Donald Trump as Our President Caligula

Back when I was in college, more years ago than I’d like to consider, one of my majors was Classical History, and I did quite a lot of original research in that field. Then after I graduated and began my doctoral studies in Theoretical Physics, I took a little time to write up some of that work and published several articles in the leading scholarly journals.

My own area of study had been Greek and Hellenistic history, but I naturally picked up a reasonable knowledge of Rome as well, and although decades have passed some of that still remains in my memory.

Like most ancient states, Rome had originally been ruled by kings, but according to legend the last ones were overthrown by Lucius Junius Brutus, who founded the Republic and then had the Roman people swear a mighty oath to never again allow any man to rule them as king.

The republicanism of Brutus was of a very stern type, and while serving as the chief Roman magistrate, he willingly had his own sons and other close relatives executed for plotting to reestablish the monarchy. For many centuries, young Roman children were raised on such harsh patriotic stories, and a deep hatred of monarchy and kings became a central element of Rome’s political culture.

The Roman Republic eventually defeated Carthage in the long Punic Wars of the third century B.C. and then conquered most of the Mediterranean world. This produced a vast inflow of wealth and slaves from Rome’s newly acquired empire, leading to the impoverishment of many ordinary Roman farmers and severe social and economic stresses in Roman society. The eventual consequences were numerous political upheavals, including the murders of popular reformist leaders and even the outbreak of civil wars, with all of this deadly turmoil representing the severe decay of Rome’s republican institutions. The era of the Late Republic saw various periods of dictatorship by victorious military commanders, but all of those leaders always insisted that their rule was strictly temporary and none of them ever dared adopt any monarchical pretensions.

The last and most important of these was Julius Caesar, Rome’s greatest conquering general. After winning a bitter civil war, he became the all-powerful ruler and was eventually proclaimed “dictator for life.”

According to later accounts, his allies soon began repeatedly offering him a crown and although he rejected it on each occasion, fears that he intended to make himself king inspired his assassination in the Senate, with his dozens of killers including many of his own former close friends and allies. Two of these deadly assailants came from the illustrious family of the original Brutus, and their decision to kill Caesar was surely facilitated by the stories they had absorbed of the famous example of their own heroic ancestor.

A new round of bloody civil wars immediately broke out, filling the next dozen years. The ultimate victor was Caesar’s nephew Octavian, who assumed the name Augustus and became the first Roman Emperor, thereby permanently transforming the five century old Roman Republic into an entirely different political system. But Augustus recognized the fierce Roman hatred of monarchy, so he carefully retained all the traditional republican offices and other trappings, and merely called himself the princeps, meaning something like “first citizen.” This is why the early Roman Empire is also known as the Principate.

So although Augustus held unlimited political power during his highly successful forty-year reign, he always treated the Senate and the elected officers of the Roman government with great respect and consideration, seeking to maintain the important fig-leaf that allowed proud Romans to avoid admitting to themselves that their republic had become a monarchy. This same approach was also followed during the twenty-three year reign of his stepson and successor Tiberias.

But then Caligula came to power and all such republican pretenses quickly vanished. His behavior soon became as outrageous and despotic as might have been found in the worst of the decadent Asiatic monarchies that Romans had always so despised.

Caligula declared himself to be a living god and as a sign of his total contempt for Rome’s nominal republican institutions, he announced that he would appoint his horse to the consulship, the highest political office of the Roman government. Later writers claimed he’d had incestuous relationships with his sisters, also exhibiting numerous other extreme sexual misbehaviors so common in absolute monarchies. These historians even reported that his arrogant and erratic behavior often slipped into outright madness.

Whether or not these stories were true, Caligula’s reign was certainly a rather brief one. He came to power at the age of 24 and was then overthrown and killed less than four years later. His wife and infant daughter were slaughtered as well, with the conspirators seeking to exterminate the entire imperial family.

But even leaving aside some of Caligula’s most outrageous personal behavior, a crucial aspect of his short reign was that he unmistakably revealed to even the most gullible and dim-witted Roman citizen that their republican system of government no longer existed. Instead, Rome had been radically transformed into the sort of absolute monarchy that the Roman political culture had always detested, a reality that Augustus and Tiberius had made every effort to conceal.

Or at least that’s what I remember about my Roman history from a distance of more than four decades.

