When a president’s words echo a killer

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This article was published 21/02/2025 (288 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When people tell you something, even cryptically, pay attention.

When a president of the United States tells you something, especially if it’s cryptic, pay even more attention.

On Feb. 15, U.S. President Donald Trump posted on his Truth Social account “He who saves his country does not violate the law.” He also posted the quote on X, and the White House X account retweeted it.

There was a fair amount of discussion about what Trump meant: was he saying that he felt he was above the law, because he felt that he was taking actions to save the United States? Was he threatening some future action? What, exactly, was he telegraphing by sending out a saying most often attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, who toppled French democracy in 1799 to proclaim himself emperor of France?

There’s plenty to consider in that isolated quote.

But what’s probably more chilling is a more recent use of those exact words.

The saying was used as justification for mass murder by a neo-Nazi in a manifesto posted online in 2011.

And not just any neo-Nazi: Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 people in a pair of attacks in Norway, first killing eight people in downtown Oslo with a fertilizer bomb, and then shooting 69 people, most of them teenagers, at a summer camp on the island of Utoya. Convicted in 2012 for the murders, his views have not mellowed: he entered a 2022 parole hearing with a Nazi-style salute.

It’s even more alarming when you consider the very public support being given by Trump’s main henchman and confidante Elon Musk to Germany’s neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany (AfD) Party.

“Only AfD can save Germany, end of story,” Musk said during a livestream on X with Alice Weidel, AfD’s leader. “People really need to get behind AfD, otherwise things are going to get very, very much worse in Germany.”

U.S. Vice-President JD Vance also met with Wiedel during his recent travels to Germany and the Munich security conference — Vance chose not to meet with Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor.

So is it a comment towards fascism, or is it a suggestion that Trump feels he is some sort of emperor, above normal laws?

Well, Musk also seems to support the imperial version of Trump, saying in a Fox News interview, “If the will of the president is not implemented and the president is representative of the people, that means the will of the people is not being implemented and that means we don’t live in a democracy, we live in a bureaucracy.” In other words, the American constitution and its structure for the division of powers is null and void, and the will of the president is absolute.

One of the problems in the end is the question of who knows for sure what Trump meant?

Trump often posts, and says, inaccurate, factually confused and peculiar things online, sometimes looking more like in-the-moment, stream-of-consciousness ramblings than anything else. On Tuesday, for example, he said that Ukraine shouldn’t have started a war with Russia — even though Russia started the war by invading Ukraine.

In some ways, he seems like a blank slate — repeating whatever he’s heard as truth because it’s been spouted by the latest coterie that surrounds him.

It may even have been a quote Trump ran into somewhere and felt that, by citing it, he’d be compared to Napoleon.

But it seems more than just sloppy to quote words used by a neo-Nazi mass murderer to justify the slaughter of 77 people, including children.

Unless, of course, that’s exactly what you intended to do.