"He who saves his Country does not violate any Law”
Napoleon may not have said it. But Trump believes it.
It’s Presidents’ Day. The banks are closed and there’s no mail. And we have a whole day to ponder the devolution of the presidency from the office once held by George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, to this…
We also have the whole day to imagine what Harry Truman, JFK, or Ronald Reagan would make of our betrayal of Ukraine and the rapid unscheduled disassembly of our post-war alliances around the globe…
But, first a quick reminder that there are no scandals (that matter) in MAGA. In the weekend’s bottom news, a well-known “conservative influencer” named Ashley St. Clair revealed that she gave birth to a child fathered by Musk, which would be the co-president’s 13th.
The icon of the movement to restore traditional values, who has a proclivity for using his other children as props, rushed quickly to take responsibility, is apparently blowing her off.
Ashley St. Clair called for Elon Musk to “publicly acknowledge” his role as the alleged father of her newborn child on social media.
On Saturday, the conservative activist took to X to blast the billionaire tech giant for ignoring her requests to talk about their alleged child after he responded to a tweet that claimed St. Clair “plotted for HALF A DECADE to ensnare” Musk.
[In response, Musk wrote just one word: "Whoa."]
“Elon, we have been trying to communicate for the past several days and you have not responded,” she wrote in a now-deleted tweet.
Messy. Very messy. But it will not cause even the slightest ripple in MAGA world and will have no effect whatsoever either on his bromance with the man who sits in the Oval Office or in the willingness of the GOP to give him a free hand to smash his way through the federal government. 1
And if you are looking for a bit more cognitive dissonance in the party of faith and family, consider this headline: “Christian aid groups suffering as Trump freezes USAID funds.”
BONUS: The hypocrisy. It burns.
Happy Monday.
Folks, we are really going to have to hang together if we’re going to make it.
And I’m afraid we can’t count on the billionaires, the oligarchs, or the corporate media to hold the line. That’s where you come in.
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Napoleon Trump
“Presidents, Judge Tanya Chutkan wrote in one of her opinions last year, “are not kings.”
But what about emperors?
Over the weekend, Trump tweeted out a quote often attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, who was both an emperor and a dictator: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” the president wrote on Truth Social and X.
As The Independent noted, “The official White House account on X also shared the message, endorsing his apparent belief that the president of the United States is incapable of breaking any law.”2
Some clarifications are needed here:
(1) This story has very little to do with Napoleon, because Trump’s knowledge of history is rudimentary at best. It is unlikely in the extreme that he even knows that a guy named Tolstoy wrote a book about Russia’s war with the French emperor. There is literally no chance he’s read it. So, all of the commentaries pointing out that things did not end well for Napoleon are beside the point.
(2) The quote itself may be apocryphal, since it seems that Trump is not quoting Napoleon directly, but a movie about Napoleon, in which actor Rod Steiger explains his usurpation of the crown.
(3) But whether or not Napoleon said “He who saves his country does not violate any Law” the statement speaks for every authoritarian everywhere.
And that’s why this matters, because:
(4) Whoever said it, Trump means it; believes it; and we have to assume that he means to act on it, because it is consistent with virtually everything we know about the convicted felon who sits in the White House. Lest we forget, Trump has called for terminating the Constitution to restore him to power; incited a mob to attack the Capitol; pardoned rioters who tried to violently overturn an election; and now openly threatened to defy the courts. He oozes contempt for the rule of law out of every porcine pore on his body.
What is striking about this latest bleat, however, is the starkness of his rejections of basic democratic/republican norms.
The New York Times’s Jamelle Bouie called Trump’s latest statement “the single most un-American and anti-constitutional statement ever uttered by an American president.”
Conservative pundits were equally scathing.
Over at National Review, Charles CW (“Maybe Trump”) Cooke called Trump’s declaration, “Batshit nonsense. The presidency is created by the Constitution; not the other way around.” In a longer post, Mark Antonio Wright struggled mightily to acknowledge Trump’s Napoleon-like Greatness, but denounced the statement as both un-republican and un-American.
But after everything we have seen of Trump these last ten years, no American ought be surprised by the fact that our duly elected president cares nothing at all for our Constitution, its Madisonian vision of separation of powers and check and balances, or his oath to protect it and defend it.
What Trump has declared is, indeed, antithetical to a republican form of government per se. As John Adams, our second president, once wrote, “A republic is the best form of government, a government of laws, not arbitrary rule.”
“The very definition of a Republic, is ‘an Empire of Laws, and not of Men.’”
But what Trump has declared is most certainly un-republican, and therefore un-American. There is no legitimate argument otherwise. To defend it is the road to serfdom.
While a president is cloaked in numerous awesome powers, he is in no sense above the law; he has no legitimate power to abrogate it. Indeed, his very office is a creation of law, of the Constitution. No matter the circumstances, no American — certainly no president — is above the law as such. No, not even to “save it.”
But this conservative pushback is also misleading, because (1) MAGA would be all-in on a lawless Trump Imperium, and (2) there is absolutely no reason to think that the Republican Party would provide any meaningful pushback.
Indeed, this was the most revealing — and significant — reaction to Trump’s declaration that he was above the law:
Exit take: It’s worth noting that Trump’s declaration of lawlessness was not limited to the president alone. Perhaps that explains Musk’s exuberance.
Monday dogs
Auggie absolutely loves the snow.
Including:
What could possibly go wrong?
We’ve seen this pattern before, haven’t we?
“He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”
… Shortly after Trump made that post, Mike Pence responded by posting an old article he wrote about the limitations on a president’s power:
“Without proper adherence to the role contemplated in the Constitution for the presidency, the checks and balances in the constitutional plan become weakened. The president is not our teacher, our tutor, our guide or ruler. He does not command us; we command him. We serve neither him nor his vision. It is not his job or his prerogative to redefine custom, law, and beliefs; to appropriate industries; to seize the country, as it were, by the shoulders or by the throat so as to impose by force of theatrical charisma his justice upon 300 million others. It is neither his job nor his prerogative to shift the power of decision away from them, and to him and the acolytes of his choosing.”
… “A president who slights the Constitution is like a rider who hates his horse: he will be thrown, and the nation along with him. The president solemnly swears to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. He does not solemnly swear to ignore, overlook, supplement, or reinterpret it. Other than in a crisis of existence, such as the Civil War, amendment should be the sole means of circumventing the Constitution. For if a president joins the powers of his office to his own willful interpretation, he steps away from a government of laws and toward a government of men.”
I was also fascinated by the Napoleon precedent. Then I learned that the white supremacist terrorist in Norway quoted that line in 2012 as did El Salvador’s authoritarian president a couple of weeks ago. People should know this!