Donald Trump Declares His Leader Principle
President Donald Trump seemingly made his autocratic philosophy clear on Saturday in a social media post.
'He who saves his Country violates no Law,' Trump posted to Truth Social and X.
This phrase, an apocryphal quote attributed to Napoleon, appears to be Trump's most bald assertion of autocratic intent to date. It stands as a justification for one-man rule and lawless, extraconstitutional actions. A version of it appears in the 1970 movie 'Waterloo,' where Rod Steiger, playing Napoleon, uses it to explain why he ended democracy and named himself emperor. More recently, the quote was infamously invoked by the right-wing anti-immigrant terrorist Anders Breivik in his 2011 manifesto posted before he murdered 77 people and injured hundreds more.
Trump's post with the phrase stands as justification for the lawless rule he has displayed since taking office. In less than a month, he has pardoned violent criminals who tried to help him overturn the 2020 election, ended birthright citizenship, impounded funds allocated by Congress, eliminated agencies created by Congress, fired government workers in violation of statutes and in retaliation for investigating his own alleged crimes, handed power to a nebulous and opaque organization that seems to operate outside of administrative law, engaged corrupt quid pro quos to buy favor with corrupt local officials and sought to open fake criminal investigations into government spending.
In this worldview, Trump is not only above the law; he makes laws by acting to save 'his Country.' It serves as a directive to his officers and followers that he is remaking the law by operating outside of it and that they should follow his lead. This is Trump's leader principle.
The leader principle has another name — the Führer principle. Under Nazi propaganda, this was how the supreme leader's will was eventually transformed into law.
This is the logic expressed by Nazi jurist and philosopher of fascism Carl Schmitt in his essay justifying the state murders committed on the Night of the Long Knives. '[T]he [leader's] action was true judging. It is not subject to law but is in itself the highest justice,' Schmitt wrote in The Führer Protects Justice in 1934.
In the Night of the Long Knives, Adolf Hitler ordered the murder of conservative and Catholic political opponents and the purging and murder of leaders of the SA Nazi paramilitary organization, which he viewed as contesting his position of absolute power. The extrajudicial murders were provoked by paranoia of an imminent coup plot ― despite no evidence existing. Hitler justified his actions as motivated by a desire to save the country.
'In this hour I was responsible for the fate of the German nation and thereby the highest judicial authority of the German people,' Hitler said afterward.
Schmitt argued that the failure of Germans to save their country at the end of World War I had 'concentrated in' Hitler and 'become in him a driving force of a political deed.' Since the leader does not want to repeat the perceived betrayals of the past, he is imbued with the authority to make laws to prevent it. Hitler, he said, 'takes seriously the teaching of German history. That gives him the right and the power to found a new state and a new order.'
Schmitt wrote later, 'The real [leader] is always a judge. Out of [leadership] flows judgeship.'
Trump is no Hitler. And he has committed no act as heinous as the Night of the Long Knives ― to say nothing of Hitler's far greater crimes. But the logic expressed here is the same.
It is also the logic of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Trump v. U.S., which granted the president immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts. That decision asserted a sweeping vision of executive power wherein the Constitution places the president above and beyond the law.
Since 'the President is a branch of government' deriving authority 'from the Constitution itself,' his powers are 'conclusive and preclusive' and 'he may act even when the measures he takes are 'incompatible with the expressed or implied will of Congress,'' the court asserted in the opinion, written by Chief Justice John Roberts. He must be unbound from concerns about the criminal law in taking 'bold and unhesitating action' while 'Congress cannot act on, and courts cannot examine, the President's actions on subjects within his 'conclusive and preclusive' constitutional authority.'
In short, the president is free from inquiry from the other two branches and can only be held accountable through an impeachment proceeding.
Make no mistake that Trump and his officials view this broad reading of executive power as authorizing him to remake the law as he sees fit. Intentional or not, Roberts' opinion channeled Schmitt: The Trump administration now sees legal challenges to its policy as a means to force the judiciary to accept the logic behind Trump v. U.S. And, if they don't, Trump and his officials suggest that he will remake the law without them.
But before those cases ripen, Trump's Napoleonic assertion bears another danger. It gives inspiration to his more radical followers to take the law into their own hands. If they are saving their country, they can violate no law after all.
Trump has named no shortage of internal enemies that must be defeated to save the country. Journalists are the 'enemy of the people.' During the presidential campaign, he warned of the 'enemy within' and named California Democrats Sen. Adam Schiff and Rep. Nancy Pelosi as two such examples. He labeled his political opponents 'vermin' and said that immigrants are 'poisoning the blood of our country.' These provide any number of targets for supporters who take Trump's assertion to heart.
And they have done just that in the past. When Trump told the far-right Proud Boys to 'stand back and stand by,' their leaders and members viewed it as a directive to await orders. They then came into action when Trump called on supporters to help him overturn the 2020 election results and led the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. After being sentenced to prison for seditious conspiracy, Trump pardoned the Proud Boys leaders who led the effort to overthrow the government.
Trump's lawless assertion may then best be exemplified not by Schmitt or Hitler but by Breivik, a radical terrorist inspired to take the law into his own hands. In the interest, of course, of saving the country.
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