Trump the Little

Le Petit Prince on the Potomac

In 1852, from his position of exile on the Channel Island of Guernsey, the French author Victor Hugo—newly proscribed by the government of Louis Napoleon, who had overthrown the French Second Republic in a coup d’état in December of the previous year—penned a blistering political pamphlet, Napoleon the Little, in which he strove to record the truths about the lesser Napoleon’s reign.

Deprived of political power and banished from his homeland, Hugo knew that he could not hope to directly influence events in France in the near term—least of all when the would-be “emperor” Napoleon III (nephew of the more famous Napoleon) had silenced the press. The most Hugo could do, therefore, was to try to tell the truth as best he could—for the sake of future generations if not the present.

Reading the book today, as a member of one of those future generations, and more specifically, as an American in 2025—it’s hard not to see a sort of family resemblance between the usurping self-declared emperor of France in 1852 and our own would-be king on the Potomac today.

It would seem as if there were a kind of natural life history common to all tin-pot tyrannies; a certain coup-prone personality that repeats itself under different masks and names throughout the centuries. It has been said, after all, that history often echoes, or at the very least rhymes.

Let me count the ways:

He seems to have no problem violating his oath to uphold the Constitution.

During the short period when the Second French Republic still stood, Louis Napoleon was elected president to a single term in office.

The French Constitution of 1848 did not allow him to run a second time, but rather strictly limited the president to a single term (“we had always been conscious of what a danger a re-eligible president could be to freedom and public morality,” wrote the political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville—who served in Louis Napoleon’s government, before losing office because he refused to go along with the latter’s coup plot; “for it was inevitable that he would, before the end of his term, employ all the vast means of constraint and corruption that our laws and mores grant the head of the executive branch, to obtain his re-election.” (Lawrence trans.)).

Louis Napoleon had sworn an oath to uphold this Constitution. More specifically, he had declared before the Assembly, upon his election, that “I shall regard as enemies of the country all who may endeavour by illegal means to change the form of government which France has established.”

Nonetheless, just a few years later—before his term of four years could expire—he had orchestrated a coup d’état and overthrown the Republic.*

So too, our current president was elected in 2016 to a four-year term in office. He likewise swore an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution, when he entered the White House. But his sworn obligation and word of honor did not appear to stop him from organizing a scheme, four years later, to try to nullify the election and unlawfully cling to power.

Nor has it prevented him four years after that from continuing to periodically entertain the idea of seeking an unconstitutional third term in office. It would appear he places as much weight on constitutional term limits as the future Napoleon III did.

In both cases, part of the incentive to stay in power unlawfully appears to be a dread of public prosecution, should they ever leave office. “[S]candals were approaching, […] the affair of the gold ingots was making a noise […] rather than be one of the vulgar swindlers of the code, you preferred to be one of the great assassins of history!” as Hugo writes in his pamphlet.

So too—one senses that a large part of Trump’s motive to at least contemplate an unconstitutional third term is the fear lest he have to hear the words “Stormy Daniels,” “classified documents,” and “January 6” at his heels once again.

He dreads freedom of thought and the press.

One of Louis Napoleon’s first acts after the coup d’état was to suspend the liberty of the press and to suppress free criticism of his regime. This was an essential buttress of his power. As Victor Hugo writes: “This government feels that it is hideous. It wants no portrait; above all it wants no mirror. Like the osprey it takes refuge in darkness, and it would die if once seen.” And so, “It has imposed silence on the press of France.”

Trump seems to share the soi-disant Emperor’s attitude to journalism. During his stint in office, not only has he sought to sue nearly every prominent mainstream news outlet out of existence, he has also used the leverage of his own regulatory agencies to try to consolidate ownership of major broadcast news outlets in the hands of his political allies.

“But,” Hugo adds, “to silence the press in France was only half-success. It must also be silenced in foreign countries. […] What was to be done? The Belgian journals were attacked through their pockets.”

Here too, history rhymes. Trump this week announced that he has filed a 10 billion dollar lawsuit against the BBC. It would appear that even people across the Atlantic are not to be allowed to hear a frank word about the president; and in order to cloak himself from this scrutiny, he will “attack them through their pockets.”

Our two little emperors’ approach to the press is echoed in their attitude to freedom of thought in the academy.

Both have sought to suppress free inquiry even in the sciences: the Emperor by forcing university professors to take an oath of loyalty; Trump by using the power of the executive to eliminate grant funding and cast a pall of obscurity over now-politically-disfavored topics of research (climate science, vaccines, the effects of social policies on marginalized groups, etc.)

“In all well-regulated States,” as Hugo sarcastically put it, “everything is a public function, even science […] the prediction of a high tide may be seditious; the announcement of an eclipse may be a treason […] a free astronomy is almost as dangerous as a free press.”

