Hear ye, hear ye! President Trump opines that he is the most powerful person to ever live (“The YOLO Presidency,” The Atlantic, April 29, 2026). There are compelling reasons to dispute his claim. Even so, many of our politicians insist that the United States is the greatest country on earth. Perhaps Trump supposes that their familiar brag is true. Well, then, if America’s power is historically unrivaled, it would follow that, as president, he is the most powerful person to ever live.

Of any power, however, we need to ask with respect to what? If we consider a country’s power to make its people virtuous, there is scant evidence of either our country’s current or historical power to do so. And if we consider President Trump’s power even to remain in office, China’s President Xi Jinping, in power since 2013, has a far greater power to do so.

A sober consideration of power leads to the question of its limits. This past January the New York Times asked Trump whether there were limits to his global power as Commander in Chief. He answered, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind.” Here, to be sure, we must ask what counts as one’s own morality. Suppose one embraces God’s law and right reason as one’s morality. In that case, one legitimately affirms the decisive place of morality. But if my morality is simply what I say it is, then it is a dangerous artefact of my own making. Far too often, and I doubt that Trump is an exception, morality has been perilously subjectivized.

History shows, moreover, that morality is also subject to hijacking by revolutionaries of every stripe. The novelist Albert Camus (1913-1960) exposed Marxist-Leninist endeavors to gag and suborn morality in his insightful work The Rebel. Revolution, he argues, characteristically destroys the present only to promise us a future that never arrives. The rebel, in contrast, honors the limits that the insurrectionist denies and strives to be neither a victim nor an executioner. He follows, instead, a path of artistic creation. Rather than using violence “to produce the being that we are not,” he counsels that “we have to live and let live in order to create what we are.” Like Solzhenitsyn, Camus was a Nobel Laureate in Literature. Both appeal to the pivotal role of beauty in a time of mendacity. But unlike Solzhenitsyn, the agnostic Camus denies beauty the place of a transcendental as an overarching characteristic of reality.

And what says the Catholic? How might a Catholic understand the limits of power and its ultimate source? With regard to the limits of power, we best look to the shared legacy of Jews and Christians, the Decalogue. There we find a series of negative prohibitions. Insofar as these prohibitions enjoin respect for God or safeguard the core goods of human flourishing, they are non-negotiable limits on how we are to act. Nor can any state abrogate them. St. Peter sets our course: “We must obey God rather than human beings” (Acts 5:29). With regard to the ultimate source of power, the Apostle Paul is eloquent: “For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him” (Colossians 1:16).

Nonetheless, plain folks and philosophers (of course) sometimes wonder about whether there are limits to God’s power. It’s common enough to question God’s power given the fearsome sway of evil. Perhaps the right short answer to that question comes from Tolstoy: God sees the truth but waits. Descartes, preferring geometry to literature, suggests that God created the laws of logic and could well fashion them otherwise. Thus, Descartes entertains the view that there is no limit at all to his power. Perhaps God could create hills without valleys!

For my part, I find Thomas Aquinas far more persuasive. Thomas sees logic not as merely a formal system but as grounded in being. Thus, he teaches that “Everything that does not imply a contradiction in terms is numbered among those possible things in respect of which God is called omnipotent; whereas whatever implies contradiction does not come within the scope of divine omnipotence, because it cannot have the aspect of possibility” (ST I, q. 25, art. 3). Square circles and moveable unmovable rocks, as well as sinless sinners, are relegated to impossible possible worlds.

But it’s when Thomas turns to the nature of God’s omnipotence that I most appreciate the wisdom of the Common Doctor. “God’s omnipotence,” he teaches, “is particularly shown in sparing and having mercy, because in this is it made manifest that he has supreme power.” He adds that “by sparing and having mercy upon men, He leads them on to the participation of an infinite good, which is the ultimate effect of the divine power” (ST I, q. 25, art. 3, ad 3). Shakespeare’s Portia reflects Thomas’s words when she avows of mercy that “It is an attribute to God himself; / And earthly power doth then show likest God’s / When mercy seasons justice” (The Merchant of Venice, Act IV, Scene I).

How much, gentle reader, The Donald of D.C. has to learn from The Bard of Avon. And how much we need to be the facilitators of this pedagogy rather than enablers of presidential pomposity.