Earlier this year I’d been interviewed by a right-wing British podcaster named Mark Collett, and he’d suggested that Donald Trump seemed an awful lot like Caligula, a historical analogy that I’d strongly endorsed.

Trump obviously hasn’t declared himself a living god nor named his horse to the cabinet, and I’m personally quite skeptical whether any of the Epstein blackmail files show him engaging in any outrageous sexual misbehavior. But our current president has certainly been very wild and erratic in his public statements, his appointments, and his actions, and that was obviously what Collett meant and why I’d agreed with him.

But in many important respects, I think that Trump’s second term has become the reign of President Caligula for different and much deeper reasons. Just as Caligula proved to Romans that their traditional republican system of government no longer existed, I think that the bold, unilateral actions taken by Trump have revealed to all Americans that our own traditional form of constitutional government has been transformed into something very different. Important stages of that transformation had already taken place under several previous presidents, but they had successfully concealed this reality, assisted by the active collusion of the mainstream media. However, Trump has now crudely torn off all those gauzy blindfolds and revealed the truth for everyone to see.

In the aftermath of World War II, a huge wave of decolonization had swept across the world, producing numerous newly independent countries in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. The great prestige of America and its Western allies led most of these to establish constitutional systems of government, including elected parliaments and often independent judiciaries, with everything subject to the rule of law.

Many of these countries soon lapsed into outright dictatorships. But even among those that retained their nominal constitutional structures, most of that intricate system of political and legal governance quickly became a dead letter. Instead, the national leader often simply issued official decrees, proclaiming whatever policies or laws he wanted enacted, with few being willing to challenge him and those critics getting nowhere if they did. Whenever a leader was replaced, whether by semi-democratic means or more frequently by a military coup, his successor followed much the same approach.

So although government policies might sometimes drastically change, the framework under which they were enacted and implemented did not.

The many Latin American countries had been independent for generations, but most of them followed this same pattern of governance, as had the many dictatorships of Central and Eastern Europe throughout the 1920s and 1930s. During the last couple of years of Germany’s democratic Weimar Republic, its elected leaders similarly relied heavily upon emergency presidential decrees, a system that Hitler merely adopted when he came to power, before eventually enshrining this policy into the laws of his new Third Reich as “Führer Directives.”

I remember that decades ago I and my friends would always snicker at the many news stories describing these turbulent Third World countries, whose complex systems of constitutional governance were simply ignored by their leaders, who merely issued emergency presidential decrees whenever they wanted anything done.

Even those countries that had somehow managed to avoid military coups or illegal seizures of power usually trafficked in bare-faced, ridiculous lies as they claimed to be governed by the rule of law. Whenever a new leader came to power, generally after a disputed or outright stolen election, he would usually begin prosecuting all his political enemies, doing so by hook or by crook, while often taking massive bribes for himself and his family members.

Elected officials or other prominent figures from a rival party or from his own who challenged his authority were regularly denounced as traitors in very crude and insulting fashion, and even threatened with death by the leader and his loyal followers. Mysterious killings of these critics occurred frequently enough that such death-threats were usually taken quite seriously.

Given this situation, any such leader would naturally be extremely reluctant to ever allow his political opponents to regain power for fear of what he and his allies might suffer at their hands, so all sorts of outrageous manipulations were applied to prevent any change of political control.

Some of the more egomaniacal leaders would begin declaring themselves to be great geniuses or even renaming more and more of the country and its landmarks for themselves.

Those government officials or civil servants who honestly reported negative developments were quickly fired and replaced by sycophantic successors, who told the leader exactly what he wanted to hear.

Some of the more despotic or ruthless leaders would establish lavishly funded secret police forces, who might regularly snatch real or perceived political opponents off the streets and whisk them away to secret imprisonment centers.

Since the vast majority of parliamentarians had entered politics merely to obtain illicit wealth for themselves and their families, few saw any reason to challenge the leader of their own party, but instead enthusiastically endorsed and praised everything he did, even if his policies were suddenly reversed on a daily or weekly basis. Most of the subservient major media organs would do exactly the same thing.

These erratic and arrogant Third World leaders often adopted ridiculous economic policies and the many problems these produced naturally led to widespread popular grumbling and even threatened the regime’s hold on power. So the leader would eagerly foment foreign confrontations to distract his gullible citizenry, sometimes proposing sweeping annexations or foreign wars, while trying to bully smaller countries into submission.

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