Is Donald Trump more like Hitler or Augustus Caesar? Honestly, it’s both

Donald Trump’s destruction of America’s 249-year-old constitutional republic and civic culture follows a historically familiar pattern that includes two especially striking precedents — one ancient, one modern. In both of these, an aspiring dictator overthrows a tottering republic while promising its frightened, gullible and/or opportunistic citizens that he is rescuing it even as he drains it of its remaining legitimacy and power.

The precedents I have in mind rose and fell on elements of “human nature” that also drive what’s befalling us now. We Americans often consider ourselves transcendent of such dark elements, triumphant over them and even innocent of them. But the precedents I’m going to sketch suggest that every time Trump tells us that one of his accomplishments is so great that “you’ve never seen anything like it,” he’s marching people who believe him one step closer to the same abyss that swallowed Augustus Caesar’s ancient Roman Empire and Adolf Hitler’s modern German Reich. This time is no different. Yale law professor Bruce Ackerman was right to warn Guardian writer Robert Tait that this is “dictatorship … a shattering assault on the foundations of the Constitution.”

In Rome during the 1st century B.C., Julius Caesar’s grand-nephew Octavian provoked and won a chaotic, decade-long power struggle in the republic, emerging victorious and intimidating the shaken senate into naming him Augustus Caesar and granting him the title of Imperator as he established an empire that would outlast him, in one way or another, for roughly a thousand years.

Twenty centuries later, Hitler and his “National Socialist” or Nazi movement of angry, desperate Germans — who had been defeated in World War I, humiliated in its settlement at Versailles and brought even lower by the Great Depression — destroyed their Weimar Republic and established his dictatorship as the culmination of a “Thousand-Year Reich” that had supposedly followed the coronation of Charlemagne in 800 A.D., the Holy Roman Empire and, more recently, the 19th-century German Empire.

Trump’s promise to “Make America Great Again” under a dictatorship carries more than a few echoes and remnants of Augustus’ and Hitler’s projects. Different though those precedents were from one another and from our situation now, a sober look at them yields insights into what we’re dealing with and where we’re heading, even though we can’t know where we’ll land.  

When in Ancient Rome …

Augustus’ record should matter especially to Americans because18th-century historian Edward Gibbon’s magisterial six-volume “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” was read intently by our republic’s founders as it was coming off the presses in the 1770s. Gibbon, no democrat, spent much of his time reading voraciously and carried some English biases and feuds into his writing, but he illuminated Augustus’ strategies in ways that America’s framers found sobering, cautionary and salutary.

Julius Caesar had become Rome’s first dictator after 49 B.C., when the republic was faltering, after leading soldiers who’d become loyal to Caesar while abroad, returned to Italy by crossing the Rubicon River, thus prompting a civil war by defying the republic’s ban on posting Roman troops domestically. Upon winning the ensuing conflict, he took control of the republic.

Caesar’s republican opponents considered him a tyrant and assassinated him in 44 B.C., whereupon his grand-nephew Gaius Octavius, or Octavian (the future Augustus), whom he’d designated as his adoptive son and heir, joined with Mark Antony, the guardian of Caesar’s papers and prerogatives, to avenge Caesar by killing his assassins. But Antony considered himself Caesar’s principal heir, and he and Octavian fought each other politically and militarily for more than a decade until Octavian defeated him in the Battle of Actium in 31 B.C., winning the loyalty of more Roman legions. 

Although Octavian’s power was now supreme, he exercised it shrewdly by dispensing selective doses of bribery, coercion and worse, turning Rome’s senators into sycophants who granted him the title of princeps, or “first citizen,” of Rome in 27 B.C. and gave him the honorific name Augustus Caesar.

The republic’s consuls and other officers became Augustus’ lapdogs, but he preserved their venerable offices and titles “with anxious care,” seeming to consult them and massaging their vanity. Augustus established a regime on their backs whose stability and benefits lasted for centuries in what Gibbon characterized as “an absolute monarchy disguised by the forms of a commonwealth” whose ruler exploited his subjects in ways that reflected his perverse character:

A cool head, an unfeeling heart, and a cowardly disposition prompted him, at the age of nineteen, to assume the mask of hypocrisy, which he never afterwards laid aside…. His virtues, and even his vices, were artificial …. He wished to deceive the people by an image of civil liberty, and the armies by an image of civil government.

