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Donald Trump appeared to quote Napoleon Bonaparte by way of Rod Steiger on Saturday afternoon after his blitzkrieg of executive actions and threats to federal agencies under Elon Musk were challenged in courts across the country, raising alarms that his administration is preparing to shred court orders and ignite a constitutional crisis.
“He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” the president wrote on Truth Social and X.
The president — whose efforts to gut federal funding, fire thousands of aid workers and unilaterally redefine the 14th Amendment were blocked in federal courts across the country in recent days — invoked a quote often attributed to Napoleon, who justified his despotic regime as the will of the people of France.
The quote from a president with his own imperial ambitions appeared to come from the 1970 film Waterloo, in which Steiger’s Napoleon states that he “did not ‘usurp’ the crown.”
“I found it in the gutter, and I picked it up with my sword, and it was the people … who put it on my head,” he says. “He who saves a nation violates no law.”
Within his first month in office, Trump’s allies have baselessly argued Trump’s supreme authority as president, immune from checks and balances, as his executive orders and Musk’s access to the levers of government face an avalanche of lawsuits and restraining orders.
Musk and other members of the Trump administration have smeared the judges who have ruled against them as “corrupt” and “evil” and threatened to impeach and remove them from the bench.
The world’s wealthiest man and his allies have repeated false and inflated claims about how the three branches of government operate, and how a system of checks and balances is designed to prevent the presidency from accumulating supreme authority.
Their comments are raising alarms among constitutional scholars and legal analysts for an impending constitutional crisis — which the White House blames on the judges, not the president’s spurious legal actions and the administration’s baseless insistence that he should not be subject to checks and balances in the courts.
Trump, now seemingly invoking his own “l’etat, c’est moi” maxim, routinely conflated the criminal and civil cases against him with an attack on the American people and rule of law itself during his campaign.
The Supreme Court’s 2024 ruling affirming a president’s “immunity” from criminal prosecution for actions tied to official duties while in office has only fueled what he perceives is a permanent shield from oversight.
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.”
“We’re getting into real Führerprinzip territory here,” added conservative Trump critic Bill Kristol, referencing executive authority under Nazi Germany, granting the word of the führer above all.
Musk’s ongoing campaign to delegitimize the courts followed Vice President JD Vance’s claim that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”
This week, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt accused the “media” of “fear mongering” about an impending constitutional crisis.
“The real constitutional crisis is taking place within our judicial branch where district court judges in liberal districts are abusing their power,” she told reporters on Wednesday.
She falsely claimed that court-ordered injunctions against the administration have “no basis in the law.”
“We will comply with these orders but it is also the administration’s position that we will ultimately be vindicated,” she said.
