Donald Trump Archives - Tales of Times Forgotten

Here’s What the Costumes and Flags on Display at the Pro-Trump Insurrection Mean

On 6 January 2021, a mob of violent, pro-Trump insurrectionists stormed the United States Capitol building in Washington D.C., forcing both houses of Congress to evacuate. These insurrectionists wanted to force Congress to overturn the vote of electoral college, which voted in favor of Joe Biden becoming the next president of the United States. Thankfully, after several hours of fighting, the rebels were eventually driven out of the Capitol. Congress has now ratified the votes of the electoral college, confirming Joe Biden’s inauguration on 20 January 2021.

Many of the insurrectionists at the Capitol were dressed in unusual costumes and carrying various flags. Many people are confused about why they dressed in this manner and what their costumes signify. Obviously, the real concern here should be the fact that these insurrectionists literally attempted a coup. Nonetheless, I think it is worth examining some of the iconography that was on display in order to get a sense of the kind of narrative that these people are trying to promote.

Why Does Donald Trump Like Neoclassical Architecture So Much?

On 21 December 2020, President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order titled “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture,” which officially establishes the Neoclassical architectural style as the “preferred” style for all United States federal buildings. The same executive order disparages Modernist architecture as “ugly and inconsistent.”

In practical terms, Trump’s executive order doesn’t mean much, since it only establishes the Neoclassical style as a “preferred” style and does not outright ban other styles. Moreover, the executive order is almost certainly going to go in the paper shredder as soon as President-Elect Joe Biden assumes office on 20 January 2021.

Nonetheless, the fact that Trump apparently felt strongly enough about Neoclassical architecture to issue an executive order on the subject right before he leaves office raises all sorts of interesting questions about what Neoclassical architecture represents in a modern political context and why a man like Donald Trump would devote time to enshrine it as a “preferred style” for anything.

Donald Trump Is No Patriot

On 17 September 2020, President Donald Trump delivered a speech at the “White House Conference on American History,” an event at the National Archives Museum in Washington D.C. In this speech, Trump claimed that United States history teachers all across the country who are radical leftists and who hate America are using their positions to indoctrinate schoolchildren into what he regards as a dangerous and evil anti-American ideology, which he claims is causing “riots and mayhem” all over the country.

Therefore, he has promised to issue an executive order to “restore patriotic education to our schools” by establishing a “1776 Commission” to “encourage” teachers across the country to only teach American history in a way that inspires patriotism and makes students proud to be Americans.

In other words, Trump doesn’t want teachers to talk about any of the bad stuff that the United States has done. He wants real history to be thrown out of schools and a heavily sanitized, jingoistic narrative to be taught instead. The full transcript of Trump’s speech is available on the White House’s official website. Here is my response to some of the things he said.

What Would the Ancient Greeks Think of Donald Trump?

The current occupant of the White House is such a unique and peculiar figure in the history of the United States that many people have wondered what various people from history would think of him. I’ve encountered a number of questions dealing with this theme on Quora. For instance, many people have wondered what the Founding Fathers would think of him. What would Cicero think? What would Socrates think? There are so many different questions and scenarios that people have been asking about. Today, though, we’re going to look at the question of what the ancient Greek public at large would think of him.

It is extremely difficult to say what the ancient Greeks would think of Donald Trump, partly because the ancient Greeks lived in a world that was so drastically different from our own. If someone brought all the people who lived in the Greek world during the Classical Period (lasted c. 510 – c. 323 BC) back from the dead today, they would barely even recognize the world we live in.

Furthermore, the ancient Greeks were as diverse in their thoughts as any people from any time period, so, obviously, opinions pertaining to Donald Trump would vary quite considerably from person to person. Some people would probably like Trump, while others would detest him.

Anything that we say on this subject will necessarily be speculation, since, obviously the ancient Greeks are all long dead and it is impossible to say for certain what their opinions would be. Nonetheless, I think we can plausibly speculate about how the majority of people who lived in ancient Greece would most likely view Trump, if they were suddenly brought to life today and told about him.

No, Nero Didn’t “Fiddle While Rome Burned”

The phrase “fiddling while Rome burns” has been in the news a lot again lately for some rather surprising reasons. As most people already know, the deadly COVID-19 epidemic is spreading across the globe. According to The New York Times, as of today, at least 973 people in the United States have tested positive for COVID-19 and at least thirty people in the United States are confirmed to have died of it. It is currently estimated that COVID-19 has a case fatality rate of around 3.4%. Meanwhile, the stock market continues to plummet at record rates.

Donald J. Trump—who is somehow the actual president of the United States—reportedly spent a large part of the weekend golfing at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach. For some reason, though, on Sunday, 8 March 2020, Trump decided that it would be a good idea to retweet a meme of himself literally playing a fiddle with the caption “My next piece is called… nothing can stop what’s coming.” Trump commented on the meme, saying, “Who knows what this means, but it sounds good to me!”

Naturally, people immediately began using the meme to criticize Trump’s response to the ongoing crises, comparing him to the Roman emperor Nero (lived 37 – 68 AD), who is famously said to have played the fiddle during the Great Fire of Rome in July 64 AD, which destroyed large parts of the city of Rome. I wrote a detailed article back in November 2017 debunking the story about Nero “fiddling while Rome burned.” Given the contemporary situation, I figured I’d revisit the subject and debunk it afresh.

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.

Here Are a Few of the Major Cultural Sites in Iran that Donald Trump May Be Threatening to Destroy

On Saturday, 4 January 2020, Donald J. Trump, the current president of the United States of America, announced on Twitter that the United States has targeted fifty-two Iranian cultural sites and that, if Iran makes any move against any American or against any American asset, the United States will destroy those sites. Trump declared, over the course of two tweets, the following words:

“Let this serve as a WARNING that if Iran strikes any Americans, or American assets, we have….”
“….targeted 52 Iranian sites (representing the 52 American hostages taken by Iran many years ago), some at a very high level & important to Iran & the Iranian culture, and those targets, and Iran itself, WILL BE HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD. The USA wants no more threats!”

Donald Trump is literally holding Iran’s cultural sites hostage, threatening to destroy them if Iran does not comply with his demands. This sounds more like the kind of threat you’d expect to hear from the Joker than from the president of the United States.

Destroying Iranian cultural sites would certainly constitute a war crime under international law. The United Nations made this very clear in 2017 when they adopted a resolution for the protection of heritage in response to the deliberate destruction of cultural sites in Iraq and Syria by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). You know you live in a messed-up world when the president of the United States is literally threatening to do what ISIS did.

Is Donald Trump the Second Coming of Cyrus the Great?

As strange as it may sound, Donald J. Trump, the current president of the United States of America, has been repeatedly likened to Cyrus the Great (lived c. 600 – c. 530 BC), the founder of the Persian Achaemenid Empire. The comparison between Trump and Cyrus the Great is especially popular among evangelical Christian Trump-supporters in the United States, but it also has some prominence among Israeli Jews. Let’s take a look at who Cyrus the Great was, why Donald Trump is being compared to him, and why these comparisons don’t hold up to scrutiny.