Weekly Mind Dump: Trump as Caligula
And - What do the Republican Party & North Korea have in common?
Week of 6/9-6/15/2024:
The Madness of Tyrants: Comparing Caligula and Trump
Pundits have speculated on whether Donald Trump, in his evident madness, more resembles unhinged Roman Emperor Nero or Caligula. I choose the latter and I’ll explain why.
But first, what brings me to make this comparison is Trump’s increasingly clear displays of cognitive decline (the latest example being his lengthy disquisition about sharks and batteries — a hodgepodge of non-sequiturs framed by hallucinogenic metaphors accentuated by paroxysms of illogic) — as well as CEO’s shaking their heads after meeting him and reporting, “Trump doesn’t know what he’s talking about” and he was “remarkably meandering, could not keep a straight thought [and] was all over the map.”
In comparing Trump with Caligula, the NYT’s Nicholas Kristof wrote a few years ago:
Initially, Caligula focused on denouncing his predecessor and reversing everything that he had done. Caligula also made popular promises of tax reform so as to reduce the burden on the public. He was full of grandiose pledges of infrastructure projects, such as a scheme to cut through the Isthmus of Corinth.
But, alas, Caligula had no significant government experience, and he proved utterly incompetent at actually getting things done. Meanwhile, his personal extravagance actually increased the need for tax revenue.
Uncanny, isn’t it?
British “histopathologist” A. T. Sandison delved into Caligula’s mental state in 1958, concluding:
It seems to be certain that Caligula, during the later years of his reign, showed undoubted mental derangement characterized by self-deification, sadism, perversion, great extravagance, pathological envy, possibly some degree of paranoid change, intractable insomnia and vivid dreams. Caligula became seriously ill. [Roman historian] Philo thought that his mind was unhinged as a result… He then quarrelled with the Senate, became entirely autocratic.
It’s almost as if Trump is channeling Caligula. But it gets better.
Roman historian Suetonius wrote that Caligula promoted his favorite race horse to the high office of consul. Trump’s appointments were almost as bad, e.g., when he promoted his 29-year old bag carrier to become chief of White House human resources.
According to Suetonius, Caligula reveled in humiliating powerful Romans, to better control them, and denigrating the works of the great scholars. “There was no one of such low condition or such abject fortune that he did not envy him such advantages as he possessed,” wrote Suetonius. Caligula described members of the Roman Senate as “men ready to be slaves.” Just look at the mass of GOP politicians Trump has humiliated and subjugated, and ordinary folks like a Gold Star family and a disabled NYT journalist whom he has cruelly mocked.
Suetonius described Caligula as “very tall and extremely pale, with an unshapely body… his forehead broad and grim, his hair thin and entirely gone on the top of his head, though his body was hairy. While his face was naturally forbidding and ugly, he purposely made it even more savage, practicing all kinds of terrible and fearsome expressions before a mirror.” He doesn’t say anything about an orange complexion.
Another Roman historian, Cassius Dio reported that Caligula ravished many women of stature, selecting them at dinners and other social occasions in his palace. Posing as the god Jupiter, “he made this a pretext for seducing numerous women, particularly his sisters.” Suetonius wrote, “He respected neither his own chastity nor that of anyone else.” In Trump’s case, 26 women have accused him of sexual assault since the 1970s; he has been found civilly liable in one case. And there’s his cringy fascination with daughter Ivanka. Caligula had four wives; Trump is still on his third.
Suetonius wrote that Caligula could not control his inherent cruelty and viciousness, and enjoyed ordering and observing torture and executions, including beheadings on command. Aides report that on a number of occasions when he was in the White House, Trump talked about having this or that enemy “executed.” And there are many times when he has encouraged violence.
Looking ahead, if past is prologue, this is what we can expect in a second Trump administration, call it Caligula 2.0: In Caligula’s third year of rule, in 40 AD, Rome experienced a reign of terror — “a tyranny requiring men to flatter and be servile and in which the informant flourished,” according a British historian, who concluded that Caligula’s life in the end was possessed by “an insane self-exaltation.”
In “Caligula: A Neuropsychiatric Explanation of his Madness,” three neuroscientists note that Caligula:
Showed constant mood swings with irascibility or unmotivated laughter, lack of impulse control, perverse behaviors, hypersexuality, and sadism. Caligula also suffered from severe insomnia and could not sleep more than three hours per night. Furthermore, he experienced delusions of grandeur, paranoid episodes, and strange behaviors, such as when he ordered his troops to collect seashells from the shore.
They suspect he suffered from any one of eleven disorders, ranging from bipolar disorder to sociopathy, but likely either epilepsy or lead poisoning.
Nearly 2500 licensed medical and mental health professionals recently signed a petition stating that Trump shows clear signs of “probable dementia.” A sample:
I am a neuropsychiatrist and movement disorders neurologist at an academic medical center. There is more than enough reason to suspect dementia including: worsening thought process, loser connections between thoughts, tangentiality, paraphasias, irritability, paranoia, persecutory ideation, impulsivity and so on; which are clearly different than videos of him from 10 years ago. Without personally examining him, I cannot clarify further, but he appears to at least have a cautious gait. The most plausible disorder would be a mixture of frontal lobe dysfunction (sort of like frontotemporal dementia or CTE) from a vascular dementia. — Ankur Butala, M.D.
The polls consistently show Biden and Trump in a dead heat. It seems half of the American people thrive on the bread and circus Donald Trump provides them. But they should be forewarned by Caligula himself:
Oderint, dum metuant.
Let them hate me, so they fear me.
What Do the GOP and the Korean Workers’ Party Have in Common?
“I really appreciated his comments as a woman, as a suburban mom,” gushed South Carolina congresswoman Nancy Mace.
“He’s always so sweet, recognizing me, and he said ‘are you being nice to Speaker Johnson?’” said Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene fawningly.
“And what he did for us upstairs just now is, he showed us that energy and he showed us that positive outlook, despite all the garbage they’ve been throwing at him with their lawfare and their nonsense,” extolled House Majority Whip Tom Emmer.
“I can’t think of anything to tell you out of it that was negative,” Mitch McConnell told reporters, after playfully fist-bumping with Trump.
“He is the choice of our voters overwhelmingly. It shows that he is absolutely the leader of the party,” Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri said of Trump.
Sen. Marco Rubio described the event as “getting the team back together.”
Now what is the difference between the above and the following? —
“It is the feelings and aspiration of all the Korean people who live in the glorious era and the solemn call of the revolution to transform and change the whole society in line with the revolutionary idea and will of the respected Comrade Kim Jong-un.”
Not much. Replace “Korean” with “American” and “Comrade Kim Jong-un” with “President Donald Trump” and the florid servility remains the same.
Trump, a convicted felon, adjudicated rapist and indicted for launching the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection, met with Republican congressional members last week at the scene of the crime — Capitol Hill.
As an admitted communist regime geek who’s spent countless hours over the years poring over turgid proclamations by party apparatchiks and over-the-top praise for ossified dictators, what transpired last Thursday on the Hill was eerily familiar, from the rushing forward with phony smiles, to the over-exuberant clapping, to the B-movie-caliber singing of “Happy Birthday” to a man most of the attendees secretly despise.
Just like in North Korea.