formations of politics. Moreover, this leads to the misapplication of Schmitt’s idea of the sovereign, and of the “people,” to Trump and the MAGA base, respectively.
In Constitutional Theory, Schmitt locates the constitution as distinct from other forms of law. It is the constitution which forms the boundary of the polity. As Jeffrey Seitzer and Christopher Thornhill have argued, “[Schmitt] sees the constitution as united with the state, representing a uniform political will that cannot be reduced to formal or autonomous legal principles.” The constitution, therefore, for Schmitt, is not merely any other law but the practical representation of the people, which the defined people give to its purpose. Such a people must be united as a homogenous block, which he identifies in Constitutional Theory as either via race, tradition, a common destiny or a shared purpose within the confines of the friend-enemy distinction. There is, after all, a reason why Schmitt frequently returns to Revolutionary France and Communist Russia in his writings. It is not simply to show historical and analytical skill, but to emphasize the complex relationship between unity and political formation outside of legal mechanisms.
Therefore, if the sovereign is to be a legitimate representative in a Schmittian world, they must embody the people. Despite what the earlier quote in Political Theology states, the sovereign can only act as they do once they have garnered legitimacy. But even that comes under contestation when you peek past the short pamphlet. In his earlier work, Dictatorship, Schmitt recognized the act of defending a political state, but was trepidatious about handing ultimate power to any singular figure beyond a specific time frame and threat level. Schmitt’s sovereign decisionism is not the blank cheque Richard the Second demanded of the English Parliament, as is regularly imagined, but more constrained, dependent upon prior legitimacy being found from the body of the people.
The people, the nation, remains the origin of all political action, the source of all power, which expresses itself in continually new forms, producing from itself these ever renewing forms and organizations.
— Carl Schmitt, Constitutional Theory
The question, therefore, must be whether America is reconstituting itself as a new form of body politic and, if so, is that new form Trumpism? And does Trumpism and/or Trump believe it is doing the will of the people as so defined? Given the close margins of the last three electoral races, it would be difficult to argue that America as a people wishes to reconstitute itself via a Trumpian Presidency. Because America is viscerally divided to the point of physical threat it is not in any real sense homogenous. America is no longer “a people” as Schmitt would define it, and we may question more deeply if it ever could be seen as such given the arguments from the Founding Fathers over the morality and legality of slavery. The strength of negative polarization, fears of secession, and long held racialized politics make America difficult to imagine today as the collective, unified force required by Schmittian standards.
Trumpism is no different. It is a movement which is simultaneously less substantial than a Schmittian proposition and altogether more horrifying. Elected on a narrow mandate, Trumpism has not brought the country together but left citizens feeling even further apart from one another. It is destructive in its nature, but unlike Schmitt’s notion of sovereignty, there is nothing to replace it. Disrespect for legal norms can be located in Schmitt, but abrogating sovereign responsibility is nowhere to be found. Trump’s use of law to detain, deport, and persecute non-enemies of the American people represents not the apotheosis of sovereignty but its ultimate demise.
MAGA does not act to defend “the people,” but rather only a minority who give the project its unbounded support. MAGA is not only a movement devoid of respect for law but a movement whose moral edifice is crumbling, if it was ever there to begin with. Acting in defense and subservience to a singular person is no representative sovereign, but the act of a cult defending a petty tyrant. For that reason, we should not treat it as a Schmittian alternative to liberal democracy but a dangerous attack on the people by an angry, vengeful minority. In my book, Trump is no Schmittian sovereign.
This suggests Trumpism is not so much a political philosophy but a way of doing politics in a deeply personalist form, founded on the charisma of the leader; it likely won't survive him because it is not a set of ideas or principles that can be developed beyond the leader, for the ideas of Trumpism are whatever Trump says they are at that moment.