Jerome Powell could hardly be more different from Nicolas Maduro. Despite having just been summoned by the US Department of Justice over an obscure case involving renovation work at the headquarters of the US Federal Reserve, the cautious head of the monetary institution faces no risk of ending up in prison like Venezuela’s ousted dictator, who was abducted in Caracas on the night of January 2 by American special forces on Donald Trump’s orders.
Because both have become an obstacle to two of the president’s obsessions – interest rates in Powell’s case and Venezuelan oil in Maduro’s – they illustrate the systematized abuse of power that now prevails in Washington.
The primacy of force over the law imposes itself everywhere. Since returning to the White House, the interventionist president has stepped up military strikes around the world. The same leader has also deployed the National Guard to patrol major US cities governed by Democrats – starting with the federal capital – even in the absence of significant unrest.
In October 2025, the president did not rule out requisitioning “the Army, Navy, Air Force, [and the] Marines” on US soil. “I can send anybody I wanted,” he has often repeated, “and I’d be allowed to do whatever I want.”
The unwritten rule since Trump entered politics in 2015 – take his excesses seriously, but not always literally – no longer holds up under the realities of his use of power.
Defending international law
The law, however, remains – at least somewhat. Within US borders, in December, the Supreme Court forced Donald Trump to withdraw the National Guard from Chicago, Los Angeles and Portland. The attempt to use the justice system to bring down Powell was unlikely to be any more successful than those targeting former FBI director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, two other presidential obsessions. Those maneuvers fell apart in November.
On the eve of a Supreme Court decision on the legality of his tariffs, Trump’s bombastic declaration on Monday, January 12, that the US would be “screwed” if the ruling went against him, hardly exuded serenity. These setbacks confirm the principle articulated by Montesquieu: “To prevent abuse of power, it is necessary that, by the arrangement of things, power checks power.”
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