While founded on African slavery and Indigenous dispossession, the American Republic says it believes in justice and equality.
Yet its current head of state is able to classify nations from which many African-American ancestors were dragged away in chains as “shitholes” and continue to demonize migrant babies who are American citizens in all but legal right.
So far, the 45th U.S. President Donald Trump has done – and continues to do – what President Barack Obama should have done: campaign relentlessly, rally supporters and galvanize his base.
According to a Reuters report of November 8, 2017, “Some 85 per cent of those who voted for Trump in 2016 said they would do so again.” The 35 to 40 per cent of those who approve of the president’s job performance include Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables,” who have revealed themselves to be white supremacists, neo-Nazis and yahoos from way up the wazoo. The opprobrium with which intellectuals rightly view Trump, however, may not be enough to bring about his defeat in 2020, nor may it be enough to stymie the Republicans in this November’s mid-term elections.
The construction of a progressive coalition of voters ought to be the Democratic Party’s job number one. What needs to happen across the United States is what happened in Alabama last December, with Black women in the vanguard. If you read #MeToo as a precisely feminist addition to Black Lives Matter, the inklings of a progressive coalition exist right now.
It would not be a gleeful fall for Trump.
In a recent piece for the New Yorker, essayist David Remnick aligns the foibles and character of Trump with the idiosyncrasies and “temperament” of the Roman Emperor Nero: both narcissists craving adulation and both obsessed with humongous and glitzy architecture – the materialist porn of the erection. And like Nero, Remnick suggests Trump may morph, in the end, from sucky baby figure of acclaim to hostis publicus – a public enemy.
Nero ended up begging to be stabbed to death by a courtier because he feared being apprehended by the Senate and beaten to death publicly in the Forum.
As compelling as the Nero analogy is to understanding the disgrace to the United States and the peril to the planet that is the Trump residency – it shouldn’t be dignified as a presidency for the jet-setter/golfing fugitive – a comparison to Caligula may be more apt.
Caligula’s name (nickname actually) means “little soldier’s boot.” It is a fitting cognomen for Trump, a man who is obsessed with size – of hands and buttons (nuclear), calling North Korea leader Kim Jong-un “Little Rocket Man,” thereby substituting comic-book epithets for diplomacy.
Beyond the puerile ambition to be the “biggest,” the “best,” the “greatest,” Trump has publicly also cast a leering eye upon his own daughter, another ugly parallel to Caligula, who was accused of incest with his sisters.
Caligula was also beloved by supporters early in his reign.
But despite his initial popularity, his mad, murderous and self-aggrandizing behaviour and illogical, sadistic and wasteful policies catalyzed conspiracies against him by his own guards (one of whom may have wanted revenge for being constantly degraded by derogatory epithets). Caligula was stabbed to death like his much more illustrious ancestor, Julius Caesar.
For Plato, the oligarch holds power due to his wealth. When the oligarch becomes a tyrant, Plato suggests, this ruler – immoderate, unjust, lawless, lustful, greedy, homicidal and base as he is – suffers so much guilt and fear due to his evil conduct that he has to hide out in his homes. Trump has made the White House a palace (or shithole) of solitary confinement and Mar-a-Lago a first-class prison.
Trump’s end should simply be his impeachment by Congress. If such comes to pass, Trump will be able to brag that, unlike Bill Clinton’s half-impeachment in 1998-99, he will have gone all the way.
George Elliott Clarke teaches African-Canadian literature at the University of Toronto. In 2016-17, he published Canticles I (MMXVI) & (MMXVII), a two-volume epic poem attacking slavery and imperialism.
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