The Emperor Donald

I am not accusing Donald Trump of trying to make money out of the presidency (that's very much more the Clintons and Bidens). I am implying that he's a barbarian, when I say he reminds me of A.E. Housman's one great poem, Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries.

These, in the days when heaven was falling,
The hour when earth's foundations fled,
Followed their mercenary calling
And took their wages and are dead.

Their shoulders held the sky suspended;
They stood, and the earth's foundations stay;
What God abandoned, these defended,
And saved the sum of things for pay.

Donald Trump resembles a barbarian from Gibbon mixed with one of the elderly rich men who bought the imperial throne, but his  historical importance will be comparable with the most significant Roman emperors.

I thought I used the Trump Roman Emperor analogy first when I wrote this:

"I increasingly feel that we may be living in a period like the reign of Marcus Aurelius, the golden age where Gibbon starts his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Come to think of it, there is something of an outlandish late Roman emperor about Donald Trump, perhaps a rich wheat importer who got his position in an auction held by the Praetorian guard. "

But in fact lots of people had the same idea and I blogged about it here.

Jonathan Powell, who is the British cabinet's National Security Adviser (Britain loves to copy US names and institutions), wrote this in 2022 reviewing Maggie Haberman’s Confidence Man, a biography of Donald Trump that does not sound worth reading. 

Haberman compares Trump to the Peter Sellers character Chauncey Gardiner in the film Being There, concluding “the truth is, ultimately, almost no one really knows him… he is often simply, purely opaque, permitting people to read meaning and depth into every action, no matter how empty [it] might be”. He had a habit of making vague statements – often in reaction to something rather than by conscious design – that allowed people to project their political views on to his words. In the end we may have overestimated Trump. There was less to him than met the eye, as was the case with Johnson. They were both self-obsessed loners, who were agents of havoc for their brief time in office. 

Democratic politicians in the UK and the US must learn the lessons from populists such as Trump and Johnson: take seriously their attempts to undermine democracy, don’t despise or ignore their supporters, don’t let their lies enrage you so you can’t think straight, meet their attacks with policy. We must ensure we don’t allow leaders such as these to return to power and render our democracies permanently toxic. Both Donald Trump and Boris Johnson lost in the end because they offered the people absolutely nothing.

See how much he and she misunderstood and underestimated the importance and meaning of Donald Trump. 

So did the opinion formers and G7/Nato/EU military industrial (and secret service) complex which he is fighting.

They really do not understand why well informed people of goodwill want to scap the system.