President Donald Trump’s recent social media post—just one sentence from a historical film—has triggered a predictable wave of outrage from critics eager to cast him as a budding dictator.
“He who saves his country does not violate any law,” Trump posted to his social media accounts.
The phrase closely resembles a line from Waterloo, the 1970 film about Napoleon Bonaparte. In the movie, Napoleon, played by Rod Steiger, speaks the words while in exile on Elba, reflecting on his reign and defending his right to rule. The line is not a declaration that a ruler is above the law or licensed to commit crimes but a response to the accusation that his rise to power itself was unlawful. Napoleon argues that his leadership was not an illegitimate usurpation but a necessary act to preserve France in a time of crisis.
While there is no evidence that Napoleon ever spoke these words, different versions of the quote have been attributed to the French leader many times over the last century and a half. It is sort of a folklore distillation of Napoleon’s claim to legitimacy.
The idea that a leader who acts to save his country should not be considered a criminal has deep roots in political philosophy, stretching back to Cicero, the Roman statesman and orator. In his work De Legibus (On the Laws), Cicero argued that salus populi suprema lex esto—”the welfare of the people shall be the supreme law.” Trump’s invocation of the Waterloo quote plays on this same theme—suggesting that, far from being a usurper, he represents the will of the people against a corrupt elite.
For Trump’s critics, the post was proof of their worst fears, confirmation that he sees himself as a leader who transcends legal constraints.
Senator Adam Schiff, a Democrat from California, reacted with characteristic alarm, writing, “Spoken like a true dictator.” Other Democrats and media folks quickly followed, framing the post as another glimpse into Trump’s supposed authoritarian ambitions. The pattern was familiar: a cryptic Trump statement, followed by a flurry of panicked analysis, leading to dramatic warnings that democracy itself was at risk.
Yet for those who have observed Trump’s political style and the response of his rivals over the years, the reaction was entirely predictable. Trump has long understood how to provoke his critics into revealing their own anxieties and obsessions. By quoting this film version of Napoleon, Trump baited his opponents into branding him a lawless ruler while exposing their own belief that he is illegitimate and a budding tyrant. The outrage was not about a single line from a film—it was about the broader struggle over whether Trump’s presidency, despite repeated efforts to block or overturn it, represents the will of the people or a break with the rule of law.
The reactions across the political spectrum appeared to more astute political analysts as an example of a Trump Rorschach test, where people reveal their biases by announcing what they see. The left and self-styled conservatives who are deeply committed to opposing Trump saw it in the worst possible light, a classic symptom of what Trump’s supporters call “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” Conservatives who support Trump saw it as a fun callback to a historical figure who returned from exile and was elevated by a swell of popular support to lead his nation once again.
If Trump does think of himself in someway similar to Napoleon, it is probably mostly because both are leaders who obtained power in the face of resistance from the establishment, were sent into exile, and later returned. Trump may also see himself as resembling Napoleon’s legacy as a popular leader who restored order after a chaotic period in his nation’s history.
Napoleon was a French military general who rose to power during the chaos of the French Revolution, ultimately declaring himself Emperor of France in 1804. He is best known in the U.S. for his military genius, which allowed him to dominate Europe for over a decade, defeating coalition after coalition of European powers.
Under his rule, France saw sweeping legal and administrative reforms, including the Napoleonic Code, which remains the foundation of many modern legal systems. His reign combined authoritarian rule with meritocratic governance, centralizing power while promoting social mobility. However, his relentless expansionism led to his downfall—his disastrous invasion of Russia in 1812 crippled his army, and he was eventually defeated and exiled to Elba in 1814. Though he briefly returned to power in 1815 during the Hundred Days, his final defeat at the Battle of Waterloo ended his rule, and he spent the rest of his life in exile on the remote island of Saint Helena.
Napoleon’s legacy has been debated for more than two centuries, but the modern concept of Bonapartism was shaped primarily by Karl Marx’s study of Napoleon III, the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Marx saw Bonapartism as a phenomenon that emerges when the political class is too weak or fragmented to govern effectively, creating an opening for a leader who appeals directly to the people, often by casting himself as a national savior above party politics.
This characterization of Bonapartism has also been scrutinized by conservative thinkers, who have typically viewed it with skepticism. In 19th-century Prussia, King Frederick William IV and his advisor Leopold von Gerlach saw Bonapartism as a destabilizing force that combined mass politics with executive absolutism, undermining the role of traditional institutions like the monarchy, the aristocracy, and the church. Gerlach famously described Bonapartism as “the dangerous and great power… this child of the vile marriage of absolutism and liberalism,” highlighting the way it fused state control with popular mobilization.
