By Andrew Mitrovica
This is Donald Trump’s latest lie: He is a student of history.
A few days ago, an emboldened US president shared this cryptic message with his gullible followers and, by depressing extension, a world already exhausted only weeks after his jarring return to the Oval Office.
“He who saves his Country does not violate any law,” Trump posted on X.
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The quote’s provenance is unclear. But it resembles one attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, by way of actor Rod Steiger who portrayed the messianic, self-appointed emperor of the French in the 1970 film, Waterloo.
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Since Trump does not read books and likely avoids watching movies where he hasn’t made a forgettable cameo, I suspect that co-president Elon Musk or some other sycophant whispered the pithy saying into his tin ear.
Napoleon’s admonition would, of course, be attractive to a strutting autocrat like Trump who is convinced that by divine right and intervention he, as president, is immune from prosecution and the law’s restraints.
Still, Trump ought to have reached for French King Louis XIV’s infamous declaration –“L’État, c’est moi” (The state, it is me) – better to describe his naked effort to erase even the, by now, performative features of America’s atrophied “democracy”.
With his blizzard of chaotic words and deeds, Trump has made it plain that he never intended to abide by the oath to “preserve, protect and defend” the US Constitution or entertain the other two equal branches of government – Congress and the courts – that he treats with derision and contempt.
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Trump is governing as he always wanted to govern – more potentate than president – doing as he pleases, when he pleases, free of fear and uninhibited by the damaging consequences.
If public opinion polls are a reliable measure, most Americans appear happy to discard the frayed remnants of the “democratic experiment” in the misguided belief that Trump – the swaggering strongman – will deliver them and their angry, ailing home from real or imagined foreign and domestic enemies.
The persistent question is why so many Americans have thrown in their lot – with a missionary fervour – behind a blustering charlatan who considers the egalitarian ideals that triggered a revolution and the birth of a republic as irritating, anachronistic nuisances.
I believe that most Americans have abandoned democracy because democracy has abandoned most Americans.
The pervasive patriotic symbols – the billowing-in-the-breeze stars and stripes, the hand-on-heart pledge of allegiance, the sometimes-soaring renditions of the Star- Spangled Banner – can no longer sustain the stubborn myth of America that the gilded few serve at the behest and in the interests of the less fortunate many.
By my count there were at least four precipitating events that, combined, exposed finally this calculated pantomime and made, perhaps, Trump’s emergence as America’s defining political, if not cultural, force inevitable by prompting millions of Americans, including a good share of thoughtful citizens, to sour on the supposed profits and promise of democracy.
The lie at the core of America’s phantom democracy was laid bare by the fabrications concocted and repeated with obdurate certainty by President George W Bush and evangelical company, including the entire US establishment in the White House, Congress and much of a war-giddy press.
The fiction that Saddam Hussein had stockpiled and was poised to unleash weapons of mass destruction led to a calamitous invasion in 2003 of Iraq that disfigured a sovereign country and killed countless innocents.
Rather than heeding the warnings, the gilded few dismissed the demonstrations of dissent by the enlightened many as the act of quislings who preferred to coddle a tyrant rather than confront him.—Al Jazeera
