This two-part essay explores the potential course of President Donald Trump’s second term. Based on Trump’s antecedents and moves he has made two months into his current tenure, the essay anticipates an increasingly illiberal, Bonapartist shift that may lead to tenure elongation or even self-perpetuation, if unchecked. Part 1 of the essay explored the history of Bonapartism, to contextualize Trump’s authoritarian impulses. This concluding part examines the Bonapartist echoes in Trumpism and its potential to accelerate global democratic recession.
By Chudi Okoye
A poignant moment came at the close of the U.S. Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia on 17 September 1787, one that has endured. As the delegates departed, Elizabeth Willing Powel, a prominent member of the Philadelphia upper class and an influential salonnière who hosted the likes of George Washington, reportedly approached Benjamin Franklin, a Founding Father and conference luminary, wondering about the outcome. She is said to have asked him: “Well, Doctor, what have we got? A republic or a monarchy?” Franklin’s reply was pointed and prescient: “A republic, if you can keep it.” It was a weighty response, especially from a revered elder statesman in his twilight years. Franklin—a writer, scientist, inventor, diplomat, printer, publisher, and political philosopher—was 81 at the time and would die less than three years later, his warning reverberating down the ages.
While the exact phrasing of that exchange has long been debated, the moment itself is well-documented in contemporaneous and subsequent accounts. It has become a canonical anecdote in America’s national narrative, a reminder that the republic’s survival depends on the vigilance of its people.
The anecdote is often used as a warning about the fragility of democracy, a system of government that imposes on the domineering impulses of men. The story encapsulates the tension between the ideals of democracy and the vulnerabilities that allow for the erosion of those ideals. We saw this in the first part of this essay in which I traced the roots of Bonapartism and its historical parallels, to contextualize Donald Trump’s increasing pursuit of personalized power and attempts to dominate U.S. governing institutions. I argued that his illiberal shift echoes the patterns of 19th-century French coups by Napoleon Bonaparte and Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, both of whom overthrew republican governments to establish autocratic empires. That first installment recalled Karl Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, a major work dissecting the societal forces and social conditions that enabled the authoritarian ascendancy of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte. I also broadened the historical scope in that earlier segment, tracing Bonapartist tendencies from ancient Rome to 20th and 21st-century examples like Weimar Germany, Argentina, the Philippines, Hungary, Brazil, and Russia, demonstrating a recurring pattern of democratic decay where leaders used institutional mechanisms to subvert democracy itself.
In the concluding part of this essay, I will examine the Bonapartist echoes in President Donald Trump’s policy moves and personal actions, as his second term unfolds, posing the ominous question of what America’s authoritarian drift portends for global democratic governance.
Bonapartist Echoes in Trumpism
History may not repeat itself precisely, but it certainly echoes. On 9 November 2016, exactly 217 years after Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup of 1799, the world awoke to Donald Trump’s first election as U.S. president. The Bonapartist parallel runs even deeper, in the political movement surrounding Trump—grandly dubbed ‘Trumpism’—which mirrors the later ascent of Napoleon’s nephew, Louis-Napoléon, in 19th-century France. It is a comparison many ignore, favoring more sensational references to Hitler. Trump and Bonaparte, though born apart and facing different historical contexts, display an eerie resemblance in their personae and political tactics: each a mercurial and demagogic figure decrying the extant conditions of their time—even exaggerating the severity, promising national restoration, leveraging populist rhetoric, exploiting institutional weaknesses, and embodying a new form of authoritarianism within a nominally democratic framework.
Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte emerged stronger after the 1848 revolution in France, his path to power paved in part by his earlier failures. He had tried to seize power through coup attempts at Strasbourg (1836) and Boulogne (1840), but both were badly botched: the first ending when a drunken general in his ragtag band defected mid-plot, the second collapsing as his borrowed imperial eagle flew away and he was shot in the arm before being arrested. These farcical misadventures, which made him a laughingstock among Parisian elites (much like Trump would later be mocked in U.S. liberal media), taught him a crucial lesson: military adventurism without mass support was doomed.
Bonaparte’s earlier coup attempts had failed, leading to exile and imprisonment, but they also refined his tactics and burnished his myth, especially among the common people. Behind bars, he abandoned military adventurism for political tactics, honing his populist persona through writings like The Extinction of Pauperism, in which he cast himself as both heir to Napoleonic glory and champion of the working class. By the time revolution broke out in 1848, he had transformed humiliation into legend: the imprisoned prince became a symbol of persecuted virtue, the last man standing who embodied national glory, social reform, and decisive action. The once-ridiculed conspirator now posed as a martyr for national renewal. Bonaparte’s reinvention was so complete that rural peasants defiantly hung portraits of ‘Napoleon the Small’ (Napoleon le Petit, an epithet his opponent, Victor Hugo, had coined to mock him) beside images of Christ, turning caricature into veneration. Not unlike the cult of personality surrounding Trump, especially following what seemed like his attempted assassination in the lead-up to the November 2024 election, about which I offered my thoughts here. Capitalizing on popular discontent, Bonaparte railed against corrupt elites, particularly those in the Directory, the governing body of the First French Republic, and cast himself as the savior of a fractured republic. His appeal to those nostalgic for Napoleonic grandeur finds an echo in Trump, who has conjured an idealized past with his repurposed slogan, ‘Make America Great Again’.
