Former FBI counterterrorism official Frank Figliuzzi on February 17, 2025 (Image: Screengrab via MSNBC / YouTube)
Over the weekend, President Donald Trump appeared to quote Napoleon Bonaparte on social media, when he wrote: "He who saves his country does not violate any law." A post to his Truth Social platform reposted a user's post that included an image of Napoleon on horseback with that same text.
But according to Frank Figliuzzi -- a former top counterterrorism official at the FBI -- that quote is apocryphal, and historians haven't been able to tie it directly to Napoleon. Figliuzzi noted that the quote was more recently made famous by white supremacist terrorist Anders Behring Breivik, who carried out the worst mass murder in Norwegian history.
In 2011, Breivik murdered 77 people in Oslo in a car bombing and a mass shooting, the latter of which killed mostly young people in their late teens and early twenties attending a summer camp. Breivik included the quote roughly halfway through his 1500-page manifesto, which proclaimed that European society was in decline due to feminism and multiculturalism.
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During a Monday segment on MSNBC, Figliuzzi opined that Trump does not personally have firsthand knowledge of Napoleonic or Norwegian history, and may have instead surrounded himself with people who subscribe to Breivik's ideology.
"[Trump] occasionally likes to take a grenade out and throw it on the floor to see what happens. I'll tell you what happens when you play with a live grenade and toss it on the floor. Eventually it explodes," Figliuzzi said. "And the only question for us is whether it's going to explode back on Trump or explode and hurt the rest of us. And my money is on both ... People are going to get hurt and eventually it will blow back on Trump."
"Now our president is quoting that white supremacist, neo-Nazi murderer. If you voted for that, you you really need to question whether you're American anymore," he added. "Someone is handing him this story, this quote, and we need to figure out who keeps spoon-feeding him the white supremacy, white terrorist philosophy.
Watch Figliuzzi's remarks below, or by clicking this link.