The End of the Roman Republic
What Trump’s electoral victory really means
The time has come to face reality: Donald Trump is going to win reelection on November 5. As much as I wish it weren’t so and it pains me to say this, I feel that America will not elect Kamala Harris as its president. More than that: The US Senate will turn Republican while the House of Representatives will maintain its Republican majority. With the Supreme Court under Trump’s thumb, what this means is that come January 20th, when he is sworn it, America will cease being America as we know it and will turn into another entity.
There are those who already say that Trump’s victory will be on the level of the fall of the Roman Empire. Already during the four years of the first Trump Administration, many articles and even books had been published that painted a picture of America – with everything that was happening there – against the backdrop of imperial Rome. This is not necessarily new. The historian Edward Gibbon published his seminal “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” already in the late 18th century, although he had the British Empire in mind. According to Gibbon, “prosperity ripened the principle of decay.” Twelve years ago, when President Barack Obama was running for reelection, a television ad attacked his policies for allegedly leading America on the path of the British and Roman empires.
So is America going the way of the Roman Empire? I have to say that it is not. It is not the fall of the empire that reflects what Trump intends to do to America. It is the collapse of the Roman Republic, which developed over some four centuries and disappeared almost suddenly when the Senate granted Octavian extraordinary powers in 27 BCE – he renamed himself Augustus and became Rome’s first emperor. This is a more apt comparison with what we can already expect from Trump in late January. Octavian/Augustus (he ruled until 14 CE) succeeded in strengthening his position as the emperor by undermining the existing institutions – the Senate and the elections, the judicial system and the army. It is these developments that more closely resemble Trump’s American reality.
(Some of the more obvious reasons behind the fall of the Roman Empire, which lasted from the year 27 BCE until the latter part of the fifth century, when what remained of the Western Roman Empire ceased to exist, may eventually apply to America as well. These included civil wars and widespread corruption, financial crises with little money for the upkeep of the brilliant technological advancements, the growing inclusion of foreign troops – “the barbarians” – into the mighty legions, and who eventually turned against their masters. The quickly diminishing labor force, i.e., fewer slaves – think American borders closed to migrants – also played a role.)
Despite Trump’s denials that he has nothing to do with it, Project 2025 is a good guide to what his second administration intends to do. This collection of right-wing policy proposals from the Heritage Foundation would consolidate and amass power in the executive branch, it would severely curtail and politicize the federal government, especially the Justice Department, and practically eliminate abortion rights, environmental protection and workers’ rights. (There are some 900 pages of this.)
What all this would mean for us, the Jews? It is the American democratic institutions that allowed for the creation of a strong community not dependent on the whims of the rulers, as was the case for almost two millennia in Europe and in the Middle East. American Jews will now find themselves without the protections that the United States has enshrined in its Constitution – we will now depend on the whims of a powerful ruler.
What it will mean for Israel, despite Trump’s promises? Just look at the list of speakers at the Republican National Convention, which brought in a number of clearly antisemitic and anti-Israel characters, including Tucker Carlson, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (she of the Rothschild laser beams from space), and other MAGA faithful. They will now hold a sway in the new administration.
To understand what a president without any checks and balances would mean just listen to John F. Kelly, a retired Marine general who served as Trump’s White House Chief of Staff who said recently that Trump seeks “unfettered power” and “meets definition of fascist,” or Mark A. Milley, former US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who told the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward that Trump is “a fascist.” Elon Musk has turned X into a Trump platform and recently invoked the names of two German Nazis who helped Hitler gain power.
Trump himself said that he would like to have some of “those German generals” (meaning those of the Wehrmacht). As Anne Applebaum pointed out in The Atlantic, “Trump uses the language of Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini to rouse hate and violence.”
With Augustus, Rome ceased to be SPQR (look it up). There is a New Yorker cartoon of a man in pillory, seemingly in the 17th century New England, who says “When I return to public office, some people better watch out.” We all have to watch out now.