Rich and powerful people go to jail all the time. SBF? Ghislaine Maxwell? Maybe that boundary is pushed but at least in theory in the "western/democratic" world you can't get away with breaking the law simply by having power (and yeah Trump and such - but in general). So sure, there is some erosion of rule of the law in the western world, but it's still a thing.

But you are right that people assume that. They also assume the rich pay no taxes. So they "assume" a bunch of nonsense. Some once told me assume makes an ass of you and me.

I think people think the US is supposed to follow this thing called international law, or at least they'll express some outrage when it doesn't.

The manipulation is that people believe in this thing called international law as something that anyone has to follow where in practice no country would ever let international law supersede its laws if it went against their interest and there is no mechanism to force this. You keep seeing news about this and that being against international law (be it Israel or the US or Russia, would be the typical use case) and people actually think this is a real thing, like there's some law book somewhere that applies universally to every country. Very few people have the real and correct understanding that these are just norms or treaties or agreements that countries decide to follow or not on a case by case basis as per their interest, i.e. not a law in any real sense of the word.