Index

American Caligula

Trump has historical precedent

Watching the press coverage of the orange twit in the Whitehouse celebrate his 80th birthday with a cage fighting match, I heard echoes of the 1979 film Caligula, a film I never saw but heard immense amounts of press babbling about. I decided that the parallels were strong enough to look up the available historical information on the notorious Roman emperor, and see if my sense of the similarities was right.

Obviously the octogenarian idiot could never attempt the sexual acts attributed to the Roman version. Caligula was a sickly child, and was never a very healthy adult, although he was healthy enough to appear strong for the public appearance required of an emperor. Like Trump’s useful idiots, the Romans were big on the appearance of their emperor, and considered that a good indicator of his internal state. The basic truism about not judging a book by its cover never occurred to the Romans nor to the orange cult.

One of the things that I saw in the limited historical data was the Roman’s “common touch” — Caligula did things no proper Roman noble would have done, acting more like a common citizen than a king in public. Likewise, Trump never had any use for “class,” preferring loud and brazen to subtle and smart. At the same time, Caligula wanted to be worshiped as a god, making these two things some of the strongest parallels between him and Trump.

Caligula only ruled four years before he was assassinated, so one can only wonder what he would have done if he had been emperor longer. As it was, the longer he reigned, the more he made his office into his personal power base. Yet another obvious parallel.

America is supposed to be governed by its people, or at least that was the founding fathers’ idea. An emporer annointed by a cult using logic straight out of drug dreams would never have occurred to them, although they certainly understood the problem of cult fanatics — the founding fathers would have heard much of the cults’ superstitious “witches and devils” garbage. The cults are still pushing that nonsense today.

We can only hope that the adults in what is left of the U. S. will wake up as the overaged juveniles of the orange cult keep destroying the country. The cult isn’t going to slow down until it is put back into the sewage lake it crawled out of.