King Trump to America: I Am Beyond the Law

Donald Trump posted on social media that the president is above all laws if he is “saving” the country. This idea has been announced by other authoritarian leaders, but the fact that he is quoting the 1970 film Waterloo should make us wonder if Trump knows what happened to Napoleon afterward.

The Independent calls the quote “ominous” :

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.

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.

Trump said this in response to another social media post suggesting he ignore court rulings, implying that he takes this idea both literally and seriously. It indicates that he rejects the constitutional authority of the judicial branch to serve as a check on presidential power.

In the words of the John Locke quote engraved on the side of the Department of Justice building: “Where Law Ends, Tyranny Begins.”

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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