For the Last Time, Donald Trump Isn’t the Modern-Day Julius Caesar

One thing I have discovered is that people really love to directly equate Donald Trump with various historical figures from the ancient world. As I discuss in this article from December 2019, Trump’s evangelical supporters are constantly comparing him to Cyrus the Great, claiming that he is God’s vessel appointed to fulfill God’s will by enacting conservative policies. Meanwhile, people who do not like Trump seem to habitually joke about Donald Trump being Caligula or Nero.

Both Trump’s supporters and his fiercest enemies, though, love to compare him to one man in particular: Julius Caesar. This obsession with equating Trump with figures from ancient history annoys me because it inevitably leads to the distortion of history to suit the needs of the present.

Donald Trump and Julius Caesar

Of all the figures from ancient history that Trump has been equated with, Julius Caesar seems to be the most prominent. The comparison between Donald Trump and Julius Caesar is often made by Trump’s supporters. For instance, here is an opinion article from the right-wing media outlet The Daily Caller titled “Donald Trump Is America’s Julius Caesar” that declares:

“Every so often in history a man comes along who overthrows a corrupt elite and resets the political establishment. We live in such a time. In our time that man is Donald Trump… Julius Caesar played the same role in Roman history two thousand years ago.”

Ironically, many critics of Trump are drawing the exact same comparison, albeit from a markedly different angle. While Trump supporters see Trump as Julius Caesar in a good way, critics of Trump see Trump as Caesar in a bad way: as an ambitious tyrant who is slowly destroying a republican system of government.

In June 2017, there was even a major stage adaptation of the famous tragedy Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare directed by Oskar Eustis that portrayed Julius Caesar as quite recognizably Donald Trump—complete with mop of blond hair, a dark suit, and an absurdly long red tie.

Although the comparison between Trump and Caesar was mostly played for laughs, the production drew extensive controversy and press coverage for its portrayal of the Trumpian Caesar’s bloody assassination. Many claimed that the play was advocating for Donald Trump’s assassination. I’m not so sure that press coverage was entirely warranted, since, if you know how Julius Caesar ends, you know it isn’t exactly a play that condones assassination.

ABOVE: Photograph of actor Gregg Henry as Julius Caesar/Donald Trump in Oskar Eustis’s “Shakespeare in the Park” production of Julius Caesar in June 2017

Debunking the Trump-Caesar connection

Let’s be very clear about two very important things: First of all, the United States is neither the Roman Republic nor the Roman Empire. Sure, there are a few things that the United States has in common with ancient Rome, but there are far more differences than similarities.

We live in a world that is utterly unlike the one in which the Roman Empire arose. For instance, in the Roman Republic, women were not allowed to take part in government, many people owned slaves, the level of technology was very different from what we have today, and political violence was far more common and acceptable than it is in the United States in the present era. (Mind you, as I discuss in this article I published in December 2019, the ancient world wasn’t nearly as violent as it is often portrayed. Nonetheless, compared to the modern United States, it was still a pretty violent place overall.)

Second of all, Donald Trump is not Julius Caesar. In fact, quite frankly, calling Donald Trump “the modern-day Julius Caesar” is an insult to Caesar. Caesar did some terrible things, but he was nonetheless extremely skilled general and strategist, a charismatic and competent leader, and an eloquent writer and speaker. He was known for showing clemency towards his political enemies, for doing things to help the poor at the expense of the rich, and for controversially extending Roman citizenship to members of many Gallic tribes. Caesar, in other words, may have been a tyrant, but he was at least a progressive tyrant.

ABOVE: A rather unfortunate image that someone made by photoshopping Trump’s face onto a portrait of Julius Caesar

Donald Trump, on the other hand, is none of these things; he is hopelessly incompetent at both political and military strategy; he is boorish; and he is so inept at speaking that half the time he is just spewing garbled nonsense and the other half of the time he is just throwing out random names, phrases, and epithets in desperate attempt to elicit some kind of reaction from his supporters. The very idea of extending citizenship to foreigners is utterly antithetical to Donald Trump’s worldview. Meanwhile, he literally campaigned on the idea that he would throw his political opponent in jail. Finally, as recent events reveal, he seems only capable of giving to charity when legally obligated to.