Human nature hasn’t changed enough since then to shield masses of people from being seduced and intimidated into servility and herd-like stampedes. It certainly hadn’t changed by the 1770s, when Gibbon described the spread of what he called “a slow and secret poison” into the vitals of the Roman Empire, whose residually republican citizens “no longer possessed that public courage which is nourished by the love of independence, the sense of national honor, the presence of danger, and the habit of command” and so “received laws and governors from the will of their sovereign and trusted for their defense to a mercenary army.”

Trump has been counting on such weaknesses, as Augustus did, but he’s doing it even more recklessly and at warp speed. Gibbon’s “slow and secret” poison has always spread much faster and more blatantly in America than it did in Augustus’ Rome or even in Gibbon’s England. John Adams may have been channeling Gibbon in his warning to Americans:

When the people give way, their deceivers, betrayers, and destroyers press upon them so fast, that there is no resisting afterwards. The nature of the encroachment upon the American Constitution is such as to grow every day more and more encroaching. The people grow less steady, spirited, and virtuous, the seekers more numerous and more corrupt, and every day increases the circles of their dependents and expectants, until virtue, integrity, public spirit, simplicity, and frugality become the objects of ridicule and scorn, and vanity, luxury, foppery … and downright venality swallow up the whole society.

A thousand-year Reich — that lasted 12 years.

Rome’s decadence may indeed be outdone by our own, owing to 20th-century developments that would supplement Gibbon’s account of Augustus with an even-darker analogy between Trump’s plot against America and Hitler’s plot against the Weimar Republic.

In an Atlantic article, “How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy in 53 Days,” historian Timothy W. Ryback references Hitler’s failed Beer Hall putsch of 1923, triggering memories of Trump’s failed coup attempt of 2021. Ryback also notes that Hitler “campaigned on the promise of draining the ‘parliamentarian swamp — den parlamentarischen Sumpf,’” a promise that Trump has repeatedly echoed by vowing to “drain the swamp” in America.

Trump’s apologists can’t excuse or ignore his continuing refusal to disavow supporters who have made Nazi salutes while shouting “Hail Trump”; who have marched into Charlottesville in 2017 shouting, “Jews will not replace us”; who have brandished Nazi swastikas in the Capitol during their 2021 coup attempt; and who have flirted with Germany’s proto-fascist Alternative for Germany party, known as the AfD, as Elon Musk and Vice President JD Vance have both done.  

Trump is more contemptuous and vengeful than Augustus in handling senatorial wind-sniffers and flip-floppers, not to mention the tech moguls whom he seated together at his inauguration this year, like dogs on a single leash, after they’d abased themselves at Mar-a-Lago. Like their new emperor, they see democratic politics as little more than a lubricant for their power and wealth. Musk may consider himself the top dog unleashed, but Trump will dump him and other Muskovites, as he did former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former national security adviser John Bolton and others who’d done his fixing and his heavy, sometimes dirty, work but then made the mistake of differing with him in public.

The poison, and Trump as its pusher

One effect of the lubricant that would have been unimaginable in Augustus’ Rome and even in America’s beginnings has been recent “free speech” jurisprudence, such as the 2010 Citizens United ruling, that stretches the First Amendment’s original intent beyond recognition to protect disembodied, algorithmically driven corporate “speakers” and their huge megaphones. It’s leaving other citizens with laryngitis from straining to be heard in the internet’s supposed free-for-all, which is becoming a “free-for-none” whose engines track, distract, titillate, indebt and entrap us before flickering screens, like the helpless Athenians Plato depicted as chained to seats in a cave, watching images projected on the wall.

Such postmodern servitude liberates only those who “platform” it and profit from it with approval of our national marketer in chief, who hawks his own merchandise online: Bibles, steaks, meme-coins, phony university degrees.

