| President Donald Trump recently said he doesn’t know if he needs to uphold the Constitution. He also left open the possibility of using military force to take Greenland, making tariffs permanent and deporting millions of immigrants without due process. Can he do all that? Let’s look at some of the broadest claims of presidential power that Trump made in his interview that aired Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” Can Trump deport immigrants without due process? The conversation about whether Trump thinks he needs to uphold the Constitution came in the context of whether Trump can mass deport immigrants without giving them a chance to contest their deportation first. NBC’s Kristen Welker asked him: “Your secretary of state says everyone who’s here, citizens and noncitizens, deserve due process. Do you agree, Mr. President?” He replied: “I don’t know. I’m not, I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know.” He then added that court hearings would slow his attempts to deport millions: “[I]f you’re talking about that, then we’d have to have a million or 2 million or 3 million trials. We have thousands of people that are some murderers and some drug dealers and some of the worst people on Earth. … And I was elected to get them the hell out of here and the courts are holding me from doing it.” But giving migrants a chance to contest their deportations before they’re deported is constitutionally protected, and courts have started to push back on the Trump administration’s attempts to skip it. The Constitution says that all people in the United States, including noncitizens, have the right to be heard before the government takes adverse action against them. The Fifth Amendment says that “No person … shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Denise Gilman, who leads the immigration clinic at the University of Texas School of Law, told me recently that the framers intended for the country to uphold basic fundamental values of freedom within its borders, rather than for specific people, because it protects everyone in the country from a tyrannical government. “If due process were to go away for noncitizens, it could easily go away for citizens as well,” she said, “Because the Constitution does not distinguish who is protected, so when we start limiting due process, then we put U.S. citizens at risk, too.” Could he take Greenland by force? “I don’t say I’m going to do it, but I don’t rule out anything. No, not there,” Trump said when asked about this. “We need Greenland very badly. Greenland is a very small amount of people, which we’ll take care of, and we’ll cherish them, and all of that. But we need that for international security.” Greenland is an autonomous territory of Denmark and a strategic site for navigating shipping routes. Trump has said one way or another he’s going to “get” Greenland, but its leaders have said the Arctic island is not for sale and took offense to Vice President JD Vance’s visit earlier this year. The president has wide latitude for military intervention, but employing that carries political risk, say foreign policy experts I spoke with. He’d need to build a lot of public support for it — and one expert questioned what would happen if such an invasion drags out, much like Russia’s stalled invasion of Ukraine. “He was the guy who kept us out of war in his first term and was proud of it,” William Alan Reinsch, a trade expert who now advises the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told me recently. “Does he want to start one?” Could he make tariffs permanent? Trump said he’s thinking of doing this and indicated in his interview that at the very least, he wants businesses to believe tariffs are here to stay so they will shift their production back home: “The tariffs are going to make us rich,” he said. “We’re going to be a very rich country.” Quick fact check: Economists tell me that it could take months or years for companies to switch from a 21st-century global supply chain to a fully domestic one. Vehicle parts can cross borders as many as two-dozen times before they’re considered a vehicle, said Diane Swonk, chief economist with the accounting firm KPMG. “That gets to how complex and integrated the global economy is,” said Swonk. Trump also talks often about how manufacturing plants are starting to move back to the U.S., but The Washington Post found that hundreds of billions of such investments were already planned before Trump came into office. As for whether Trump can just make tariffs permanent: The Constitution gives Congress authority to impose tariffs. But they’ve forfeited that over the years to presidents from both parties. Still, Trump’s tariffs are so broad that even some Republicans are open to the idea of voting to take back their authority One such vote narrowly failed in the Senate last week, but House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) didn’t rule out taking legislative action to rein in Trump’s tariffs, a possibility that gets more likely if the economy continues to struggle under them: “I think the executive has a broad array of authority that’s been recognized over the years,” Johnson told Axios. “If it gets close to where the imbalance is there, then we would step in.” Can he run for a third term? The 22nd Amendment says no president can serve for more than two terms, even if they weren’t consecutive terms. Here, Trump seemed to acknowledge his presidency is constrained by the Constitution. “This is not something I’m looking to do,” he told NBC News, adding: “It’s something that, to the best of my knowledge, you’re not allowed to do.” To run again, he’d need to amend the Constitution, which is one of the hardest things to do in government. It would require a two-thirds vote in both chambers of Congress, followed by ratification of three-fourths of the states. Republicans don’t have that kind of majority in Washington or in state legislatures. | 