There is nothing Trump seems to fear so much as a lamp in the darkness. Thus, inquiry must be stymied; science must be struck dumb; no one must be allowed to go about with the words “climate change” or “vaccine efficacy” on their lips.

“You have placed a bandage on the eyes of France and a gag in her mouth. Why?” Hugo asked. “To accomplish loyal deeds? No, to commit crimes. He who is afraid of the light is doing evil.”

He loves the trappings of power, is swinishly corrupt and a vulgarian at heart.

In writing his withering tract against Napoleon III, Hugo returns time and again to the contrast between the magnitude of the future emperor’s crimes and the moral pettiness, ludicrousness, and smallness of the man himself. “As a dictator he is a buffoon;” he writes; “as emperor, he will be grotesque. […] The meanness of his vices is injurious to the greatness of his crimes.”

So too, Trump the Little always strangely combines the horrific with the absurd—the sublime with the ridiculous. He deports people to secret prisons, where they are tortured for months in isolation from their families—then “jokes” about it in front of the TV cameras as part of an annual “turkey pardoning” ceremony.

He has killed more than a hundred people in illegal boat strikes at sea; yet, in a given day, what he really appears to be most interested in is preening himself before the cameras and finding new ways to satisfy the basest forms of vanity.

“[T]here was a figure of the Republic […] on the coinage,” Hugo writes; “—Monsieur Bonaparte puts the profile of Monsieur Bonaparte in its place.”

“A medal, called the medal of the 2nd of December, is being struck at the Mint, in honour of the manner in which he keeps his oaths.”

So too—Trump has proposed putting his own visage on the currency, in the form of a Trump commemorative coin—expected to feature an image on its obverse side of the president pumping his fist.

This week, his hand-selected committee of loyalists at the Kennedy Center proposed renaming the performing arts center in his honor. As of this writing—the words “The Donald” were already being added to the building’s facade.

“He is fond of tufts, trimmings, spangles, top-knots, and embroiders,” writes Hugo, “of grand words and grand titles, of sound and glitter and all the petty glories and glass beads of power. […] To be despised affects him little: the appearance of respect contents him.”

There is something that lingers in all his actions—even the most repulsive—of smallness and pettiness. He is, as Hugo put it, “a scamp”—and so, has drawn to himself a grand conspiracy of fellow scamps—a “constellation of caitiffs,” as Hugo calls them—every possible variety of trickster and con artist and crook and sharper and walking punchline from days past—George Santos, Roger Stone, Rod Blagojevich; Gulf state autocrats and American sleaze barons; crypto hype-men and narcissistic billionaires: one scamp always seems to recognize another, and to be drawn to Trump’s banner by a kind of magnetic principle.

“Nations never know how rich they are in the product of rascaldom,” Hugo writes. “It is only from such commotions and disarrangements as this that they are enabled to form any idea on the subject.”

“Every adventurer dons an official costume, rests his head on a pillow stuffed with banknotes.”

You can put a scamp in the White House or the Elysée Palace, but you cannot make him any less of a scamp at heart.

In short, Hugo puts it: “although he has committed great crimes, he himself remains paltry.”

The best we can say of such an administration is that “[i]n this government,” as Hugo puts it, “atrocity is corrected and tempered by imbecility.”

I am reminded of Benjamin Wittes’s summation of the first Trump administration in 2017: “malevolence tempered with incompetence.”

He murders, tortures, and deports.

But those crimes and those atrocities are indeed great—however ridiculous their author.

Both would-be emperors deported innocents, tortured people in secret prisons, and murdered in broad daylight. Louis Napoleon gunned down citizens protesting against the coup and exiled dissidents to detention camps in Africa. Trump has put people on planes—in violation of a court order—to a torture prison in El Salvador, where they were not allowed to meet with attorneys or contact their loved ones. He has disappeared people to detention camps in Panama, Ghana, and Eswatini.

“He caused thousands of the deported to rot in the horrible holds of prison ships,” Hugo writes— or in “hovels, each containing a hundred and fifty human beings, under the sun of the tropics […] all these innocent creatures, all these patriots, all these honest people are dying, far from those dear to them, in fever, in misery[.]”

And he has done so boastfully, proudly. He showcases his own atrocities to us on social media—images of men being shaved and maltreated in a foreign prison, to which no court of justice ever sentenced them; images of boats full of civilians being detonated on the open seas and living human forms being consumed in flames.

The administration makes, as Hugo put it, “a parade of its iniquity. Atrocity was not enough; it needed cynicism. To massacre was but the means; to terrify was the aim.”

He hides his atrocities under the mantle of religion.

Louis Napoleon murdered the Second Republic with the blessings of the Pope and the Catholic clergy, many of whom dreaded the secularism of the republic and longed for a return to the monarchy. So too, Trump’s top executioners and hired assassins go about their bloody work with the name of Christ, the Prince of Peace, on their lips.

