Captain Jack Sparrow — pauper of the surf, jester of Tortuga — once said: “The only rules that really matter are these: what a man can do and what a man can’t do.” That’s a Hobbesian discourse on the state of nature, Disney-fied for popular consumption. Any restraint beyond this brutish human reality requires social contract theory. Disney-pirates, it turns out, are actually the most legalistic fools on the planet. It’s three goddamn movies full of “codes” and laws and technicalities. Jack’s maxim is betrayed again and again — Jack’s own father turns out to be the keeper of the actual rulebook, and he’s enough of a textualist to make Justice Antonin Scalia rise up and applaud.

The Pirates of the Caribbean are a loose Confederation of autonomous states bound together by common law. They can be easily distinguished from Donald Trump and his cabal of ruling Republicans, who have dismantled American Republican norms. If we have not fully devolved into a State of Nature, we are certainly living under a Hobbesian Leviathan, where the only constraint on the state are the limits of its raw physical power. Trump is constrained by no law, he’s only constrained by the willingness of his ruling junta to go along with him.

The reality of our situation is counterintuitive, given that law would appear to be THE ONLY THING constraining Trump. Consider: The courts have been the only branch of government willing to check Trump’s power (see Muslim ban), legal proceedings seem to be the only thing that prevents Trump for lying to a willfully ignorant American people (see Stormy Daniels), and the only real threat to Trump’s survival in office in an ongoing investigation led by law enforcement (see Robert Mueller). Elected officials seem powerless to stop Trump and our weak, decadent populace cannot be aroused to disrupt and disobey the edicts of a tyrant. Laws, the story goes, are the only things keeping Trump in relative check.

But these are illusory “constraints.” Yes, the wording of the euphemistic “travel ban” has not yet been worked out to Supreme Court’s approval, but anti-Muslim violence and hate speech is up 45 PERCENT since Trump’s election. While we’re out here futzing with appellate motion practice, Trump is hanging a giant “Mission Accomplished” sign on his campaign to bring fear and intimidation to vulnerable communities.

Stormy Daniels continues to fight for her right to tell the world about an affair that we’re all pretty sure happened at this point. This NDA scrap is hardly a victory for the rule of law. Trump’s NDA reads less like an enforceable contract and more like a brutish intimidation tactic. Meanwhile, the country remains focused on this alleged consensual affair while 19 women have accused Trump of unwanted sexual advances, and there’s nobody offering those women any form of justice.

Robert Mueller? Please. Trump isn’t out here by himself. Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell are Trump’s first line of defense against whatever the Mueller probe reveals, and those two have shown no signs that they care one wit about the rule of law. Donald Trump admitted he obstructed justice on television, and Paul Ryan said nothing. And people seem to forget that Mitch McConnell stole a Supreme Court seat, there is zero chance that he values law over his own power.

Whether he knows it or not (and I’m gonna bet “not”), Trump is using the law exactly like Machiavelli would tell him to. From The Prince (emphasis mine):

Still the experience of our times shows those princes to have done great things who have had little regard for good faith, and have been able by astuteness to confuse men’s brains, and who have ultimately overcome those who have made loyalty their foundation. You must know, then, that there are two methods of fighting, the one by law, the other by force: the first method is that of men, the second of beasts; but as the first method is often insufficient, one must have recourse to the second. It is therefore necessary to know well how to use both the beast and the man… Therefore, a prudent ruler ought not to keep faith when by so doing it would be against his interest, and when the reasons which made him bind himself no longer exist. If men were all good, this precept would not be a good one; but as they are bad, and would not observe their faith with you, so you are not bound to keep faith with them…. But it is necessary to be able to disguise this character well, and to be a great feigner and dissembler; and men are so simple, and so subject to present necessities, that he who seeks to deceive will always find someone who will allow himself to be deceived.

People act like despots have no regard for “law” and simply do what they want in an arbitrary and capricious fashion. But that’s only true near the paranoid end of their reigns. It’s the arbitrariness that gets them ousted; once ruling elites realize that they could be “next,” self-preservation kicks in. The wild, Hitler-Downfall-Meme view of despotism is the endgame, not the starting position.

The other years of their reign usually involve paying lip service to establish legal principles, at least the ones that help them accomplish their goals. Hitler was elected, Caligula ended the treason trials; despots don’t announce that the rule of law is now subject to their whims. Instead, they do things like this:

Alarming parallels of history escalate. pic.twitter.com/5P708XVa5h — Anne Frank Center (@AnneFrankCenter) August 8, 2017

Trump is above the law, but he is not yet beyond constraint. He is constrained by what his ruling party will let him get away with. Mueller has a job because Sessions won’t fire Mueller and ruling Republicans won’t let Trump fire Sessions. Trump can’t do what the NRA won’t let him do. Unlike Vladimir Putin, it does not appear that Trump has acquired the power to simply assassinate his enemies, perhaps because he cannot yet find enough people in the “deep state” to carry out his orders.

Trump is a despot, but he’s a weak and ineffectual one. His incompetence is really the only thing that protects us against him. There are certain thing that the man can’t do, because he doesn’t know how.

But the constraints on his power are simply not found in our code of laws. Trump has moved beyond them. We are not a nation of laws, we are a nation of raw power.

Trump, Ryan, McConnell, John Kelly, and the rest of the ruling party already knows this. Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin and Rodrigo Duterte know this. James Comey and Andrew McCabe know this. The question now is whether the opposition to Trump will figure it out.

Robert Mueller is not coming to save us, fools. He fights fair.

Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.