Donald Trump is not a latter-day Caesar. The best you can argue is that maybe—maybe—Donald Trump is a bit like a degenerate clone made by a group of deranged scientists straight out of a cheesy sci-fi film using random bits of DNA collected from Caesar, a mob boss, and someone’s class idiot—with a bit of Kentucky fried chicken mixed in.

Furthermore, Donald Trump will almost certainly not have a “Brutus.” No Republican senator who is believed by Trump to be his friend is going to lead a conspiracy to assassinate Trump on the Ides of March 2020. I think that the closest thing Donald Trump will ever have to a “Brutus” is probably Michael Cohen. Michael Cohen was Trump’s personal attorney, fixer, and personal friend for years. They were working together long before Trump ever decided to run for president. When faced with the threat of prison, though, Cohen turned on Trump and cooperated with prosecutors.

ABOVE: The Death of Caesar, painted in 1865 by the German Academic painter Karl von Piloty. Donald Trump will almost certainly not be assassinated by being stabbed to death by a conspiracy of senators led by someone he believes to be his friend.

Why people like seeing Donald Trump as Julius Caesar

I think that people like to see Donald Trump as the modern-day equivalent of people like Julius Caesar, Nero, Caligula, and so forth because everyone already knows what ended up happening to Caesar, Nero, and Caligula and the idea that we can know where we are headed—even if the place we are headed is someplace terrible—has tremendous appeal to a lot of people.

I think that people feel this way about Trump especially because Trump is such a volatile and unpredictable figure whose meteoric rise to power seems to utterly defy all the conventional rules of how American politics is supposed to work. In the topsy-turvy world of the Trump administration, it is natural for people to look for some kind of meaning in the midst of all the madness.

Unfortunately, though, this tendency is also dangerous because it leads people to make a lot of false assumptions about how events in the present are unfolding and how future events will continue to unfold. If you assume that Donald Trump is the modern-day version of Julius Caesar, that might lead you to also assume that he is going to inevitably bring an end to democracy as we know it and, if you assume that the end of democracy is inevitable, you might not put forth any effort to protect it. In other words, the death of democracy might become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Comparisons and history

This is not to say that we shouldn’t ever compare any contemporary figure to any historical figure in any way. That would be silly. What I am saying here, though, is that, when drawing historical comparisons, there is a right way and a wrong way to do it. The right way to do it is by making specific, conscientious, and carefully limited comparisons. For instance, you can say, “This specific thing that Trump is doing is similar to this other specific thing that this one historical figure did.”

The wrong way to do it is by making blanket comparisons and directly equating contemporary figures with historical ones. Saying that Trump is the modern-day Julius Caesar, Cyrus the Great, Caligula or whoever else is most decidedly the wrong way of making historical comparisons.

Thankfully, despite all the rampant comparisons between Trump and Caesar, Trump and Cyrus, Trump and Caligula, and so forth, there are at least a few other people out there pointing out the insanity of this trend. For instance, this article by Zachary Karabell, published in The Washington Post, rather memorably concludes:

“Certainly, excavating the history of the Roman republic can help us understand the multiple pathways the present offers, but not with any clairvoyance about specific outcomes. Some of the challenges of that age are recurring human ones: how to balance individual freedoms with collective needs, determining what the rights and responsibilities of citizens are and what powers government should have. That’s a far cry, however, from using ancient Rome as a road map, template or crystal ball for identifying latter-day Ciceros and Caesars. It can be comforting to choose false certainty over real uncertainty, even if it says we are on a road to ruin. But whatever our apprehensions, our republic’s next chapter remains to be written; ancient Rome’s conclusion lies in the past.”

In other words, we can learn to better understand the present by studying the history of Julius Caesar and the late Roman Republic, but we should not assume that there is any kind of direct one-to-one correspondence.

ABOVE: Cicero Denounces Catiline, painted between 1882 and 1888 by the Italian painter Cesare Maccari