Trump didn’t invent the poison that has worked its way into the vitals of American society, but he’s its most prominent pusher and a carrier of its most virulent effects. Millions of voters seek relief by following him because he knows their addictions so well that he can voice and channel their pain while telling them, “I, alone, can fix it.” Never mind that he’s been a carrier since long before he peddled it to millions of Americans for nine seasons on his TV show “The Apprentice,” every episode of which accustomed them to being told what he’s now telling tens of thousands of public workers: “You’re fired!” He can’t “fix” what’s oppressing them, but he may be able to rig it for a favored few, becoming the heartland’s and the urban working-class’ imagined avenger when he’s really their pusher.

Gibbon anticipated — and Augustus mastered — something very much like Trump’s false bonding with plebeians:

The provinces, long oppressed by the ministers of the republic, sighed for the government of a single person, who would be the master, not the accomplice, of those petty tyrants. The people of Rome, viewing, with a secret pleasure, the humiliation of the aristocracy, demanded only bread and public shows; and were supplied with both by the liberal hand of Augustus. The rich and polite Italians… enjoyed the present blessings of ease and tranquility, and suffered not the pleasing dream to be interrupted by the memory of their old tumultuous freedom.

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

So now, too, with us. Civic implosion and loss have generated a spiritually deep hunger that’s driving many Americans to sanctify Trump, as ancient Romans sanctified their emperors — and as Trump has sought to sanctify himself, ostentatiously surrounding himself with evangelical leaders and overt Christian nationalists.

As Gibbon wrote: “The influence of the clergy, in an age of superstition, might be usefully employed to assert the rights of mankind; but so intimate is the connection between the throne and the altar, that the banner of the church has very seldom been seen on the side of the people.”

Even Gibbon’s despairing judgment that history is little more than “a register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind” resonated with many American founders’ residual Calvinism, which was grimly realistic, right up through Abraham Lincoln’s reckonings with our fallen world. But the founders’ Calvinism, represented in “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” was intrepidly covenantal, crusading against abuses and addictions that Augustus merely massaged and that Trump actively trades on and peddles. 

What historian Louis Hartz characterized as Americans’ “vast and almost charming innocence of mind” hasn’t transcended the idealism of the 1960s, when Peter, Paul and Mary’s “If I Had a Hammer,” a ballad of “danger” and “warning” and “love between our brothers and sisters, all over this land,” electrified me at age 16 when I watched them sing it at the 1963 March for Jobs and Justice in Washington. But although that and other siren songs — The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin'” — arrested millions of us morally and roused us against “the System,” they couldn’t deliver us politically. That would have required untangling what’s more inherently destructive in our politics and markets, not to mention in human hearts.

Can Americans resist dictatorship and rescue fairness?

Trump’s election has put all Americans on a playing field somewhat like the one on which Hitler was installed as the Weimar Republic’s duly elected chancellor, but it’s a field unlike any other in the American republic’s history since the Civil War. Trump isn’t quite as crafty as Augustus or as brutal as Hitler, but he’s a wrecking ball for America’s civic-republican structures: “He’s been extremely good at persuading banks to lend him money for dubious business ventures and equally good at getting gullible customers to pay for things he never delivered,” writes Stephen Walt, a Harvard Kennedy School professor and Foreign Policy columnist: 

He has proven to be remarkably adept at persuading voters that the United States was in desperate shape (no matter what the facts were) and that he alone could fix it, in good part because he is equally adept at finding fictitious enemies to blame for different problems. He’s in a class of his own at avoiding punishment for past crimes and pretty darn good at extracting benefits to himself, his family, and his pals…. What Trump has not shown much talent for is running a government, designing coherent policies, and delivering broad and tangible benefits to ordinary Americans.

Even Bret Stephens, the conservative New York Times columnist, assesses Trump’s governance as follows: 

The Jan. 6 pardons were awful… Withdrawing Secret Service protections from Mike Pompeo and Bolton… will haunt [Trump] if Iran makes good on its efforts to kill them. The sale of Trump crypto tokens is tawdry and unethical…. The effort to revoke birthright citizenship and 160 years of jurisprudence on the 14th Amendment is abominable…. And the idea that Elon Musk has an office in the White House when he has billions of dollars of business before the federal government is appalling.

