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.
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.
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.
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.
The so-called “checks and balances” designed, in theory, to thwart Bush’s catastrophic misadventure were, instead, marshalled to quash defiance – big and small – and empower a rogue regime bent on “regime change” elsewhere.
Bush and several unrepentant co-architects of this century’s signature geopolitical debacle have prospered or are enjoying comfortable retirements.
Meanwhile, the scores of Americans in uniform who did the invading, fighting, maiming, killing and dying have been largely forgotten.
Once again, the many were disposed of or destroyed – in mind, body, and spirit – to satisfy the imperial aims of the few.
The strained compact between the governed and the governors buckled further in the wake of a ferocious hurricane that struck vulnerable New Orleans in 2005.
The terrifying scope of Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed a city and the levies that were meant to protect it.
The flooding swallowed homes and the livelihoods of mostly poor people who sought refuge on rooftops. There were more than 1,400 deaths. Amid the epochal destruction, the living were obliged to fend for themselves in desperate search of shelter, food, and water.
President Bush praised his flailing government’s incompetent response as he hovered far above the apocalyptic scenes in a helicopter – an indelible image of a smug, out-of-touch commander-in-chief who had left forlorn Americans stranded, in more ways than one.
By way of instructive contrast, Bush rushed in 2008 to the rescue of the profit-by-any-means-necessary bankers on Wall Street and beyond who engineered, in effect, a nationwide Ponzi scheme that triggered the near-collapse of America’s greed-fuelled economy built on a sandy foundation known as the sub-prime-mortgage (racket) crisis.
When the enormous bill came due, Americans paid in full to staunch the metastasizing contagion that threatened the whole, decrepit house of cards.
All told, besieged taxpayers bankrolled $7.7 trillion in “emergency loans” to save a host of teetering banks from foreclosure while they struggled to stave off predatory creditors and make meagre ends meet during the “Great Recession” that lasted for two arduous years.
Bush, a lifelong member of the gilded few, confirmed that his job was to protect his dear friends and enablers whatever the burden or cost the many were expected to endure or assume.
That shining, eloquent avatar of the resurgent Democratic Party, Barack Obama, capitalised on his humble roots to convince working- and middle-class Americans from coast to beleaguered coast that, unlike his craven, silver-spooned predecessor, he was the “everyman” they were yearning for.
Alas, Obama understood that like Bush, his principal task was to ingratiate, not alienate, the prosperous powers-that-be who made him president.
Obama’s trite, self-serving clarion call, “Yes, we can,” was a cynical ruse meant to dupe Americans into believing that he was an ardent ally of the “we” and not the mendacious magnates.
The practised facade dropped when it became apparent that the Obama administration refused to pursue seriously, let alone charge, any of the criminals-in-custom-tailored-suits responsible for the systemic fraud that produced such loss, heartache, and suffering among working- and middle-class Americans.
Obama’s shameful failure was proof of America’s two-tiered “justice system” that condemned the destitute and insulated the rich.
In this contemptuous context, it’s only mildly surprising that milked and manipulated Americans have sought salvation from a demagogue who offers easy, instant answers to hard, ornery problems.
Disappointment is sure to follow.