Like Bonaparte, Trump had been plotting his rise long before his electoral breakthrough. For decades, he flirted with presidential runs, honing a public persona that weaponized conspiracy theories (most notoriously his birther lie targeting Barack Obama) and framed opponents as existential threats to America. His 2016 campaign was no political debut but the culmination of a years-long project to channel resentment and grievance into power. And like Bonaparte, he ascended through democratic means, mobilizing populist anger to secure victory, only to subvert the very institutions that legitimated his rule.
Bonaparte’s path to power was marked by a strategic manipulation of legal and institutional processes. As president of the Second Republic, he systematically undermined parliamentary authority, consolidating power through a December 1851 self-coup, dissolving the Assembly, arresting opponents, and imposing martial law. He then legitimized his actions through a January 1852 plebiscite (a tactic borrowed from his uncle Napoleon I) which approved a new constitution granting him dictatorial powers. By December 1852, another plebiscite ratified his transition to Emperor Napoleon III.
For his part, though soundly defeated in the November 2020 election (Joe Biden won 51.3% of the popular vote and 306 Electoral College votes to Trump’s 232), Trump refused to concede, falsely questioned the results, and sought to overturn the certification of the election. He pressured state officials to ‘find’ votes for him, mounted numerous legal challenges—filing over 60 failed lawsuits—while stoking anger among his supporters with baseless claims of fraud. His rhetoric contributed to the 6 January 2021 insurrection, when a mob stormed the U.S. Capitol to disrupt the electoral count. Having failed in his efforts to subvert the election, Trump refused to attend Biden’s inauguration, becoming the first outgoing president in over 150 years to do so. His actions reflected a deep disregard for constitutional norms and a willingness to undermine democracy in the pursuit of personal power.
Even after leaving office, Trump relentlessly undermined his successor’s legitimacy while tightening his grip on the Republican Party, transforming it into a personal vehicle for his political resurrection. This mirrored Louis-Napoléon’s strategy after his failed coup attempts in 1836 and 1840, when he spent years carefully cultivating a populist base and loyal following before winning the 1848 presidential election. Both leaders mastered the art of coalition-building among contradictory factions: Bonaparte drew strength from sections of the military whilst presenting himself as a restorer of order to urban conservatives terrified of socialist revolution, and to disaffected rural peasants yearning for stability; Trump, in turn, united white Christian nationalists, alienated blue-collar workers, pro-deregulation plutocrats, and far-right ideologues, many embedded in the media landscape. Both thrived on cultural grievances, presenting themselves as bulwarks against encroaching radicalism: Bonaparte against the ‘red menace’ of Parisian socialists, Trump against the specter of ‘woke progressivism.’ Crucially, both understood the power of using the media to amplify their grievances, whether through Bonaparte’s subsidized newspapers or Trump’s dominance of conservative cable news and social media.
Ideological Roots and Contagion
While Bonaparte and Trump employed similar tactics to achieve power, they differ in their approach to ideology and governance. Bonaparte was a product of a dynastic tradition, intellectually and ideologically rooted with a coherent vision for government, whereas Trump operates more on impulse and political instinct, relying on a loosely bound coalition of grievances rather than a structured ideological framework. Compared to Bonaparte, Trump seems more like a philistine. Marx stated in his preface to the second edition of The Eighteenth Brumaire that he intended to show how circumstances allowed “a grotesque mediocrity” like Bonaparte “to play a hero’s part” in France. That description of Bonaparte is debatable, but it is far less so in the case of Trump. This point is crucial in assessing Trump’s potential contagion, particularly in fledgling democracies where the absence of ideological coherence makes his brand of populism easier to imitate and deploy.
Bonaparte’s political philosophy was not shallow or contrived; rather, it was the product of deep reflection and systematic articulation. Classically educated (like his uncle, Napoleon, who engaged intellectuals like Laplace and Goethe), trained as an officer in the Swiss Army, and well-versed in Napoleonic military doctrine, he authored works such as Napoleonic Ideas, Political Reveries, and Political and Military Considerations on Switzerland—each advancing his vision for governance. His ideal? A state “strong without despotism, free without anarchy, and independent without conquest.” His earlier cited work, The Extinction of Pauperism, laid out an economic vision that sought to provide stability and ownership to the working class, reflecting his attempts to reconcile popular sovereignty with social order. His History of Julius Caesar was as much a historical study as it was a political project—an implicit defense of his own leadership, drawing a parallel between himself and a figure who had risen to power through a blend of military prowess, popular support, and institutional restructuring. Even in exile, he remained engaged with intellectual debates, publishing scientific articles on electromagnetism in British journals. His breadth of study made him not only a political actor but also a theorist of governance, military strategy, and social transformation. His appeal was broad—uniting leftist workers, rural peasants, and conservative landowners under a structured political program.
