In 1655, a teenaged Louis XIV, drunk on his power as king of France, is said to have admonished a parliamentarian who dared to check his authority, “l’etat, c’est moi”: I am the state. The remark is almost certainly apocryphal, but lives on in the Western imagination as a reminder of how authoritarianism erases the boundaries between the head of state and the state itself. It is precisely that sort of imperial power that America’s founders sought to prevent when they created the presidency, an office of limited powers and term limits, beholden to voters and to the legislature. Of course, President Donald Trump has almost certainly never read the Constitution, and seems eager to test it for weaknesses. In January, as we now know, Trump’s lawyers sent the special counsel, Robert Mueller, a confidential, 20-page letter arguing that the president is not required to to speak to Mueller, asserting his limitless power to shut down the Russia investigation or to pardon anyone involved. “It remains our position that the President’s actions here, by virtue of his position as the chief law enforcement officer, could neither constitutionally nor legally constitute obstruction because that would amount to him obstructing himself, and that he could, if he wished, terminate the inquiry, or even exercise his power to pardon if he so desired,” the letter reads.

The conclusion of Trump’s argument, distilled in an earlier letter to the special counsel, is even more radical: “Put simply, the Constitution leaves no question that the President has exclusive authority over the ultimate conduct and disposition of all criminal investigations and over those executive branch officials responsible for conducting those investigations.” Trump is not only above the law, his lawyers claim—he is the law.

Legal experts almost uniformly dismiss Trump’s reading of his Constitutional powers. “What he seems to be saying is that he is justice and that is not the way the law works,” Louis Michael Seidman, a constitutional law professor at Georgetown University, told me. “I think it is true that the president can’t be prosecuted for doing something that he has the constitutional power to do,”—like fire James Comey, for instance—“but his constitutional powers are limited by his obligation to take care that the law is faithfully executed.” Firing Comey over “this Russia thing,” then, as Trump has said was his reasoning, could be evidence of corrupt intent. “And obstruction of justice is, by definition, a failure to faithfully execute the law.”

Trump, Seidman added, “is not justice. When he is obstructing justice he is not obstructing himself.” Attorney William Jeffress, who worked the Plame Affair, echoed the sentiment. “The idea that because he is the chief law-enforcement authority, a president cannot by definition obstruct justice, is nonsense,” he told me. “The president has the ultimate authority to enforce the law, but it is silly to contend that his actions are by definition lawful. A president has to obey the law like anyone else. When a president acts corruptly, he isn’t enforcing the law but violating it.” Sol Wisenberg, who served as a deputy prosecutor in the Starr investigation, offered a more blunt assessment. “The statement is beyond ludicrous,” he said of Trump’s claim that he cannot obstruct himself. “It is the kind of proposition a law student might come up with after dropping acid and pulling an all-nighter.”

Veterans of the D.C. bar do agree with some elements of Trump’s legal argument. Rudy Giuliani, the president’s lead attorney in the Russia matter, was widely mocked when he told the Huffington Post on Sunday that the president could not be indicted—even if he “shot James Comey”—without being impeached first. “Look, reasons matter,” said Harry Litman, a former United States attorney and deputy assistant attorney general. “It is the general principle that Giuliani never confronts. If the president does something for a corrupt reason, including a pardon, it can be a crime. . . . The idea that he somehow can’t commit a crime being a president, that really is a royalist idea.” But there is a difference between saying the president cannot commit a crime and saying the president cannot be indicted—a position on which Giuliani is on firmer legal ground. As Wisenberg told me, “It is a totally respected opinion that a president cannot be indicted while in office.” Although Giuliani’s example was “reprehensible,” he said, “being impeached and removed the next day, and then being subject to indictment is, as a matter of constitutional law, a mainstream position.”