For the most part, Richard Nixon excepted, presidents have understood their role to include following the law. That didn’t mean they couldn’t test the law or try to push the edges as far as they would bend, but ultimately concede that they were constrained by the law. But that, of course, doesn’t help a president to know what the law is, and where the outer perimeter lies. So the president would turn to the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department for a legal opinion when there was a question as to whether something he wanted to do (or did and got caught) was legal.

OLC is the place where water-boarding torture was rationalized as lawful. OLC said it was okay to use a drone to kill an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlacki. The thing was that OLC put its opinions into memos that provided written explanation for why something was lawful. It wasn’t so much that OLC could not be wrong, as OLC correctness could be determined and challenged.

When it comes to blowing up boats in the ocean, there is nothing. Asked by a Senate Oversight Committee to explain the legal basis for doing so, AG Pam Bondi refused with some prepared sarcastic rejoinder. Many have used Obama’s killing of al-Awlaki to whataboutthis, falling far short for a few fairly obvious reasons.

1. There was an OLC memo holding the killing lawful.
2. The killing was of a known individual, not unknown people in unknown boats.
3. The evidence that al-Awaki was a terrorist was well known and documented.
4. Despite all of the foregoing, it was still wrong.

If it was wrong when Obama did it, it’s no less wrong when Trump does it. This somehow eludes a lot of folks.

But as Charlie Savage explains in the New York Times, this administration has made two changes to the system.

The first is that Mr. Trump has told executive branch lawyers that they may not question any legal judgment that he — or Attorney General Pam Bondi, subject to his “supervision and control” — already decided. “The president and the attorney general’s opinions on questions of law are controlling on all employees in the conduct of their official duties,” Mr. Trump declared in a February executive order.

The second is that Mr. Trump has been declaring that as president, he has determined that the factual and legal scenarios exist that are necessary for him to exercise various extraordinary powers.

In other words, the president, who is notably neither a lawyer nor a person who has demonstrated either knowledge or regard for the law, has decided that he is the final word on what the controlling law is. The president is also the sole individual who gets to decide whether the facts as he declares them to be sufficient to invoke the law as he declares them to be.

The two tactics combined create a gigantic loophole. Mr. Trump is able to dictate his own factual and legal realities, and executive branch lawyers who want to keep their jobs must treat them as settled. The result is that Mr. Trump can order agencies to take actions to which independent-minded lawyers might have raised legal objections.

Are the boats being blown up “narco-terrorists”? They are if the president says they are, even though the concept of “narco-terrorists” is one of his own rhetorical invention as there is no law that establishes the existence of an entity known as “narco-terrorists.” There is law that holds that “foreign terrorist organizations” exist, but extending the definition of terrorists, organizations that seek to induce political change by the use of terror, to drug smuggling which neither seeks political change nor uses direct violence against people to do so, stretches the definition well beyond its breaking point. And the remedy for being designated a foreign terrorist organization is not murder at will, anytime or anywhere.

The emanations and penumbras from Trump’s reinvention of law as his, and his alone, to decide, are seen throughout his deportation and deployment of military in American cities. After all, if we’ve been “invaded,” then he has the authority to repel the invasion. If, in his discretion alone, cities and states are incapable of fending off the invaders and their “agitator” supporters, then it’s his decision to send in the National Guard or regular military to pursue his agenda.

Similarly, if he alone has the discretion to decide that drug smugglers, who can’t be executed under American law, should be blown up on the high seas, he has the discretion to take his fight to the land to kill them as well. Kill them, as in “dead,” just in case the work “kill” was unclear.

And there are plans to bring this to a city near you. Does that mean that people believed to be drug dealers will be executed on the streets of American cities as “narco-terrorists”? Does that mean troops or ICE will be deployed at American polling places to prevent invaders or “narco-terrorists” from voting? Is this legal? According to the administration, it is if the president says it is. Instead of the president following the law, the law now follows the president.