Trump, by contrast, lacks a comparable ideological foundation. His ascent is less about a coherent vision for governance and more about instinct, grievance, and nostalgia for a past order. Unlike Bonaparte, who built his movement on the principles of universal suffrage and national interest, Trumpism is animated by cultural resentment, an aversion to globalization, and a rejection of established norms. Trump’s political appeal is not derived from a structured set of policies or an intellectual tradition but from an ability to channel discontent into political momentum. His movement thrives on contradictions—he decries globalization while embracing corporate tax cuts, appeals to working-class anxieties while courting billionaires, and claims to defend democracy while undermining its institutions. These inconsistencies do not weaken his appeal; rather, they allow disparate factions to project their own beliefs onto him, creating an amorphous but potent coalition.
Yet, despite its ideological incoherence, Trumpism is reshaping American politics. It has transformed the Republican Party into a vehicle not for traditional conservatism but for a broader illiberal movement, defined by what it opposes rather than what it supports. While Trump himself lacks a firm ideological bearing and is dismissed by some as a buffoonish megalomaniac motivated more by monetizing his office than molding an authoritarian state, his ideologically driven allies are busy laying the groundwork for a radical reconfiguration of American governance. For instance, as I showed in a previous essay, the Supreme Court, in its 2024 ruling on presidential immunity, embraced a maximalist vision of executive authority, echoing the Bonapartist impulse toward a strongman unbound by traditional democratic constraints. Again, as I depicted in another essay, the Heritage Foundation, an influential conservative think tank, has enshrined this vision in its Project 2025, a sweeping manifesto that calls for dismantling the administrative state and centralizing power in the hands of the presidency. This project, with its unitary executive theory, seeks to strip the civil service of its independence, turning federal agencies into instruments of partisan loyalty, much like Bonaparte’s consolidation of power in 19th-century France.
Among Trump’s acolytes, figures like J.D. Vance, his vice president, provide the ideological scaffolding that Trump himself lacks. As I demonstrated in a previous piece, Vance has flirted with national conservatism, a movement hostile to liberal democracy and enamored with reactionary, even monarchical, governance. He has cited Carl Schmitt, the Nazi-affiliated theorist of executive supremacy, and finds intellectual kinship with Michael Anton, a disciple of Leo Strauss, whose elitist critique of liberalism has influenced many on the radical right. On a trip to Germany in February, Vance accused Europe of suppressing “free speech,” for monitoring the activities and rhetoric of far-right parties like Alternative for Germany (AfD). Meanwhile, Trump’s influential adviser and major financier, the tech-right billionaire Elon Musk, who heads his Department of Government Efficiency, has been accused on several occasions of making Nazi or fascist Roman salutes. Even more alarming is Trump deputy Stephen Miller’s claim in February that the president was “elected by the entire nation” and thus alone embodies “the whole will of democracy.” This grossly distorts Rousseau’s concept of ‘general will’ (volonté générale) which emphasizes collective deliberation, not unchecked power. More crucially, the Constitution vests that will in Congress, not a president installed by the Electoral College without a popular vote majority.
These ideological currents suggest that while Trump may operate on instinct, he is far from intellectually adrift. Rather, he is surrounded by ideologues with an agenda, one that seeks to dismantle the guardrails that have historically constrained executive overreach.
The gradual erosion of democratic norms in Trump’s America—through bureaucratic restructuring, excessive use of Executive Orders (akin to military decrees), thus usurping Congress, assault on the judiciary, media and academia, the mainstreaming of illiberal ideology—mirrors Bonaparte’s subversion of the French Republic. What began as an unconventional political insurgency has metastasized into a systematic effort to remake American governance in a way that could endure beyond Trump’s personal reign. Whether America resists its own Eighteenth Brumaire remains an open question. The outlook is foggy, redolent of ‘Brumaire,’ the second month of autumn in France’s revolutionary calendar, which means ‘the foggy month.’ The lessons of history suggest that authoritarian transitions, whether built on a coherent ideology or populist grievance, often leave lasting scars on the democratic fabric they seek to upend. France itself struggled with its legacy of Bonapartism for nearly a century, cycling through multiple republics, empires, and authoritarian regimes. Even after Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte was deposed in 1870 and the Third Republic established, democratic consolidation remained extremely fragile, illustrating the profound difficulty of shaking off the imprint of strongman rule.
In the end, the greatest threat of Trumpism is not merely its impact on American democracy, but its viral adaptability, a likely blueprint for aspiring autocrats in fragile states. Unlike Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte’s structured, theory-based dictatorship, Trumpism thrives on resentment, opportunism, and emotional appeal, offering a playbook for illiberal populism that can take root in fledgling democracies without America’s constitutional guardrails. The United States, fortified by its founding memories—including Benjamin Franklin’s prescient warning, “A republic, if you can keep it”—may yet resist this proto-Bonapartist drift. But if even the world’s oldest constitutional democracy can be shaken by demagogic subversion, what hope for nations without its entrenched institutions or deep democratic traditions? As America wavers, so too does the global democratic order, emboldening authoritarians and accelerating the erosion of liberal democracy worldwide.
