The Criminal appears to endorse political assassinations(?) in his latest social media posting

Well, that's certainly one way to make news.

That would be either convicted felon Donald Trump somehow stumbling across a Napoleon quote popular in far-right terrorist circles or someone—looking at you, ketamine boy—posting it to his account on his behalf.

Most people who are familiar with the quote know it as Napoleon's declaration that ending French democracy to install himself as dictator was legal because He Said So. Even if you didn't know that, the expression is self-explanatory; crimes committed with the intent of "saving the country" don't count as crimes after all.

As you can guess, both the quote and its many variations are endorsed primarily by would-be and actual terrorists.

You might also know the sentiment Adolf Fking Hitler, or more recently from Richard Nixon, who attempted to brush off brazen corruption with an insistence that "if a president does it," it's "not illegal." Closely related and more recent would be the ticking bomb scenario, an assertion used to justify the U.S. torture of war prisoners during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars because, the theory went, if that torture produced information that could thwart a new act of violence then who the hell cares how many innocent cab drivers or distant relatives are beaten, tortured, or, in the hypotheticals of the day, watch their child's testicles be crushed by a state-sanctioned torturer for the sake of loosening their parents' lips.

Mostly, though, it's the sentiment and quote used by white supremacists to justify acts of mass violence against supposed enemies. If murdering this or that person will "save the country," then doesn't that make the murderer a hero?

That was the supposition of Luigi Mangione, who executed a health insurance executive while justifying it as a moral action needed to bring accountability to elites and institutions who had plainly risen above the need to follow laws at all.

The question at hand, then, is whether Trump or the Fake Trump posting to his account means the sentiment as justification for rank criminality by himself and his fascist foot soldiers...

Or if The Criminal means it as what his white supremacist followers understand it to be, and what his now-pardoned seditious conspirators in the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers have premised their entire organizations around: The theory that they are allowed to do violent crimes by virtue of supporting Dear Leader.

The catch here: It doesn't matter what The Criminal meant. Tweet out a dictator-premised, neo-Nazi cherished quote asserting themselves to be above the law and you're going to get ten thousand loners with rifles reading that statement, thinking quietly to themselves for a moment, and then glancing towards their favorite rifles.

That is why political leaders who are not, ahem, felonious rapist shitbags know to steer very very clear from arguments that crimes can be "good" if the crimes are meant to benefit their own political party. Because they know that the sentiment, by definition, goes both ways.

If a political figure is not bound by laws and is allowed to commit crimes, it only follows that his political opponents are similarly not bound by laws and are allowed to commit crimes against him.

That's not a door that any non-shittacular non-drug-addled non-brainworm-riddled public figure ever wants to open. It's only those who both aspire to dictatorship and who, either erroneously or not, believe that they will have a monopoly on the resulting violence.

It would be nice, perhaps, if the White House Press Corps took a bit of time being used to cower about what the Gulf of Mexico ought to be called and instead applied it to asking Donald what he meant here. Did he know that he quoted a sentiment widely used by mass shooters, "race war" proponents, dictators, seditionists, and all others who back violence for the sake of "saving" their own visions of what a country ought to be?

Let's pretend the man is not dementia-addled but is, in fact, fully cognizant of his own statements. Does this mean he's now supporting political violence broadly? Only violence perpetrated by his own "allies," self-declared or not? Or does it only apply to nonviolent crimes like ending national cancer research and nuclear safety programs so that Druggy Von Horseboy can get a larger tax cut?

Who gets to do these crimes, Donald? You're going to have to spell this out much more concretely or people are going to take your statement to mean things you didn't intend.