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His Napoleon Complex, Our Waterloo [1]
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Date: 2025-02-17
My high school French teacher grew up in Paris. Chatting with her after class (apropos of a 1972 report on the aftermath of the Watergate break in), I remarked unflatteringly on one of her all-time heroes.
Before you could say “tout alors,” she roared “NAPOLEON WAS A GREAT MAN!”
Life went on. That same year, President Richard Nixon (R) sought a second term. When he won a landslide comprising some 520 electoral votes, I began to make plans to live abroad for quite some time.
Fast forward. On US broadcast TV, on 5/19/1977, the perniciously pardoned, ruthlessly unrepentant Nixon foreshadowed Trump (and harkened back to Napoleon) by snarling, “when the President does it, that means that it is not illegal.”
So here we are. Echoing the bumptious Bonaparte, Doge Donald crows, “He who [says he] saves his Country (sic) does not violate any Law (sic).”
Oops. Logically, that sense of entitlement must have held true in Trump’s mind all along. For instance, during his gleefully admitted (on tape) history of habitual carnal assault, he somehow must have viewed himself as ‘saving’ damsels by (as he puts it) “grab[bing]” them. Likewise, while perpetrating the 34 felony counts on which he’s been duly convicted, he must have pegged himself as pillaging the village to ‘save’ it.
More dots connect. In effect, Trump dons the mantle of some above-the-law screed that’s been apocryphally (though not inaptly) attributed to an inspirer of Napoleon, King Louis XIV. Namely, “L’Etat, c’est Moi” (“The Nation is Me”).
The Sun King’s successor no doubt saw France’s sun setting: Louis XV supposedly sighed, “Apres moi, le deluge” (“After me, the flood”). Suffice to conclude: if you’re not building an ark, you haven’t been paying attention to some highly germane past prologue.
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