A Roman History of the Trump Presidency

Imagine if Suetonius or Tacitus wrote about the beginnings of the Trump presidency. Well here’s a crack at it.

This is part humor, part history lesson, and part political commentary.

Trigger warning: Whether you love or hate Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, you WILL find something here that offends you. I am not going to read any comments. Take it leave it.

If this proves to be popular, I might even do another one!

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In the eighth year of the reign of Augustus Obama, the world seemed in disarray. Civil war raged in Syria, rebellions failed in Asia Minor, American legions continued to battle brigands in Babylonia and Bactria, and Britannia decided to leave Europa (as if it was ever a part of it to begin with).  Augustus Obama reigned, not without controversy, but without notoriety, and was beloved by senators, equestrians, tribunes, and plebs alike. He left the republic perhaps not in marble, but better healed of its many wounds, both recent and old.  While the Fox Acta did nip at his heels with their treatises and tirades against him, they could never truly sully the glory of the jaguar of Illinois. Augustus Obama retired not to Capri like Tiberius, not to Dalmatia like Diocletian, but to travel the provinces, both home and abroad, to cement his legacy and to share his wisdom. And in gratitude, he was deified in the Temple of Netflix and was thereafter known as Divus Obama.

Many assumed Obama would be succeeded to the purple by his adopted heir, Caesar Josephus Biden, who now was as it goes, the son of the divine Obama. But the praetorian prefecture and vestal virgins of the Palatine hill did not consent to this and preferred instead another candidate, Hillary Clinton, a former Augusta, senator, and proconsul. The Acta of CNN and MSNBC wrote many economium for her, feats of epideictic rhetoric not heard since the days of Cicero were written about her. Many equestrians paraded statues of Hillary through the forum, they hosted games in her honor, and sacrificed rams both for her and to her. She was married to Augustus William Clinton, an emperor once loved for his charm as now despised for his debauchery. She served in the senate with distinction and was proconsul for foreign empires. But wherever she went, the scent of subterfuge preceded her and the odor of suspicion followed her. Many partisans and sycophants, from the Senate to the agora, claimed that the goddess Fortune had chosen Hillary to be Augusta of Augustoi, Queen of kings, Juno Epiphanes, she would bring a golden age of peace and diversity, and those who did not bow the knee would be exiled or eradicated that like so many who crossed the house of Clinton had before.

Before I proceed, I must share one anecdote. A certain merchant from Ostia, Marcus Quintus Publicanus, did relate to me the story that while praying in temple of goddess Alanna, the deity we associate with irony, he vouchsafed that he did see the statue of her both cry and laugh for what soon was to fall upon the republic. This was a portent for the tragic comedy that came upon the republic. Tragic for what happened, comedic in that we did in all truth deserve it. For what arrived was not a golden age, but a chaos of mockeries and vanities that the republic had not hereto known before.

From those who might oppose Hillary in the contest for the office of princeps, the plutocrats offered up their own candidate to the plebs. A magnate who was famous for his constructions as he was for his antics in the theatres with the comedies about his apprentices. He was known to be a worshipper of Mammon, given to rapine, typified by disordered vanities, impious, and conceited. Yet his oratory lit a fire in the hearts and minds of many. Everywhere he went, with much pomp and blasting of the trumpets, the heralds announced that he would make the American Empire Great Again. He taunted Hillary with the nickname “Livia.” He promised to tax imported goods which pleased the artisans. He promised to withdraw the legions from foreign wars as the plebs had grown weary of having their sons and daughters bleed on foreign sands. He promised to build a wall like Hadrian to guard the southern frontier. He promised liberties for the devotees of the Christ cult known as the evangelici album who in turn anointed him as Jesus the lesser. He made the scapegoat for the republic’s many ills especially those from Hispania and Africa. Let it be said that gruff and ungroomed men had often adorned the purple, Emperors Andrew Jackson and Ulysses S. Grant were uncouth but at least they were competent. Yet Trump had neither the record of a general, only the reputation of an actor, a propensity for mercenary mercantile ventures, and abject disgust for all who lived on the Palatine hill before him. The many Acta could neither interdict him nor inhibit him, only react to him, keeping him the centre of attention, and by doing so they stoked the fires of his destiny all the more, since they were in love with their hatred of him!

