I guess that should be counted as a kind of confession, with a plea for jury
nullification: yes, when you come down to it, he kind of has tried to
overthrow the US government, a couple or three times, and that's probably
illegal in the normal way of things, but then the price of eggs is really
high, so what choice did he have? You can't make a revolution omelette without
breaking some constitutional eggshells, even if that's going to push the egg
price even higher.
That is, Trump is really and truly making the claim that he has led a
revolution against unbearable oppression, and at a time like this, the
ordinary laws that we've been living with don't apply any more. Laws
specifying procedures you have to follow if you want to fire a few hundred
civil servants, or saying you have to spend the money Congress has allocated
for a certain purpose on that purpose, or demanding that you treat immigrants
as if they were human beings. You're busy saving your capital-C Country, for
Christ's sake! Like the Founders, who were breaking the law too!
Though Jefferson wrote his complex and sophisticated argument denying that
they were doing that at all, putting all the blame on poor George III and
claiming not that the revolutionary gang were the saviors of a Country which
didn't in any case exist yet—just that they were breaking up with the abusive
old country, and that they were acting in the service of self-evident truths,
a higher kind of law that George was alleged to have relentlessly violated,
including the unwritten British constitution, particularly in his refusal to
grant them the traditional liberties of the British citizen with respect to
representation in Parliament.
The quote itself is usually attributed to Napoléon Bonaparte, as a presumptive
defense for his role in the coup d'état of 18 Brumaire (November 9) 1799,
which overthrew the government of France under the five-man revolutionary
Directoire, and established him as First Consul, though it wouldn't have made
much sense for Bonaparte to say it either; he undoubtedly thought of himself
as the savior of the nation, but preferred to have other people say that for
him (unlike the irrepressible Donald Trump), and was anxious that the thing
look backed by stringent legality): "The extraordinary decree of the Council
of Ancients, in conformity with articles 102 and 103 of the Constitution, has
put me in charge of the city [of Paris] and the army," he told the soldiers
gathered at the Tuileries, after the Council finished its vote before
high-tailing it out of town to Saint-Cloud; "I have accepted, in order to
support the measures it will be taking, all on behalf of the people."
The French emperor was certainly a murderous and narcissistic psychopath, but he wasn’t an idiotic meme like our American emperor. He had some sense of dignity, and some sense of what ordinary people are like and what they need to hear.
Imagine Vought or Miller writing Trump a speech offering a legal justification from the Constitution or statutes for firing 12 or 17 inspectors general (we still don't know exactly how many) or decreeing the end of birthright citizenship, or sending the military in contravention of the Posse Comitatus Act to pacify the southern border area. Of course they wouldn’t be able to do it, any more than they are able to write up the administration’s executive orders and memoranda with the minimal professionalism required to keep judges from grinding their teeth in rage or laughing in the administration’s faces.
In fact Napoleon didn't say it, as I've been able to determine with my
advanced Googling skills. The first appearance of the sentence "Celui qui
sauve sa patrie ne viole aucune loi" is in 1838, 17 years after Napoléon's
death on St. Helena, in a little collection of 525 unsourced sentences
attributed to the emperor under the title Maximes et Pensées de Napoléon, signed by a hatmaker called Jean-Louis Gaudy, but actually written by
no less a figure than Honoré de Balzac, it turns out, who ghostwrote it on
commission from Gaudy, making the quotes up mostly up out of his head (Gaudy
was apparently hoping to earn a decoration from King Louis-Philippe, the
"citizen king" crowned after the 1830 revolution, who encouraged the Napoléon
cult to bolster his liberal bona fides—Balzac himself was a Legitimist
supporter of a Bourbon restoration but also a great admirer of Napoléon and
his contrast with the destestable bourgeois dominance of the age of
Louis-Philippe, which shows how confused French political thinking was in the
early 19th century). Balzac could never afford to turn down some easy money.
He probably tossed it off in three days with 60 cups of coffee and then
hurried back to whichever installment of La Comédie Humaine he was
working on.
That makes the thing a neat little epitome of what this Trump administration
is about. We can argue what he means by using the sa ying, we can debate where
he got it from (the prevailing opinion on X and Threads seems to be that it's
Stephen Miller, who loyally
retweeted its
appearances
three
times
yesterday afternoon), but what stands out in the end is that it's
fundamentally bogus, like everything else they do.
We are being ruled by memes, meme stocks, meme coins, meme policies, meme
slogans, meme philosophies of government, a meme emperor who thinks he's
Napoléon when he's actually more like Père Ubu, and his Batman villain
billionaire sidekick. And we do have to worry about what it portends for the
administration as a whole in the awful future, because it's actually going to
kill people, throw families into turmoil, halt important research, destroy
international relationships, spread poverty, crash markets, encourage criminal
corruption, weaken the military, harm the education system, and generally
humiliate our country in the eyes of the world, but we can't let them continue
to make us stupider. Refusing to become stupider is our only hope.