French historian René Rémond later expanded on this by identifying Bonapartism as one of the three major traditions of the French right, alongside Legitimism and Orléanism. Where Legitimists favored the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy and Orléanists championed a constitutional, business-friendly monarchy, Bonapartists represented a strong, centralized executive power that operated outside traditional party structures. Rémond saw figures like General Georges Boulanger, who nearly overthrew the Third Republic in the 1880s, as inheritors of this tradition. Some elements of Bonapartism even carried into Charles de Gaulle’s leadership style, though he maintained democratic legitimacy.
But if Bonapartism is defined by centralizing executive power beyond traditional constraints, then the comparison to Trump quickly falls apart. Unlike Napoleon, who established an imperial regime, expanded state control, and restructured France’s governing institutions to concentrate power in himself, Trump is doing the opposite—dismantling entrenched bureaucracies and pushing power out of Washington. His presidency has been about firing, not hiring, career officials; cutting, not growing, federal agencies; and withdrawing, not expanding, military commitments abroad. The irony is that his critics accuse him of hoarding power while simultaneously demanding that power remain with the very institutions that resist democratic oversight.
Perhaps a better paradigm to compare Trump and Napoleon is the perspective of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the German philosopher. Hegel held Napoleon Bonaparte in high regard, viewing him as a pivotal figure in world history. Hegel saw Napoleon as the embodiment of the “World Spirit”—a personification of the historical force driving humanity toward greater freedom and self-awareness. This admiration is evident in a letter Hegel wrote to his friend Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer on October 13, 1806, during the Battle of Jena, where he described witnessing Napoleon:
“I saw the Emperor—this world-soul—riding out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it.”
Hegel argued that certain individuals, like Napoleon, played crucial roles in actualizing the progression of history. These “world-historical figures” emerge when existing societal structures become obsolete, acting as agents of change who, through their actions, advance the development of human freedom and consciousness. In Napoleon’s case, Hegel saw the consolidation of the revolutionary ideals of liberty and equality into a new political order, marking a significant transformation in the historical landscape.
Friedrich Nietzsche saw Napoleon Bonaparte as a figure who illustrated the tensions within the noble ideal, a man who reshaped history through sheer force of will but whose career exposed the limits of power and greatness. In On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche described Napoleon as “this synthesis of the inhuman and the superhuman,” admiring his ability to transcend conventional morality and impose his vision upon the world. Napoleon was, for Nietzsche, not simply a conqueror, but a living challenge to the mediocrity and complacency of his time—someone who seized destiny rather than submitting to it.
Yet as the German-American scholar of political philosophy Leo Strauss observed, Nietzsche did not regard Napoleon as the ideal of nobility itself, but rather as the problem of the noble ideal incarnate. Napoleon demonstrated how difficult it is for a great man to be both powerful and truly noble. “However much one might admire Napoleon, he is not striking as a very noble man, as Nietzsche himself says,” Strauss told his students in a 1967 seminar on Nietzsche.
Predictably, some commentators have rushed to conflate Bonapartism with fascism. But Napoleon’s rule was not defined by racial ideology, totalitarian control, or a militarized police state. He was a pragmatist who consolidated power in the wake of revolutionary chaos and worked to stabilize France. Unlike fascist dictators, Napoleon did not seek to abolish the old order outright but to restore it under his authority.
Trump’s presidency does not fit the mold of a Bonapartist regime, let alone a fascist one. His administration has not expanded the size of government but has worked to reduce it. His second term has been marked by aggressive efforts to fire entrenched bureaucrats, weaken regulatory agencies, and scale back America’s global military commitments. If his critics truly believed he was a dictator in the making, they would not be fighting to prevent him from shrinking the federal government. If they feared authoritarianism, they would not be racing to court to demand that unelected agencies be allowed to operate outside of presidential oversight. And they would not be decrying Vice President J.D. Vance’s defense of free speech in Europe if they feared Trump was going to curtail freedom in America.
The contradiction at the heart of the opposition to Trump is that those who claim to defend democracy seem most anxious to keep power in the hands of institutions that have become immune to democratic control in recent decades. The fear is not that Trump will become too powerful but that he will weaken the administrative state’s hold over the country.
The broader reaction to Trump’s post reflects the deeper conflict at the center of American politics today. His critics see his presidency as an existential threat, not because of what he has done, but because of what he represents: a direct challenge to a political establishment that believes it alone has the right to govern. Their insistence that he is a dictator has little to do with his actual use of power and everything to do with their fear that they have lost control over the system.
Trump’s Napoleon quote was not a statement of legal philosophy, nor was it a blueprint for authoritarian rule. It was a provocation, a carefully chosen historical reference designed to trigger the exact response it received.