Why Liberals Must Confront Carl Schmitt and the Logic of Trumpism

He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.
-Donald J. Trump, Truth Social, Feb. 15, 2025

We do have an enemy from within. We have people that are … in many ways more dangerous than the outside enemies that we have.
—Donald J. Trump, Oct. 17, 2024

The moment calls for the simple declarative sentence. Crises often do that—they force out complexity, sides must be taken, and you’re either on one or the other. This dynamic helps explain the renewed appeal of Carl Schmitt (1888–1985), the German legal theorist whose stark declarations—like “sovereign is he who decides over the exception”—cut through complexity. The right has long drawn on Schmitt's simplicity: the friend-enemy distinction, the sovereign exception, and the critique of liberal universalism. But what once shadowed conservative arguments for executive power has now erupted into a full-scale assault on the American constitutional order. Liberals typically resist such simplification, preferring to embrace nuance, complexity, and ambiguity. Yet the moment demands stark declarations, as journalist Josh Marshall has rightly argued—the truth can be simple without being Schmittian. 

Despite outstanding reporting across many media outlets, major news outlets have hesitated to name what we're seeing: When a political leader claims the authority to override law in the name of “saving” the nation, or when a movement defines itself primarily through opposition to a designated “enemy,” we are witnessing a direct assault on democracy itself. The euphemisms that often cloud such coverage serve not only to obscure this fundamental threat, they help to neutralize the ability to respond. 

Schmitt is important in this horrific context for three reasons:

1. Trump’s declaration that, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” which he pinned to the top of his social media accounts for a time in February to remove any alibi of the “just joking” variety, recalls Schmitt’s claim that the sovereign is he who is both within the law while also the exceptional force that guarantees the law. 
2. The J.D. Vance wing of the Republican party often references Schmitt, not least to give intellectual cover to authoritarian impulses.
3. Finally, and most crucially, Schmitt's theory of sovereignty names a persistent threat to democratic governance. Like Thomas Hobbes before him, Schmitt argued that much of what liberalism focuses on is just political theater, and real political power resides behind the stage in a supreme protective force—the “leviathan.” As such, Schmitt offers less a set of ideas than a name for a consistent tendency within politics, especially when claims about the safety of the nation are bandied about.

Understanding Schmitt today is a vital task for anyone concerned about the future of freedom and the rule of law. His ideas help explain—and thus help us counter—the radical right's assault on American constitutional democracy, including in numerous court filings in the last month. What follows is both primer and warning: a guide to Schmitt's core concepts and an examination of how liberals can effectively confront them. Nevertheless, while Schmitt's claims ultimately rest on a political confidence game, recognizing this fact alone won't dispel the very real dangers ahead. 

“The Schmitt has hit the fan”

The above was the gallows humor that spread across Bluesky after Trump's declaration about saving the country through extralegal means. The connection to Schmitt isn't mere wordplay since his theory of sovereignty provides the intellectual blueprint for such claims to unlimited power. Here’s an often-quoted passage from his Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (1922):

All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development—in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver—but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts.

For Schmitt, the sovereign is exceptional to the law, just as God is to the laws of nature (after all, the Christian God performs supernatural miracles). This idea has deep historical roots. In the 16^th century, Jean Bodin, a French jurist, developed the first systematic theory of sovereignty. For Bodin, sovereign power meant absolute authority, unlimited by time or law, and answering to no other power. The sovereign's will alone made law, regardless of whether that will is rational or just. Here’s a key passage from Bodin, with explanations in brackets:

Sovereignty is the absolute and supreme power over citizens and subjects of a commonwealth, which the Latins call maiestas [from which we get the word “majesty”]; the Greeks akra exousia [having the most freedom to do as one pleases], kurion arche, and kurion politeuma [political sovereignty] … Unlimited by time [and] not subject in any way to the commands of someone else [not your pesky judges or a legislative branch] ... [It’s] able to give laws to his subjects, and to suppress or repeal disadvantageous laws. … The laws of a sovereign prince, even if founded on good and strong reasons, depend solely on his own free will.

As such, whether the sovereign is rational or not doesn’t matter—a key point in Bodin’s time since it means you can’t question the sovereign by saying he (always figured as masculine) is being irrational and thus couldn’t have meant his edicts.