Pete Hegseth—who has butchered more than 100 people without charge or trial, by means of illegal boat strikes, then joked and boasted about it on social media—notoriously sports a tattoo on his arm of a Crusader motto: “Deus Vult”—generally understood to be a slogan of far-right Christian nationalism.

J.D. Vance—who defends the administration’s crimes on social media and openly declares that he doesn’t “give a shit” if anyone deems these acts of public murder a “war crime”—considers himself a Catholic in good standing—even as the Pope and the American bishops condemn his administration for violating the human rights of immigrants and asylum-seekers.

“[W]hat a government!” as Hugo puts it. “The soutane covers the spurs. The Coup d’État goes to Mass […. I]t is clear enough that it is leading us back to the time of the crusades. Caesar has taken the cross from the Pope. Diex el volt.”

And so, in the process, this government has managed “to compromise at the same time two sacred things,” Hugo writes: “military honour and religious faith, to stain the altar with blood, and the flag with the holy-water sprinkler; to render the soldier ridiculous and the priest more than a little savage […] The present government, a hand bathed in blood steeping a finger in the holy-water font!”

And yet: murder will out. The ocean graves of those 100 souls who were massacred in the administration’s boat strikes will not remain silent. “[A] crowd of human beings, still, icy-cold, terrible, a multitude of human beings already become formless,” writes Hugo, “[…] and who once existed, wrought, and thought, and loved, who had a right to live and have been killed […] Ah, if this is no longer remembered, let us recall it to those who forget!”

“Does God allow and accept such entombments as these? Do not believe it. Some day, […] that trench shall open suddenly, and we shall see rise up one after another […] every corpse with its wound[.]”

His apologists say that a vote absolves all.

“But this government, this horrible government,” as Hugo calls it, “at once hypocritical and stupid; this government which makes you hesitate between a shout of laughter and a sob of agony”—it, too, has its defenders.

Louis Napoleon’s apologists in the 1850s said that—even if he had initially seized power in a coup—he nonetheless held a referendum after the fact, in which a majority of the population ratified his act (albeit at the point of a bayonet).

Likewise, Trump’s apologists claim that, merely because he won the 2024 election, he plainly can do no wrong; any abuse of power is henceforth justified.

When asked on the DealBook Summit stage, for instance, whether Trump is a “fascist”—the Palantir CEO Alex Karp, recently converted to the MAGA banner, squirmed for a while as he dismissed the charge as ridiculous. “He won in a landslide,” Karp insisted—as if fascists had never won elections; as if a single poll taken of the public at one snapshot in time transfixed the absolute morality of events for all future generations.

Yet, “the truths of morality are no more at the mercy of a vote than are the truths of algebra,” Hugo counters. “[…] It is not given to the ballot to make the false become the true and the unjust the just.”

“This vote is the excuse of cowards;” he concludes, “this vote is the buckler of dishonored consciences.”

Why, though, do so many appeal to it? Why does Alex Karp seek by such paltry means to excuse the inexcusable and salve his own “dishonored conscience”?

Why do so many CEOs and billionaires and law firms swear their own cowardly oath of allegiance to Trump; just as so many eminent members of the French establishment took the loyalty pledge to the usurping Emperor in 1851?

Why do CBS News, Disney, the Washington Post editorial page, tech barons who endorsed Kamala Harris just months previously, and thousands of their kind allow themselves to violate their integrity and independence so cravenly?

The answer is simple, in every case: they stood to profit from it.

“Some horrible gangrene of material prosperity is melding public honesty with destruction and rottenness,” Hugo writes. “[W]hat a miserable spectacle is the delight of self-interest and cupidity as they gorge themselves at the trough of the 2nd of December! […] Let us get money: it is ignoble, but faith! it is excellent. A scruple lost is a louis gained; so let us sell our souls at this rate! […] Each has his hand outstretched, all offer themselves for sale. One of these days an assayer of consciences will be appointed, just as there is an assayer of coin.”

“[T]hese same men do not understand”—wrote Hugo—and we say it now to Alex Karp and Jeff Bezos and all their ilk—they do not understand “that the material interest which alone floated amid an immense moral shipwreck would be, after all, but a poor and worthless waif, and that that situation is indeed frightful and monstrous of which it may be said ‘All is saved, except honour.’”

Conclusion

A final word from Hugo:

“And you tell me this can last! No! No! by every drop of blood in every vein, no! It shall not last! Ah, if this did last, it would be in very truth because there would no longer be a God in heaven, nor a France [nor a United States!] on earth!”

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* “It seemed to me very doubtful that such a man, after ruling France for four years, could be sent back into private life,” Tocqueville mordantly recalled in his private memoirs of the period (published only after his death); “that he should agree to go, quite fantastic; even to prevent him, while his mandate lasted, from throwing himself into some dangerous undertaking, seemed tremendously difficult, unless one could find some prospect to charm, or at least to content his ambition.”