Trump had something which Hillary did not have, not strategy, not magnanimity, not even augury to predict the future, but the ability read the portents of the plebs. The voiceless plebs were tired of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, the surplus of day labourers that the republic’s porous borders had created, the blasphemies against their pieties, and many elites who trampled over them to climb ever higher on the cursus honorum. The American republic with its dream of a better life, health, and opportunity, of peace with the gods and love from nations, had in their mind, been set upon by brigands from Yale and Harvard. Turning the people’s republic into a republic of lawyers. Trump, whether by scheme, opportunity, or fortune, planted his rhetoric in the soil of the people’s discontent, and it grew into the pugnacious weeds that would soon envelop the empire.

Hillary and her freedman responded to Trump’s pantomime of promises and prejudice with plans to woo the plebs with inane declarations. She promised to bring bread and circuses for the cities to be paid for by taxing the rural poor, to deify Al Gore as the goddess Gaia, to crush Scythia and Syria with a machine of war, to fund the exposure of infants, to conquer the tribe of Amazon, to censor academics who grieved her admirers, and to write lists of proscription for all magistrates who opposed her. Listening to her many secretaries, actors, and the flatterers writing for the Acta, she did truly believe that she was invincible as her reign was inevitable. It was then that she made one memorable acclamation, that the plebs who contemplated dropping their stone for Trump were truly and terribly lacrimabilis, or as we say in the common tongue, deplorable. It was then that the plebs, the deplorable ones, did take the dagger to her ambition, and assassinated her reign before it was born.

So it was on the 8th Day of November that the college of Tribunes, at the behest of the plebs who bothered to turn up to vote, did elect Donald Trump as the 45th American Augustus with Michael Pence, consul of Indiana, as his adopted heir and Caesar. At dusk of that day, a senator from Alaska claimed that he saw a massive eagle flying over a mountain swoop down and kill a lady-Hawke, while a senator from Delaware claimed that tears of blood began to flow from the eyes of Divus Abraham Lincoln in his temple. Instantly the many Acta claimed that the election had been stolen by the machinations of the Rus from Scythia and senators and equestrians tore their togas and wailed in the streets and longed for the days of Nero, Caligula, Domitian, Commodus, and Caracalla compared to the tyranny and ignominy that they believed now awaited them.  Many took flight and chose exile in the wintery wastelands of Toronto.

Hillary was immediately struck with a mute spirit and was unable to provide her speech conceding defeat until the next morning. Months later she would write her memoirs titled What Happened? Given that her name was also on the cover it meant that the answer to her question was also immediately obvious to all. Some say that Hillary was a noblewoman surrounded by ignoble men, a victim of prejudice towards her gender, that the American mind was seduced against her by the magistrate James Comey and the trickeries of King Putin of Scythia. Others say she was never considered trustworthy by the populace, too much a daughter of the Palatine to be its reformer. For my opinion, I think Hillary is a tale of the unpredictability of political craft, an omen not to antagonize one’s own veterans and above all proof that one must be loved before one can seek to be feared.

It was then that Augustus Trump took up residence in the White House, the American Palatine palace. He celebrated a Triumph over Hillary with much fanfare and pomp, though only a few people turned up. He began posting his own Acta in the public places. They were like the chirpings of birds, and like bird sounds, they were largely calls for mates or threats against enemies, which is why we call them tweets. His first tweet was “All hail Augustus Trump Optimus Maximus Magnus.” To which the Fox Acta replied, “Jupiter stands among us, a new Constantine has arisen, the Savior of the American republic is here, may he be as great as Reagan and as fortunate as Washington.”

Photo of White House from Wikimedia Commons.