As with liberalism as it develops later, Bodin’s Six Books of the Commonwealth (1576) is a response to the horrific violence of the period. Bodin wrote during the French Wars of Religion (1562-1598), a series of brutal civil wars fueled by religious differences that masked power struggles among noble families vying for control of the French throne. The monarchy was severely weakened, and France was on the brink of collapse. Where liberals after Hobbes would argue that the way out of the chaos that frightened Bodin was to, essentially, privatize religion and get it out of politics, Bodin believed that only a single, absolute sovereign power could do so. That these are opposed views of the political (plurality vs. homogeneity) should be crystal clear, but it’s worth emphasizing given what we’re seeing today. 

Schmitt takes Bodin's theory further by linking sovereign power to the logic of miracles. Just as God can suspend natural law, the sovereign claims the power to transcend (i.e., ignore) political law. This power reveals itself most clearly in moments of crisis—or rather, in moments the sovereign declares to be crises. Here lies the crucial twist: the sovereign alone decides what constitutes an emergency requiring extraordinary measures. When Trump claims the country needs “saving,” he asserts this power to declare the exception that justifies breaking any law.

Unlike Bodin writing amid religious wars, or Schmitt during Weimar's collapse, Trump is manufacturing the very crisis he claims to solve. Yet this circularity perfectly demonstrates Schmitt's “advance” over earlier theorists of absolute power. For Schmitt, sovereignty means not just deciding when there's a crisis but determining who counts as a friend and who as an enemy. These two powers—declaring emergency and naming enemies—form the essence of sovereignty. Schmitt writes:

The political enemy is the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible. These can neither be decided by a previous determined general norm nor by the judgment of a disinterested and neutral party.

The friend-enemy distinction is aimed at liberal democracy's core premises. Where liberalism builds institutions for managing disagreement through compromise and mutual constraint, Schmitt sees only naïveté. Constitutional structures, checks and balances, administrative procedures—all these, he claims, merely mask the raw power that underlies political order. Yet Schmitt's insight about hidden violence leads nowhere progressives might take similar ideas. He cares nothing about how this violence might stem from capitalism, racism, colonialism, or patriarchy. For him, sovereign power alone matters: you want the sovereign on that wall, as A Few Good Men puts it, you need the sovereign on that wall.

Schmitt writes:

Every legal order is based upon a decision ... What is argued about is the concrete application, and that means who decides in a situation of conflict what constitutes the public interest or interest of the state, public safety and order, le salut public [an ominous callback to the French Terror], and so on. The exception, which is not [indeed for Schmitt, cannot be] codified in the existing legal order, can at best be characterized as a case of extreme peril, a danger to the existence of the state, or the like. But it cannot be circumscribed factually and made to conform to a preformed law.

The sovereign determines when, say, your normal checks and balances exist—making all law fundamentally situational. Since no one can question the sovereign’s decision, there’s no limit to it. Were you to pass a law to do so, that law, too, would only be in effect at the sovereign’s whim. Should Trump follow through on his social media post—say, by denying judicial review of his acts—this would be the crisis the U.S. would find itself in. 

How do we argue with this?

The left's engagement with Schmitt has been complex and often fraught. Simply dismissing Schmitt as a Nazi apologist (which he undoubtedly was) is insufficient, since this "tendency" has always haunted the political, and in new forms. In addition, that clearly won’t do today since even the Nazis seem to be getting a political rehabilitation. Even without that, there is a seductive simplicity to Schmittianism—it’s not just reactionary viewers who come away from Aaron Sorkin’s A Few Good Men thinking the Jack Nicholson character was just the man we need on that wall.

The arbitrariness of the exception

When commentators speak of Trump breaking norms, they echo a theoretical debate between Schmitt and Hans Kelsen (1881-1973), an Austrian legal philosopher and jurist. Like Schmitt, Kelsen rejected fuzzy appeals to ethical principles. But unlike Schmitt, he insisted that law itself provides the foundation for political order. A constitutional system, he argued, rests on certain “basic norms” (Grundnorm). This isn’t as murky as it sounds—despite the hemming and hawing of some major newspapers, we can see clearly when actions are against a basic norm like “the Constitution of 1787, as legitimately amended, ought to be followed.” 

For Kelsen, even emergency powers must flow from the legal order itself. The law exists to constrain power, not express it, demolishing any notion of a sovereign standing outside the system. After all, what is a “president” but a set of powers enumerated by the Constitution? The office doesn't exist before the document that creates it any more than a chess piece has any meaning before we start a game—you now see why Schmittianism almost invariably becomes a cult of personality beyond the “office.” Even if we imagined such a pre-existing authority, it would be powerless—something like the UK’s King Charles III, who has a title without force—unless granted funds (and far more) through legislative taxation and spending. The Schmittian sovereign who claims to transcend the law is like privileged heirs who imagine they're self-made: both conveniently forget the system that enables their existence.

