I HAVE never been to Mar-a-Lago, the sprawling, 126-room estate in Palm Beach, Florida, owned, since 1985, by Donald Trump. From the photographs, it looks as if it has the opulence, style, and taste of a late Roman imperial palace, such as Justinian’s Great Palace in Constantinople. This was considerably larger than Mar-a-Lago, and had a prominent chapel (there isn’t one on President Trump’s estate, to the best of my knowledge); but the two buildings still bear comparison — one that doesn’t end there.
Since Mr Trump’s 2024 election win (News, 8 November), the rich, powerful, and hopeful have lined up before the new emperor. Political, business, and tech magnates have paid homage and demonstrated their loyalty, like latter-day courtiers and supplicants. Some commentators have said that this is simply the nature of that strange liminal period between election and inauguration. Once you’ve been sworn into office, the business of government becomes rather less imperial, and rather more mundane and bureaucratic.
But maybe this is naïve. John Bolton, President Trump’s National Security adviser in 2018-19, observed that the President’s first period of office functioned more like a court than an administration, the primary criterion for success (indeed, for survival) being loyalty to the leader. Mr Bolton’s predecessor, H. R. McMaster, remarked that Mr Trump was “addicted to adulation . . . from people around him”. Bill Barr, a former US Attorney General, accused the President of putting his “own interests and gratifying his own ego ahead of everything else, including the country’s”. In his retirement speech, Mark Milley, who had served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, complained that “we don’t take an oath to a king, or a queen, to a tyrant or dictator or wannabe dictator.”
President Trump may be politically isolationist, but that does not stop him from having an imperial mentality. “I was saved by God to make America great again,” he said in his inauguration speech. Justinian himself could not have put it better.
THIS time round, he is prepared and eager for office. Michael Wolff famously claimed that Mr Trump expected Hillary Clinton to win in 2016, and had intended to use the visibility of his campaign for business reasons. That being so, he was compelled to work with the existing Republican machine, which, for all its faults, was designed for government rather than imperial adulation (which was why there was such a revolving door in his administration).
This time round, in the process of preparation, loyalists have replaced bureaucrats, Trump’s appointees being as personal as they have been controversial. Professor Timothy Snyder, of Yale University, has described the nominations to head Health, Justice, Defence, and the Intelligence Services as a “decapitation strike”.
Moreover, as I write this (on Inauguration Day), President Trump’s advisers are finalising dozens of executive actions, on immigration, tariffs, deregulation, and the like, so as to make good on the incoming President’s promise to “act with historic speed and strength and fix every crisis facing our country”. Acting with speed means bypassing the checks and balances of what has become the US’s vetocracy.
To be clear, there is nothing unusual or illicit in a president’s use of executive orders, but these are limited by the Constitution. And that is where people worry, because the Supreme Court has never been more politicised. Judgments are now commonly passed by 6-3 in favour of the justices nominated by Republican presidents.
One of the most momentous of these is Trump v United States (2024), in which the Court held that Mr Trump was immune from prosecution for criminal acts committed in the course of his official functions as President, even after leaving office. As the former UK Supreme Court Judge Jonathan Sumption has written: “If an ex-president is immune from criminal liability for trying to overthrow the Constitution and install an unelected intruder in the White House, one is bound to wonder what is left of the Constitution.”
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This is, perhaps, the most fateful comparison with the late imperial world, more important than palace, court, and supplicants. In contrast to what developed in Latin Christendom, the Greek-speaking East thought that the Emperor was above the law. The Corpus iuris civilis, a codification of laws that was begun at the command of Emperor Justinian, in 527, proclaimed: “Let the imperial rank be exempted from all our provisions, because God has subjected the laws themselves to the emperor.”
I DON’T want to sound alarmist, not least because it has been the alarmist hysteria of President Trump’s opponents which has done so much damage to their cause. For many, it has almost been as though all you needed to do was to shout “fascist” at him and the American voting public would come to their senses. For all the incitement to violence in 2021, President Trump won the 2024 election fair, square, and conclusively. Fascists don’t do that.
But nor do I think we can ignore the lessons of history. One of them is that powerful men want to use and keep power as they see fit, especially when they believe that history demands it. And this is where another comparison between late imperial “Rome” and modern America is particularly pertinent. The empire of the sixth century had lost territories and power, and, in spite of Justinian’s brief attempt to make Rome great again, it felt as though its most powerful days were behind it. The same might be said of today’s US: an undoubted superpower whose 20th-century pre-eminence is slowly being supplanted by the world’s true demographic superpowers: China and India.
The danger is that Trump, drunk on imperial adulation and convinced of his world-historical significance, will stress-test the US Constitution beyond endurance. While it is hard to imagine the isolationist President behaving like an emperor abroad, his quasi-imperial authority at home is unlikely to help him to deal with this impending Thucydides Trap, as one great power fades just as another rises. The risk is the chaos of the first administration, spiced with the ambition and fear in the second — or, to misquote Marx, that history will repeat itself, first time as farce, then as tragedy.
Nick Spencer is Senior Fellow at Theos and the host of the podcast Reading our Times.
This post was originally published on here