Watching U.S. senators cave in to confirm Trump’s horrid nominees for Cabinet positions and other high administrative posts, I can’t help but recall Gibbon’s report that after Augustus piously “professed himself the father of his country,… He was elected censor; and… he examined the list of the senators, expelled a few members, whose vices or whose obstinacy required a public example, persuaded near two hundred to prevent the shame of an expulsion by a voluntary retreat… The principles of a free constitution are irrevocably lost, when the legislative power is nominated by the executive.”

Trump hasn’t expelled or “primaried” many senators into oblivion, nor is he yet as armed and brazen as Augustus. Most Americans aren’t yet as frightened and angry as the desperate Germans who sought relief in hailing Hitler’s Third Reich. Yet our hideous gun massacres, degrading entertainments and rampant addictions are making clear enough that tens of millions of Americans do feel abused or alienated enough by corporate and finance capital’s exploits to crave easy explanations and scapegoats to blame for their pain. Many swallow Trump’s lies like poisoned gummies and demand more.

It has become possible to imagine Trump delivering a speech, embellished perhaps by Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon, in which he boasts that MAGA and “all great movements are movements of the people, are volcanic eruptions of human passions and spiritual sensations… and not the lemonade-like outpourings of literati and drawing room heroes.” But that celebration of a MAGA-like movement was written in 1926 by Adolf Hitler, in “Mein Kampf,” to describe his own rising movement.

It has also become easy to imagine an influential conservative such as Bret Stephens becoming alarmed enough by Trump’s actions and rhetoric to issue this warning:

Right before our eyes, like something on the screen, the vast social fabric of [our republic] has crumbled and on its ruins, [Trump] and his confederates have run up a political front of startling and provocative modernity.…[MAGA’s] hand has been so much quicker than the democratic eye, and for his violence we have so little precedent. All the democratic countries, or if you like, the parliamentary countries, are unaccustomed to murder gangs…. We can no more count on the fruitful prospects of earlier days than we can count on ease in a hurricane. We… who made for ourselves a habit of give-and take in the faith that we were not at cross-purposes with anyone, have to confess that if goodwill runs out of the machinery of government and domestication is wrecked, to repose on our security is suicide.

But that assessment was written not by Stephens but by Francis Hackett, literary editor of the New Republic, in 1941 for his book “What Mein Kampf Means to America.” Nazism wasn’t on my mind when I came upon and read Hackett’s book one wintry morning early in 2016, as candidate Trump was rampaging through the Republican primaries and exposing the hypocrisies of conservative Republicans and neoliberal Democrats on his way to the GOP nomination. 

An ordinary citizen, with the last word

To understand how creepily un-American Trump’s Project 2025-driven strategies are, compare them to a brief sample of American civic-republican thinking in action that an anonymous reader identified only as “SPHealy” sketched in a 2007 post, beneath something I’d written:

Back in the playground days, we used to play basketball with whoever was on hand… and people would rearrange and switch sides as needed to keep things even and fun. We were quite competitive and loved to win, but we were playing against our neighbors and schoolmates who were not necessarily our friends but with whom we knew we needed to maintain at least non-destructive relationships.

The problem is that such a system requires that all parties have a fundamental allegiance to getting along, and specifically to handling losses without developing longstanding brutal grudges. If a small group had ever gotten together and made an agreement to subvert the system and behave destructively in a coordinated manner, they could have done a lot of damage before the rest of us figured out what was happening — and then our only alternative would have been to terminate the system. 

If trust had been destroyed it could not have been replaced. Strong as our constitutional system is, I don’t think it was ever intended to resist a large scale, long-term, tightly-organized effort to subvert it from within.

That warning about “a small group” making “agreement to subvert the system and behave destructively in a coordinated manner” fits perfectly the Claremont Institute, the Heritage Foundation and such prominent right-wing activists as John Eastman, Michael Anton and Russell Vought, who are referenced tellingly in a darkly prophetic essay by the legal and political historian William E. Scheuerman. 

Eastman, Anton and Vought could have been top strategists for Augustus or Hitler, and now perform those functions for Donald Trump. To understand where they, Bannon, Musk, Miller, Peter Thiel and others are taking us, ponder a prophecy from 18th-century Anglo-Irish writer Oliver Goldsmith, which the late Tony Judt adapted for the title of his final book: “Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey/ Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.”