In addition, without such norms or “guardrails,” a fundamental question arises: Who decides the decider? Democracies have a quick answer—their constitutions, laws, and the consent of the governed. But Schmitt can’t rely on those at all. He can't invoke legal principles, since sovereign power supposedly precedes all law. So, too, with extra-legal principles, for similar reasons. Trump’s apologists face the same contradiction: they might cite, say, the 2024 election results to justify his current powers. But that would admit that the law binds presidents—if it didn’t, Biden could have stayed in office using the same logic, and what applies to Biden applies to Trump. Instead, in Schmitt, we get pure arbitrary power: a ruler invokes vague “emergencies” or “threats to national security” to suspend rights and rule by decree. Law then dissolves into raw will.

Political Agonism

The most fundamental and dangerous element of Schmitt's thought is his insistence on the friend-enemy distinction as the defining characteristic of the political. This is not simply a theoretical construct. As we’re seeing today, it’s ultimately a call for division, hostility, and, ultimately, violence since, whatever Schmitt claims, it’s not that friends and enemies preexist political demarcations; Schmittians manufacture the threat they then use to legitimize their power. The friend-enemy distinction thus functions as a self-fulfilling prophecy: it demands that politics become a battle for survival, transforming fellow citizens with different views into existential threats that must be eliminated. This vision stands in direct opposition to liberal democracy's core insight: that modern politics depends on recognizing the legitimacy of disagreement and creating structures for peaceful coexistence.

One thinker who hasn’t rejected Schmitt but has critically engaged with his ideas, Chantal Mouffe, argues that a healthy democracy acknowledges conflict as inevitable, channeling it through democratic institutions. Instead of "enemies" to be destroyed, we have "adversaries" whose right to exist and hold opposing views is recognized. The goal is to transform antagonism into agonism—a vibrant, but ultimately contained struggle within a shared democratic framework. This contrasts sharply with Schmitt's vision of a unified Volk defined by its opposition to an external (or internal) enemy. Others on the left have used Schmitt to critique what they see as the weaknesses of contemporary liberalism: its tendency towards bureaucracy, its inability to address fundamental economic inequalities, and its failure to inspire genuine political engagement. However, any such use of Schmitt requires vigilance.

The con of sovereignty

In a telling historical irony, 1922—the year Schmitt published his seminal work on sovereignty, Political Theology—was also when he discovered his wife of six years, who claimed Croatian aristocratic lineage, was actually a con artist. The parallels are striking: just as his soon-to-be ex-wife demonstrated that she could conjure aristocratic authority through mere performance, Schmitt's theory of sovereign authority relies on a similar sleight of hand.

Schmittians position themselves as having a clear-eyed Realpolitik against supposedly fuzzy-headed liberals with an unworkable politics blind to perpetual conflict. Yet this pose of hard-headed realism is a feint: Schmittians typically point to enmity their own movement creates as evidence that conflict is inevitable—we’re seeing that again today. In addition, Schmittianism in practice has never provided the security and freedom from chaos it’s claimed—far from it. The history of the 20th century, from the horrors of Nazi Germany to countless other instances of ethnic and political cleansing, provides ample evidence of the devastating consequences of this kind of thinking. By reducing politics to a zero-sum battle for survival, this exclusionary logic doesn't merely challenge democratic deliberation—it renders it impossible. Far from offering hard-won practical wisdom that the "woke" left refuses to acknowledge, Schmittianism is a dangerous fantasy. 

Hannah Arendt crystallizes this insight in Between Past and Future: "The famous sovereignty of political bodies has always been an illusion, which, moreover, can be maintained only by the instruments of violence, that is, with essentially nonpolitical means." With characteristic precision, Arendt exposes sovereignty as a carefully constructed fiction, sustained not through natural authority but sheer force or acceptance. While the sovereign's threat of violence can bring about results—a gun to your head does tend to concentrate the mind—such coercion reveals sovereignty's inherent weakness, not its strength.

