Trump’s Napoleon phase

A different look at the Bonapartist analogy

“Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the Buonapartes. But I warn you, if you don’t tell me that this means war, if you still try to defend the infamies and horrors perpetrated by that Antichrist—I really believe he is Antichrist—I will have nothing more to do with you and you are no longer my friend.”

Such are the words of Anna Pavlovna Scherer that open Tolstoy’s War and Peace, amply indicative of this Russian society lady’s suffering from an acutely severe case of Bonaparte Derangement Syndrome (another, doubtless very different “BDS”).

One of the novel’s narrative strands tracks the cycles of Napoleon’s reputation in Russian high society across the first decades of the 1800s. As of 1805, Anna Pavlovna’s words stand for the general feeling among the smart set in Petersburg and Moscow. Napoleon, with his lowly Corsican origins and association with all the satanic and subversive doctrines of revolution in France, would have been an easy candidate for opprobrium in orthodox Tsarist Russia even without the presence in Russian society of a number of aristocratic French émigrés. “Buonaparte” was the “Drumpf” of the time—a refusal to grant Napoleon the title of emperor, and a de haut en bas insistence on the original Italian spelling of his name.

But by 1807, when Napoleon met Alexander at Tilsit to strike an alliance between Russia and France, feelings in the upper reaches of the Russian military and its society had begun to shift accordingly. Napoleon seemed to have proven himself a durable phenomenon, more promising as something to accommodate than as a target for a vituperation that had by this point wearied even its most dedicated exponents.

Boris Drubetskoy, an ambitious young man with a fine sense for the way the winds are blowing, recognizes the shift early:

“I should like to see the great man,” he said, alluding to Napoleon, whom hitherto he, like everyone else, had always called Buonaparte.

“You are speaking of Buonaparte?” asked the general, smiling. Boris looked at his general inquiringly and immediately saw that he was being tested.

“I am speaking, Prince, of the Emperor Napoleon,” he replied. The general patted him on the shoulder, with a smile.

“You will go far,” he said, and took him to Tilsit with him.

But the alliance doesn’t last, of course: by 1812 Napoleon is undertaking his doomed invasion of Russia, and Anna Pavlovna—with Boris Drubetskoy at her side—is back to breathlessly haranguing her guests about “how at Potsdam the impious Bonaparte had stolen the sword of Frederick the Great.” At least Russian high society had grown tired of calling him Buonaparte.

With the inauguration of Donald Trump for a second nonconsecutive term today amid appropriately Russian arctic chill and snow in Washington, D.C., it should be obvious enough that we are reaching the end of something akin to this middle stage when it comes to opinion in the higher reaches of American society toward Trump and his agenda.

We have been through the “Buonaparte” phase—totalizing disdain, opprobrium and “resistance,” backed up by the impression that the insurgent is an illegitimate fluke. We now find ourselves at the Emperor Napoleon phase, in which a significant faction within the highest ranks of the American elite, especially in tech, but to diminishing extents within (respectively) the finance, corporate, legal, entertainment, party-political and media worlds an attitude of self-interested accommodation is now being adopted.

The Boris Drubetskoys de nos jours, Mark Zuckerberg an indicative example, have openly abjured the old progressive-moralist faith of the 2010s and pledge, not quite to join the invaders, but at least to throw open the gates for them. Facebook and Instagram, open cities. Zuckerberg is an extreme case, with the reaction from the media establishment, on the other end of the spectrum of the liberal establishment, being calibrated more in terms of grudging and still disapproving acceptance, rather than open apostasy.

Peter Baker’s column in the Times immediately after the election result summed up this corner’s reaction to the emphatic confirmation of Trumpism as a phenomenon with wide if not preponderant social appeal across lines of class and race:

In her closing rally on the Ellipse last week, Kamala Harris scorned Donald J. Trump as an outlier who did not represent America. “That is not who we are,” she declared.

In fact, it turns out, that may be exactly who we are. At least most of us.

Here, mixed with sour acknowledgement of political reality, is a last little pungent note—“At least most of us”—of liberal self-esteem. At least some of us are still unhappy with this state of affairs. The sentiments of American high liberalism toward the country have long veered between narcissistic optimism—America is as good as I am!—and pessimistic city-on-a-hill Calvinist disdain.

From the unraveling of the federal criminal cases against Trump and the partial dismissal of charges in Georgia, to (as Baker recently described it) a broad feeling of resignation in Washington, to the lack of anything even on the order of Meryl Streep’s 2017 anti-Trump cri de coeur at the 2025 Golden Globes—to say nothing of mass protest—the level of deference toward Trump is unquestionably higher than the first time around across the whole span of America’s “elite institutions.”

In describing the shockingly rapid process by which Trump went from internal exile and political abandonment by both parties, in the wake of the carnival of January 6, 2021—a status which he kept well into 2023—to a yet more emphatic return to the center of American politics, some have seen a different Napoleonic comparison. There was indeed something reminiscent of Napoleon’s escape from Elba and the dawn of the Hundred Days in the rapidity as much of the return as of the collapse of rhetorical and political resistance to it. It calls to mind that old canard about the headlines of the Moniteur universel that supposedly went from calling Napoleon the “Corsican ogre” on 9 March to proclaiming him Imperial and Royal Majesty on the 22. From the slow-motion collapse of the Biden campaign to the doomed, frantic efforts to shore up Kamala Harris’s candidacy, ending with the fateful plane bound from Mar-a-Lago to Washington, the whole chain of events has the quality of a cinematic montage set to In the Hall of the Mountain King.

Meanwhile, the sealing of a ceasefire in Gaza—thanks, by all reports, to the insistence of the incoming Trump team, and not by any special encouragement from the outgoing Biden administration—has been a particularly bitter and disorienting development for the American left, otherwise likely to be a reliable opponent of Trump.

But the Hundred Days lasted only a hundred days, and Trump has already promised internal invasions of several kinds: on illegal migrants, who make up the most shamelessly exploited class of American workers—Guatemalan teenagers regularly losing limbs in Virginia meatpacking plants—as well as on the cultural front, against the bureaucratic apparatuses within the state and civil society (universities, etc.) established to entrench ideas and hiring practices associated with the 2010s project of diversity, equity and inclusion. Depending on how aggressively these are pursued, the possibility of liberal toleration of them will be more or less quickly exhausted, and the Jacksonian battles of the first Trump term, between the state and its political allies and the partisan insurgents, will resume on a more even level.

It is only likely that the current “Emperor Napoleon” phase will, with Trump inaugurated, give way to a “Bonaparte” phase, indicating renewed rhetorical opposition from the liberal establishment and the zones within the economy and culture where it retains predominance, but of a more steely and less hysterical variety. The horizons of this phase, the intensity of the renewed opposition, remain unclear—but there will be no burning of Moscow by its inhabitants this time to stop the invaders’ advance.