Trump appears to channel Napoleon in vision for executive authority: 'He who saves his Country does not violate any Law'

CNN  — President Donald Trump on Saturday offered a cryptic, one-sentence 
insight into what appears to be the guiding philosophy behind the first 
weeks of his presidency — and his expansive and unprecedented efforts to 
reshape the use of executive authority.

“He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” Trump claimed in a 
social media post, now pinned atop his profile.

Trump has dramatically reimagined the scope of his executive power at the 
start of his second term, issuing scores of executive actions. The efforts 
have been bolstered by the administration’s implicit confidence in its 
capacity to defend itself from legal challenges as Trump, in part, sought 
to remake the judiciary during his first term.

Still, Trump’s extraordinary attempts to expand the power of the executive 
branch have hit legal roadblocks in recent days. Dozens of court cases 
have swiftly challenged Trump’s policies and prompted judges to put on 
hold some of the implementation to determine whether the moves are legal. 
The lawsuits include challenges to stopping federal foreign aid, firing 
federal workers, ending government programs and even closing agencies 
altogether.

Trump’s Saturday social media post is likely to have echoes in court — and 
government attorneys defending his policy decisions against more than 60 
lawsuits are arguing to protect and expand executive power.

The court cases so far have prompted lawyers from the Justice Department 
to argue that Trump’s power as president shouldn’t be limited within the 
executive branch and shouldn’t be tied up in the federal judiciary, 
especially as he makes decisions around the federal workforce and 
spending. Several of the cases have set up the Trump administration to 
attempt to strike down congressional authority, especially over spending 
and mechanisms that Congress put in place in the past to check the 
executive’s authority.

Some of the cases prime the Trump administration for an explicit clash 
with Congress’ appropriation power, and many look at the Constitution’s 
outlines for the office of the president.

One fast-moving, early notable case is about the president’s power over an 
independent watchdog for federal workers, called the Office of Special 
Counsel. Trump fired that official weeks ago, only to have a court 
reinstate him quickly. On Sunday, the Trump administration pushed the case 
to the Supreme Court for emergency review. It becomes the first dispute 
before the justices for this administration to test the boundaries of 
executive power.

The swift pace of firings appears designed to force the Supreme Court’s 
hand, in the same way Trump appears eager to challenge other long-standing 
legal norms such as birthright citizenship and the president’s power to 
pause spending.

Acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris on Wednesday told Senate Democrats 
the Justice Department “intends to urge the Supreme Court to overrule” a 
1935 precedent that allows Congress to create protections for certain 
federal officials so they cannot be fired without cause. In the Trump 
administration’s view, those protections prevent “the president from 
adequately supervising principal officers in the executive branch who 
execute the laws on the president’s behalf.”

In a letter to Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, the top Democrat on the Senate 
Judiciary Committee, Harris wrote that her office would no longer defend 
the constitutionality of for-cause removal provisions for the Federal 
Trade Commission, the National Labor Relations Board and the Consumer 
Product Safety Commission.

“The department,” Harris wrote, “has concluded that those tenure 
protections are unconstitutional.”

Hampton Dellinger, the government’s special counsel, is one of several 
independent officials who are fighting dismissal by the White House. In a 
lawsuit filed in federal court in Washington, DC, last week, Dellinger 
pointed to the 1935 decision in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States as a 
“binding Supreme Court precedent” that he asserted should bar his firing 
by the president.

Trump’s most recent significant test of executive authority, of course, 
was in his criminal January 6, 2021, case, where he sought and earned from 
the high court immunity from prosecution for official actions taken while 
in office.

“The president is not above the law,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in 
that decision. “But Congress may not criminalize the president’s conduct 
in carrying out the responsibilities of the executive branch under the 
Constitution.”

The quote posted by Trump nearly matches one that appeared in a 1970 movie 
about French emperor and military leader Napoleon Bonaparte, whose 
ambitions included attempts to expand French territory. Trump has 
indicated a desire to annex Canada and Greenland.

“President Trump has raised an issue that is as old as the republic: Does 
the president have the authority to disregard a law if necessary to 
respond to a threat to the nation’s security?” conservative attorney John 
Yoo, an advocate of exploring the boundaries of presidential power, told 
CNN.

“The question is, even if such a prerogative power exists, whether the 
circumstances today are so dire that justify its use. I don’t think so, 
but the president has access to greater information, much of it secret or 
classified, than the public does. I tend to think that President Trump, as 
he often does, is raising the question even though he does not intend to 
go this far,” he said.

The president’s post prompted muted blowback from some key Democratic 
lawmakers, even as the Democratic Party has struggled to land unified 
messaging in the wake of Trump’s 2024 victory.

“Spoken like a true dictator,” Sen. Adam Schiff of California, a member of 
the Senate Judiciary Committee, wrote alongside Trump’s post.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat who is also a member of that 
committee, offered a more resigned take on the Trump administration’s 
latest actions, including last week’s resignation of the top prosecutor in 
Manhattan and other senior officials over the Justice Department’s order 
to halt the prosecution of New York City Mayor Eric Adams on corruption 
charges.

“This is just another day in the Trump administration. Costs are up. Chaos 
is up, and yes, corruption is up. They have literally taken the mayor of 
New York City, who was facing and is facing serious charges of bribery, 
which were going to be expanded, and they have turned him into their own 
political pawn,” Klobuchar told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union” on 
Sunday.

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/16/politics/trump-executive-authority-
napoleon-post/index.html