“I didn’t say that. I said I want to be a dictator for one day.”
— Donald Trump, 45th President of the United States
Why has Julius Caesar remained a household name for over 2,000 years? Like Christ, Caesar divided history: there was Rome before Caesar, and there was Rome after Caesar. And also like Christ, Caesar was divine — decreed a god by the Senate two years after his assassination. He was 56 years old, and the power he consolidated through his military campaigns and lengthy political career truly projected an air of immortality.
Rome had become Caesar, and Caesar was Rome.
Caesar’s prominence as a symbol of the might of Rome, of alpha male dominance — Veni, Vidi, Vici; crossing the Rubicon; et tu, Brute, his affair with Cleopatra — overshadows the reality of his character and the truth of his legacy: he irrevocably destroyed the Roman Republic, a feat little appreciated in our own time, particularly when the health and future of our American Republic is in such great peril.
Even how Caesar set in motion the collapse of an albeit imperfect representative democracy that operated for nearly five hundred years is underappreciated. Shortly before his death on the Ides of March, 44 BC, he named himself dictator for life. For centuries Rome’s highest elected political office was the consulship. To safeguard from power-hungry politicians usurping the cursus honorum, there were two consuls, each with a term of only one year. Caesar himself was a consul at various points.
But by the time Caesar came of age, the Republic was in decline. One’s success was defined by military prowess, the loyalty of private armies, the strength of triumvirates and other alliances, and holding onto power by any means necessary — murder, if expedient enough.
Caesar, though, was not an anomaly, only the logical conclusion of a system that no longer believed in itself. In Caesar’s youth another general, Sulla, was given dictatorial powers for an indefinite period. This was not the first time the senate bequeathed dictatorial powers. But previous dictatorships were only temporary, for emergency purposes. Now, Sulla could craft the order of things as he pleased. Yet, before he dipped into full-on tyranny, Sulla ended his dictatorship, returning to the two-consul system.
But the precedent was set. The republic could, in fact, be contorted to the whims of one. While Sulla eventually walked away from absolute power — not before appointing senators, increasing the number of standing courts, among other measures — it would not be long before someone succeeded in toppling the Roman Republic for good.
After a number of subsequent crises to the Roman Republic, such as the Catiline Conspiracy and the Civil War between Caesar and Pompey, all the remaining safeguards to a Julius Caesar dictatorship evaporated.
In other words, enough pressure against the safeguards eventually fatally damaged the Republic. Of course, it wasn’t until almost twenty years after Caesar’s death when his adopted heir, Octavius, became Rome’s first emperor — Caesar Augustus.
In Chronicle of the Roman Republic, Philip Matyszak put it this way: “History has been kinder to Caesar than he deserves.” And while later representations of Caesar do not hesitate to mention his faults — “He deserved assassination,” Roman historian Suetonius a century later proffered bluntly; “The evil that men do lives after them,” Shakespeare has Antony proclaim at the outset of his funeral speech (Act iii, Sc. 2) — Caesar’s legacy today is seen in light of the Caesars of Empire, not the Consuls of the Republic. The illusion of luxury and excess of empire has always been far more titillating than the dull procedures of a representative democracy.
And so when former U.S. president Trump flippantly said he would be dictator for one day at the start of a possible second term, naturally there were both laughs and applause and backlash and outcries. What kind of a one day dictator would he be? If he was only joking, as he somewhat claimed some weeks later, why did he not say he would be “king” for one day, a modern day Midas who would turn things into gold his first day in office?
Trump complained the press edited his comments to Sean Hannity, excising the “for one day” clause to just, “I would be dictator.” But for one day or not, how is the comment even appropriate? Trump’s outlandishness is nothing new, but this isn’t the 2016 campaign, when his outlandish charmed enough voters to win him the presidency. The problem with the quasi-kidding and sarcasm these days is that they come in the wake of January 6, 2021, when a sitting president let his supporters both rummage and rampage the Capitol Building in an obvious attempt to block, delay, or altogether thwart the ministerial certification of the 2020 election.
Insurrection and nationalist dictatorships are usually closely linked (cf. Maximillien Robespierre, the French Revolution).
Moreover, if the purposes of becoming a one-day dictator are to ostensibly “close the border” and “drill, drill, drill,” as Trump claims, how would these abstractions be actualized? Why does it take a dictatorship in the first place? Who, by the way, is Trump’s touchstone as a model dictator? Kim Jong Un? Nero?
It would be much more interesting if Trump parlayed his dictatorship remark to evoke the dictatorship of Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, the legendary savior of Rome, who at the behest of Senate envoys famously put down the plough at his two-and-a-half acre farm and took up his sword. The particular crisis was a military one, and having achieved victory and securing Rome and the continuity of the Republic, he put down his sword and resumed work on his farm. He was named dictator for six months, but renounced it after fifteen days.
That is what a one day dictatorship looks like.
George Washington thought so, and applied the Cincinnatus method twice: first, his resignation as commander in chief of the Continental Army; second, his refusal to seek a third term as president.
Joking or not, Trump’s demagoguery has a track record. His ignorance or apathy of the rule of law, particularly revolving around the outcome of the 2020 election, is proven. His candidacy appears little more than a cover to seize power for ego imperialism objectives. That the Republican Party has effectively become a bastion of Trumpism is not unlike the Last Republicans of Rome, who allowed Julius Caesar to manipulate a venerable system for his own benefit — until he was eventually eaten by his own.
The drama and characters of Rome’s volatile history is forever captivating. GOP leadership and supporters of the one day dictator are partying like it’s 44 BC. At some point the toga party will come to an end, and the hangover sets in. But by then the emperor with no clothes will blithely be playing the fiddle while Rome engulfs in flames.