Critics rounded on Donald Trump on Sunday for likening himself to Napoleon in a “dictatorial” social media post echoing the French emperor’s assertion that “he who saves his country does not violate any laws”.
The post came at the end of another tumultuous week early in Trump’s second presidency, during which acolytes questioned the legitimacy of judges making a succession of rulings to stall his administration’s aggressive seizure or dismantling of federal institutions and budgets.
His defiance of some of those orders, including one ordering a restoration of funding to bodies such as the National Institutes of Health, has led to several of the president’s opponents declaring a constitutional crisis.
“He is the most lawless president in US history,” Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, wrote on Wednesday in the Guardian.
“This is bonkers. In our system of government, it’s up to the courts to determine whether the president is using his power ‘legitimately’, not the president.”
Trump laid out his position in the tweet posted on Saturday afternoon, after a round of golf at his Florida resort. The quote, as internet sleuths soon discovered, is a version of a phrase attributed to Napoleon “Celui qui sauve sa patrie ne viole aucune loi,” translated as: “who saves his country violates no law”.
Another version appeared in the 1970 movie Waterloo, starring Rod Steiger as the dictator who rode roughshod over the French constitution to declare himself emperor and pursue world domination before his comeuppance at the pivotal 1815 battle from which the film’s title is derived.
Senior Democrats led the criticism of Trump. The Virginia US senator Tim Kaine, Hillary Clinton’s running mate in the 2016 presidential election that Trump won, told Fox News Sunday that occupation of the White House was not a mandate to ignore the courts.
“The president has authority, but the president also has to follow the law,” he said.
“There’s this law that, you know, the Impoundment Act, that says once Congress has appropriated dollars for a particular purpose the president is not allowed to say: ‘Yeah, I don’t like that. I’m going to spend this money, but not that money.’
“That’s why, so far, there’s a whole lot of lawsuits that have been successful. They’ll go through appeals courts, but a lot of the president’s extreme executive actions that hurt folks are being challenged in court right now.”
According to the Associated Press, the administration is facing at least 70 lawsuits nationwide covering actions from the attempted elimination of birthright citizenship to the freezing of federal grants and funds – and the accessing of sensitive computer systems and data by unofficial entities.
Trump’s wrecking ball approach since his 20 January inauguration continued this week with deeper infiltration by Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) into federal institutions – and the latest firings of vast numbers of employees.
On Sunday, Bloomberg reported a wave of new dismissals at health department agencies including the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Other agencies where the workforce has, or will be, slashed include the homeland security department, the Food and Drug Administration, US Forest Service and National Park Service, the US Agency for International Development (USAid), and the Department of Education.
Critics believe that a hollowing out of many essential taxpayer-funded services, especially in healthcare, support for veterans, and military and defense expenditure, will come with a lucrative corresponding financial windfall for private companies, including those owned by Musk.
Musk, the world’s richest man and Trump acolyte, who has been awarded the status of “special government employee”, has called on the administration to “delete entire agencies”, which it could not legally do without the sanction of Congress that created them.
“I don’t like the fact that Donald Trump is shutting the government down as we speak,” Kaine told Fox.
“He says he wants to shut down the Department of Education, shrink USAid staff down to 250 people. That is a shutdown unauthorized by Congress, against the law.
“My outrage is about who they’re hurting. I don’t like unelected officials, those Doge guys, posting classified information on their website. You shouldn’t let people run rampage through offices that have classified information.”
More turmoil came with the administration’s decision to ban Associated Press journalists from the Oval Office and Air Force One for refusing to comply with Trump’s executive order attempting to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America”.
The White House sought to justify the punitive move by insisting that it was “a lawful geographic name change”. The AP pointed out that the agency served an international audience, and while it recognized Trump’s order, it would continue referring to the body of water by its globally accepted name.
In a statement, Axios said the right of news organizations to report how they saw fit was “a bedrock of a free press and durable democracy”. Nonetheless, it also said it would use the name Gulf of America because “our audience is mostly US-based compared to other publishers with international audiences”.
The Atlantic’s view was that it was a spat the AP should have avoided. “To cave now would be to surrender on the constitutional issue. But this is a fight that Trump is clearly happy to have, especially to the extent that it draws attention away from his more egregious affronts to the public interest and the rule of law,” it said.
Meanwhile, economic headwinds continue to mount for the fledgling Trump administration as it prepares to impose new tariffs on trading partners that analysts predict will lead to an international trade war and job losses. Inflation rose to 3% in January, according to government figures, despite Trump promising during election campaigning that prices “will come down, and they’ll come down fast”.
By Thursday, the message had changed. “Prices could go up somewhat short-term,” Trump said as he laid out his tariffs plan, before promising they would go down again at some point.
