On his 1993 album American Caesar, the soothsayer Iggy Pop conjured the second coming of Donald Trump: “People of America/ I bring you a great army/ To preserve peace/ In our empire/ Throw them to the lions/ Darling, let us go to the banquet hall”.
Gore Vidal’s great theme in his novels and political essays was (as he paraphrased the philosopher Giambattista Vico) “imperial republics evolving into dictatorships, chaos, barbarism”.
When Trump postponed the imposition of the tariffs on Canadian imports he had announced a few days earlier, his mouthpiece Karoline Leavitt told the White House press corps: “Canada is bending the knee, just like Mexico.” This is not the language of republics. It is the argot of tsars, khans, sultans. And it raises, for Ireland and for every other democracy, the essential question: to grovel or not to grovel?
Trump’s open adoption of the imperial manner (issuing peremptory edicts, renaming geographical features, demanding the handover of territories from Greenland to Gaza, appointing stooges to high offices of state in homage to Caligula’s plan to make his horse a senator) is a function of failure. It arises, not from strength but from weakness.
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The genius of the United States has long been that it was an empire that could pretend not to be one. It ruled much of the world, but went out of its way not to say so. In this, it took its cue from the first and arguably most successful of the Roman emperors, Augustus. He insisted that he was not an emperor at all, merely the humble servant of the senate and the people of Rome. He understood that power is at its most effective when it is unnamed, undefined and therefore, of course, unlimited.
Thus it was with the US and its presidents in the decades between the second World War and the al Qaeda attacks of September 11th, 2001 – the American imperium was obvious but, for the most part, unstated.
But after 9/11 and during the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the neocons who had come to power with George W Bush and Dick Cheney embraced empire. Famously, in 2004, the New York Times quoted a “senior adviser to Bush” (widely believed to be, but never confirmed as, Karl Rove): “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”
Yet two big things have happened since. One is that this turned out to be an empire of fools. The US was horrendously bad at establishing and sustaining its Pax Americana. The historian Arthur Schlessinger delivered a pithy judgment in 2004: “Americans are simply not competent imperialists.” The other shift is the rise of China as a serious rival for global power.
There is an inverse relationship between the assurance of empire and the need to act like an emperor. The US is in reality deeply uncertain about its overall place in the world and its ability to enforce its will whenever it chooses – an anxiety, ironically, that Trump tapped into in 2015 and 2016. Back then, his isolationist rhetoric and promise to extract America from its forever wars were a big part of his attraction.
[ Donald Trump’s openly authoritarian instincts are about to be unleashed ]
But war-weariness tips over into weakness. The American withdrawal from Afghanistan – begun under Trump and completed under Joe Biden – was its most humiliating moment since the desperate flight from Saigon in 1973. And Biden then allowed himself and the US to be debased again and again by Binyamin Netanyahu, with all of his red lines on Gaza quickly turning out to be lines in the sand.
Trump’s calculation is that the disillusion with post-9/11 imperialism that helped to get him elected in 2016 has now been replaced in the minds of his followers by worries that the US is a waning power. But there is no easy way to recreate that power in a much-changed world. So his instinct is to fall back on what he knows: performance. He is doubling down and tripling down on the imperial style. He is acting out empire. No more Augustus – it’s Caligula time.
The Romans understood that the key to “imperial republics evolving into dictatorships” is sycophancy. The empire enters its decadent phase of chaos and barbarism when its elites succumb to the allure of obsequiousness. The great Roman historian Tacitus tells us that the republic died when “they all rushed into servitude – consuls, senators, and knights. The higher the rank, the greater the hypocrisy and haste".
He also tells us that even the tyrannical emperor Tiberius was disgusted by the slavering: “Clearly, while he objected to the freedom of the people, he was also sickened by such abject submission from his ‘slaves’.” And here there may be a warning to those who think that the appropriate response to Trump’s emperor act is to play along with abject submission.
Tacitus notes that “sycophancy ... in a corrupt society is as dangerous when taken to extremes as when it is absent”. This is because emperors come to resent their most slavish devotees “for favours are welcome only to the point where reciprocity seems possible. When they go far beyond that, hatred replaces gratitude”.
Trump doesn’t do reciprocity. People exist to be screwed and if they collude in their own exploitation, so much the better.
He has never been a reliable rewarder of his sycophants. If you want proof, look at the miserable fate of Rudy Giuliani, who made himself Trump’s most loyal slave, shredding his own reputation in the increasingly absurd pursuit of his master’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
Where is Giuliani now? Humiliated, debarred, a laughing stock and, on his own account, broke.
The tech and media billionaires who scurried to prostrate themselves before the American Caesar will discover the truth that in Trump’s mind hatred replaces gratitude pretty quickly.
What goes for individuals and corporations goes for countries too. Trump understands the kowtow as a declaration of weakness. And to be weak is be that most contemptible of all things: a loser.