In her massive works on totalitarianism, Arendt systematically dismantles the myth of a perfectly homogenous Volk, united by a single will and defined by its opposition to an external enemy. Genuine political power, Arendt argued, does not arise from the imposition of uniformity, but from the collective action of diverse individuals within a shared public space. It is through deliberation, persuasion, and the messy process of consensus-building that a political community is formed, not through the violent eradication of difference. The Schmittian sovereign, in seeking to create this artificial homogeneity, inevitably resorts to violence, both physical and symbolic. Those who dissent or deviate from the "friend" category (or are just declared to be doing so) must be silenced, expelled, or eliminated. Chaos and violence are not accidental to Schmitt's system: his Nazism of the 1930s followed from his 1920s writings as surely as night follows day. The sovereign relies on the threat of violence, a fundamentally anti-political tool, to enforce obedience. This reliance reveals the fragility of the sovereign's claim: if power must be enforced, it is not truly sovereign—it’s not as exceptional to the political order as it would have you believe. 

Jacques Derrida, in lectures he gave during the buildup to the second Iraq War (collected in The Beast and the Sovereign, V. 1), another time when Schmitt was getting a massive hearing, gets at this well:

Where that power makes the law, where it gives itself right, where it appropriates legitimate violence and legitimates its own arbitrary violence—this unchaining and enchaining of power passes via the fable, i.e., speech that is both fictional and performative ... power is itself an effect of fable, fiction, and fictive speech.

Derrida highlights how sovereignty isn't a thing to be possessed, but a performance to be enacted. The sovereign's authority isn't derived from some higher law or inherent right, but from the very act of claiming that authority—from the "fictive speech" that constitutes the sovereign as sovereign. This performative dimension has two crucial elements: first, the sovereign must declare their sovereignty, but second—and crucially—this claim must be accepted, or at least not effectively challenged. The "arbitrary violence" at sovereignty's core is mystified through narrative, through the construction of what Derrida terms a "fable" of sovereign authority. This is why kings and tyrants customarily surround themselves with elaborate displays and constant proclamations of their glory: the performance must be continuous to maintain its effect. If Trump can be said to understand anything, it’s this.

We don’t need to take Schmittianism and all the ad hoc claims in recent weeks by Trumpists of constitutional powers seriously—the force behind them is serious but everything else is part of the con. Any reader of Alice and Wonderland knows this:

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” Sounding like many plaintiff attorneys facing off against administration legal briefs in court this past month, Alice responds, “The question is whether you can make words mean different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”

This illuminates not only how sovereignty performs itself, but also why treating Schmittianism as merely another position to debate fundamentally misreads the current moment. The Trumpian apologists will say anything and, like Humpty Dumpty, declare things unbound by external constraint. They’ll laugh at Alice’s sensible question—can you simply make words mean whatever you want? For both Humpty Dumpty and Schmitt's sovereign, the only relevant question is who wields the power to enforce their definitions. This reveals the essence of the "sovereign con": a claim to absolute, self-justifying authority grounded in nothing more than the will to power and the capacity to enforce it through violence or its threat. Criminal history, of course, is replete with con artists who reach for the gun should someone ask too many questions. 

That this is true doesn’t make any of this better: after all, when the con artist is in charge, there are no cops to call. Meanwhile, the above might seem like airy-headed nonsense—oh, don’t you know it’s just a performance? But this insight is deeply practical: every such regime, no matter how "exceptional" and powerful, must present itself as not requiring your acquiescence even as it fundamentally depends upon it. The con works not through persuasion but by making its authority appear inevitable—the natural order of things against which resistance is futile. Thus, for a theory built on the exceptional moment, Schmittianism requires us to see its exercise of power as normal—hence the relentless gaslighting of the last two months and the danger of onlookers in the media and in Congress who would treat it as such. 

In the—God help us—weeks, months, and years ahead, no one is coming to save us. But that's the point: democracy's true strength has never come from singular saviors or sovereign protectors. All cons last only so long, just as the Schmittian regimes of history exhaust themselves maintaining elaborate fictions of absolute power. No doubt, too, they end up taking so many down with them, and we must do all we can to prevent that today. Yet, every emergency the sovereigns manufacture, every enemy they conjure, reveals not their strength but their weakness—their fear of precisely what makes democracy powerful: the capacity for collective action, the ability to work through disagreement rather than suppress it, the power to build rather than destroy. Democratic societies build lasting institutions, forge genuine coalitions, and solve real problems.

This is not naive hope—it is a practical lesson of history. The challenge, then, is to refuse sovereignty’s self-serving declarations, to remain stubborn in our refusal that might makes right, and to insist today and every day on a politics grounded in democratic justice, not the illusion of absolute command.

Featured image is Twenty-one ex-leaders of the German Third Reich on trial at Military Tribunal Case 11 at Nuremberg