Trump Isn’t Playacting When He Invokes Napoleon https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-02-18/trump-is-serious-about-the-napoleon-option

President Donald Trump invoked Napoleon over the weekend, inspired, it would appear, by Rod Steiger’s portrayal of the military dictator and reformer in a 1970 film, Waterloo (shot in part, by the way, on location in Ukraine and jointly produced with the Soviet Union).

Trump, possibly on the verge of abandoning Ukraine amid his own joint production with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, took to his social media account on Saturday to note: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” The origins of the quotation aren’t clear, but the closest proximity is a similar Steiger line from Waterloo. I can’t imagine a book inspired the post. Trump doesn’t read. But he’s an avid movie fan who thinks about himself cinematically — and he also shared another post featuring the quotation and an image of Napoleon.

Regardless of the quotation’s provenance, its message was clear: A little authoritarianism in the service of renewal and rescue is just fine, regardless of what the law says. And Trump has been on a roll since his inauguration. He and his team are defining the US presidency and its powers in the most imperial of ways while taking a cudgel to federal agencies without congressional consent or constitutional grounding.

There is a good argument to be made that the only way to remake a bureaucracy as sprawling as the federal government is with a sledgehammer. Congress moves slowly, presidential mandates lose steam, and the race is won by the fleet of foot. Trump’s inaugural address last month offered a portrait of an America so unraveled that only someone with a divine mandate — someone like him — could heal its wounds. He slipped into the presidency with 49.9% of the popular vote to Kamala Harris’ 48.4% while painting the Electoral College and Congress red. That’s as much of a mandate as the polarized US election system is capable of giving these days, and Trump’s voters want the president to do what he promised — take on centralized government, the economy, immigration, foreign affairs, institutionalized expertise and the culture wars.

The only surprise in what Trump is engineering is that anyone is surprised. His supporters are gratified. They’re sick of Democrats carping, clueless about Trump’s magnetism and what they see as his good works. His critics are relying on the legal system for protection, the only potent bulwark given that the GOP is supine, Democrats are flailing and voters just had their say. We are in uncharted waters, with the American experiment in play.

For his part, Trump is still doing what he began doing when he rolled down the escalator in Trump Tower in 2015 to declare his candidacy. He’s challenging Americans to decide what they want out of a president, their government and one another.

When we talk about remaking the government, what are we really talking about? When we talk about a strong executive branch, what do we really mean? If you don’t have a working definition for either, and no idealized view of how you might prefer them to be, you better get busy — because Trump is speeding past you and scooping up whatever powers and opportunities he can while you make up your mind.

Many already have made up their minds, of course. Trump is bringing change and they like it. The Trump Show is must-see and must-support TV. Beyond the performance art, though, is a refashioning of political power that Trump’s advocates may not have to wrestle with until it’s already arrived, when he is fully fashioned as Donald Rex, master of all he surveys.

Trump isn’t just tilting at bureaucracy, after all. He’s also undermining the rule of law, countenancing the idea that courts can’t restrain his actions, and giving sway in his government to conspiracy theorists, incompetents, loons and an unelected phalanx of Muskovites. He’s also making coin, literally, off of his presidency, unconcerned about and unimpeded by long-standing financial conflicts of interest that his predecessors wouldn’t dare entertain.

Seismic change is afoot. Context is everything, however.

The southern border is a porous mess that Democrats tolerated for far too long. But immigration is the lifeblood of the US economy and Trump plans to squeeze that resource dry.

Government is big and routinely inefficient, but federal workers represent less than 2% of the national workforce, and labor costs represent only about 6.6% of federal spending. Tackling government spending means tackling entitlement programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and the great untouchable, defense outlays. Everything else except federal debt payments is peanuts compared with that quartet. Trump has said little about all of that, and he is pining for a tax cut anyway — a surefire way to make sure the government’s revenues don’t support its outlays.

Besides, the federal government usually oversees endeavors that aren’t inherently profitable or involve intangible or very long-term payoffs — like defense, public health, public works, public safety, research, disaster relief and the like. These are projects the private sector either can’t or won’t take on. And government and many of the talented people it employs do a lot of that very well (as this ambitious Washington Post series spelled out).

Too much government is, indeed, bad. So is too little. Finding the balance may require wielding both a scalpel and a sledgehammer. That’s not a discussion much of the American public is having right now. They like Trump and his sledgehammer, including when he’s also amped up with boundaryless tariff, national security and foreign policy powers.

Some consequences of this free-for-all will play out well past Trump’s current term. Others are likely to land sooner. The Trump team, for example, is dismantling a core part of the federal public health apparatus as the bird flu virus appears to be gaining traction and the Covid-19 pandemic fades from memory. Its tariff postures, if fully embraced, will be inflationary (and inflation helped end Joe Biden’s presidency).

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said recently in a CNN interview that she’d like to dismantle the Federal Emergency Management Agency “as it exists today” because local agencies know best how to deploy disaster relief resources. Maybe. But it also begs the question of why all those localities look to FEMA when disaster arrives, even in red states that routinely decry big government. The next disasters will offer rich tutorials, perhaps, on how much we rely on the federales.

Much of this is performative, to be sure. Trump is demonstrating that he can move quickly and break things. It’s also usefully distracting. Trump isn’t fawning over historical figures like Napoleon and contemporary strongmen like Putin just for laughs. He’s fascinated by them. He wants to be like them, and he’s paving his path. While Americans fret over his dance moves, he’s amassing power and sabotaging institutions.

Republicans, the courts and voters wouldn’t tolerate this in a Democratic president. But Trump — a convicted felon who has survived two impeachments, an election defeat, decades of investigations and enough professional and personal debacles to fell an oak — is a special case. And he knows it.

Unfortunately Trump is not an actor playing at being an authoritarian, and he has put the country on a slippery slope.