Amid the Trump administration’s head-spinning foreign policy reorientation this week vis à vis Russia and Ukraine and its ongoing crusade to gut federal agencies at home, the president of the United States dubbed himself king. (The White House even gave him a crown and put him on the cover of Time Trump magazine.)
Four days before he posted “CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!” Trump had sent another social media missive with an imperial pedigree: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” The quote is often attributed to Napoleon, although there’s no scholarly evidence he said it. That doesn’t mean it’s not vintage strongman.
“Is the United States really in a moment of extreme danger, to the extent that it needs ‘saving’ by a strongman figure?”
As Alex Woodward wrote in The Independent: “Trump appeared to quote Napoleon Bonaparte by way of Rod Steiger.” The latter portrayed the French general-turned-emperor in the 1970 film Waterloo, chewing the scenery as Napoleon dictating a letter to Russian statesman Alexei Kurakin:
“To my dear Prince Alexis, I did not ‘usurp’ the crown. I found it—in the gutter! And I… I picked it up with my sword. And it was the people, Alexis! The people who put it on my head. He who saves a nation violates no law.”
In an email exchange this week, Princeton historian David A. Bell, author of a Napoleon biography and of Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution, told me the last line, the one Trump tweeted, was wholly made up by Waterloo screenwriter H.A.L. Craig. “Nothing unusual about this,” Bell says, noting that many famous historical quotations weren’t uttered by the people they’re attributed to. (“Marie Antoinette never said ‘Let them eat cake.’”) Bell had discussed the genesis of the part about the crown in the gutter on his Substack French Reflections a year and a half ago.
As for the idea conveyed by Trump via Napoleon via Steiger, Bell says it’s not actually that extreme. “A key legal principle going all the way back to the Roman Republic is that in moments of extreme emergency, the safety of the people takes priority over all other factors…There have been moments in the history of the United States, notably during the Civil War, where the principle justified the suspension of constitutional rules in part of the country. Abraham Lincoln was no strongman or tyrant, although of course the Confederates denounced him as such.”
The problem, says Bell (who participated in our “Big Question” on the allure of the strongman) is not the statement itself, but how it can be abused. “Is the United States really in a moment of extreme danger, to the extent that it needs ‘saving’ by a strongman figure? Who makes the determination, and who decides what measures need to be taken? During and since the election, Donald Trump has repeatedly insisted that the country is riddled by corruption, threatened by treason, taken advantage of by foreign adversaries, and generally in an almost hopeless state. Thus it needs ‘saving,’ by extra-constitutional means if necessary. It is a classic ploy used by virtually every strongman in history trying to destroy a constitutional republic.”
Not long after Trump dropped his Napoleon dynamite, Elon Musk retweeted it with 14 American flag emojis running at the top. Conspiracy theorists jumped on the number of flags and the 2:14pm timestamp–14:14 in military time—connecting both to 14 words the ADL calls “the most popular white supremacist slogan in the world.”
In some respects these sleuths aren’t so much conspiracy theorists as gamers, spotting the efficiency czar’s trollish moves and decoding them for the rest of us. As UNC professor and NYT columnist Tressie McMillan Cottom explained in her excellent piece last week, “Musk’s escapades are political posturing staged like a video game side quest.” Describing Musk’s talent for creating content that abets President Trump’s “stylistic approach to authoritarianism,” Cottom wrote that “Musk’s DOGE gang has outmaneuvered the Democrats and produced a governmental soap opera that confuses some Americans but feeds their fans what they want. Storming anodyne cubicles as if they’re Waterloo creates chaos and it satisfies fans’ desire to vicariously storm the seat of world power.”
In other news, the entertainment mogul formerly known as Kanye West—Ye—did some antisemitic trolling of his own over Super Bowl weekend. He did so in a decidedly less cheeky way (are we supposed to say one is better than another?) and even called out the person who let it continue for so long: “Elon stole my Nazi Swag at the Inauguration.” Unfortunately, these ugly games are multiplayer.
Top image: Caricature of George IV by James Gillray, 1792.