What Do You Do When Your President Quotes Napoleon?

The Catch-22 President

Note: At the urging of my good friend

scott cunningham

I am testing a new Wednesday feature. Can I keep up with that? Time will tell. It may be sporadic, but I’d like it to be a regular thing. Unlike the Monday paid and Friday Free posts, Wednesday’s post will be random. Some weeks it’ll be unlocked, some it’ll be free. Today’s, for selfish reasons, is paid. One of the benefits of Substack is that I can try out ideas, including political ideas, without significant concerns of trolls swooping in and quoting me out of context because I can hide behind a paywall where only my most invested and charitable readers can find it. Of course, I encourage and welcome paid subscribers to comment and share. I try to engage on Substack. I’m also doing something a bit risky by talking about politics at all, something I have shied away from over the last two or three years with a few exceptions. I have many friends who disagree with me politically, on the right and on the left, and I value their perspectives. Some of them are even subscribers! But I felt this was worth commenting on. So here we are…

I realize the pitfalls of writing about a single tweet by our President. He intentionally (and quite deftly) uses the dynamics of social media to stir up drama and attention and lure his critics into petty feuds which almost always end up embarrassing them by lowering them to his level, inviting them to jump to conclusions, and getting them to overstate their case. The difficulty here is that Donald Trump is the President of the United States. And his public proclamations do matter. They affect the way other nations see us, they may in fact be accurate representations of his intentions, and they represent us as a nation. If we acknowledge his radical statements, we play into his social media unreality. But if we ignore his statements, we’re ignoring the words of the President. If we take him seriously or literally, we’re chastised as panicking and pearl-clutching. But if we don’t take him seriously or literally, we’re chastised for not respecting the Office of President. He’s the Catch-22 President.

And this week the Catch-22 President tweeted an apocryphal quote from Napoleon:

“He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”

The official White House account retweeted with a gigantic image of Trump’s face, portraying his dominating presence, and Musk retweeted with a series of American flag emojis. The message these tweets collectively convey is that the President believes himself to be above all laws so long as he thinks it’s necessary to “save his Country.” The problem is, America was founded on rule of law, particularly the Constitution. To violate the law in order to “save America” would be to destroy what America was founded upon, thus failing to save America. (He is the Catch-22 President, after all). Now, as my friend and Historian Miles Smith IV pointed out, this statement didn’t come out of nowhere. Executive powers have been growing in abusive and maniacal ways for some time now. Granted. The question I think we need to ask is, how concerned should we be that a sitting president boldly claimed that he had the power to violate laws as he felt fit in order to “save America.”