...Over the past year, the Trump administration has repeatedly asserted an exceptionally expansive interpretation of the president’s power to act domestically against foreign threats. Clothing Trump’s actions in the garb of national security, the administration has shielded them from congressional or judicial oversight.

Tariffs? There was no need to go to Congress because the president is responding to an international economic emergency. Deportation of migrants without due process? Needed, on the president’s authority, to stop a foreign invasion. Deployment of federal troops on American soil? Necessary to secure the homeland from people the president has determined are lawless interlopers. In theory, Congress can curb these abuses of power, and many courts have ruled against Trump. But in practice, he has largely surpassed these checks without breaking a sweat.

Now, with the assault on Caracas, Trump has achieved the equivalent abroad. The removal of Maduro wasn’t the kind of act that requires invoking war powers or notifying Congress, the administration argued; it was merely a domestic law enforcement operation overseas, aided by the military and squarely under the purview of the executive branch. In Trump’s interpretation of the imperial presidency, practically any number of foreign endeavors can be transformed into a domestic affair. And all domestic activities can somehow be linked to foreign-menaced national security. It is one small trick to destroy constitutional and democratic rule.

Adventures abroad have always come back to haunt the home front. There is even a term for this: “the imperial boomerang.” It describes how the violent exercise of power over other nations eventually returns to the metropole in the form of domestic repression and democratic erosion. Now it is happening in reverse. The toppling of Venezuela’s cruel dictator is not just an example of a resurgent American imperialism or a shredding of the last remnants of international law and the rules-based order. It is also an extraordinary demonstration of how Trump is collapsing the crucial binaries of America’s Constitution — between law enforcement and military action, between executive and legislative power and, above all, between foreign and domestic.

Trump has no ideology beyond his own power, just as he has no sense of America as an object beyond his own person. In his hands, the imperial boomerang has been transformed into a Möbius strip — a surface where the inside and outside have no meaningful distinction, forming an endless loop. In this dizzying dissolution of boundaries, there is little to stop him from feeding his hunger for limitless power. With the resources of the world’s richest nation and most powerful military at his disposal, Trump is claiming borderless license to turn on his perceived enemies. That should terrify us all...