For those who study ancient history, it has come as no surprise that the Trump campaign has started filing lawsuits to challenge or stop the vote count. As history has shown us time and time again, the twin engines of power and money are a potent force, and Trump has revealed his aspirations—and political cunning — to be quite similar to an ancient counterpart, the Roman general and dictator Julius Caesar.
As Jane Mayer recently argued in the New Yorker, President Trump cannot afford to lose. Reportedly mired in debt and facing potential criminal liability in multiple jurisdictions, the promise of immunity that comes with holding office, both explicit and implied, is just too great.
Even before Mayer provided her tally of Trump’s looming nightmares, a team of New York Times reporters documented numerous irregularities with his tax filings that subject to an ongoing IRS investigation. The Times also found that Trump is responsible for $421 million in loans. Trump dismissed the story as “fake news” and hasn’t publicly said a word about how he plans to repay his debt.
When it comes to money, power and politics, there truly is nothing new under the sun. In Rome, as increasingly in the United States, a reliance on huge sums of money to reach office was a feature — and not a bug — of the system. Roman politicians regularly went into debt to finance their early campaigns. They then committed various atrocious acts to pay their debts — or bribe the juries when victims sought relief from courts.
Which brings us to Julius Caesar, a charismatic politician, who was, like all Romans of his class, determined to reach the consulship — Rome’s highest office. To do so, Caesar borrowed heavily, and the debtors drove his early political ambitions at his heels. When he became governor of Spain in 61 B.C., he had to get wealthy friends to vouch for his debt before he could leave, and while there, he undertook a military expedition which, conveniently, turned up so much loot that he could pay off his balance in full.
Now a rich man, the future dictator, could set his sights on the highest office in the land, to which he was elected in 59 B.C. After a year in office, he once again led Rome’s armies on a military expedition, this time in Gaul (modern France), where he increased his fortunes, even more, all while perpetrating what scholars today increasingly describe as a genocide.
But then, a snag: Though no longer in debt, he knew that leaving office meant facing political retribution at home, so remaining in office became his strategy for avoiding the courts.
Rather than cede to republican norms — and face litigation as a civilian — he recognized the widespread and growing distrust of elites and fashioned himself as their populist savior. He enjoined supporters to condemn the opposition as incompetent, elitist and crooked. His charisma, combined with a willingness to bend institutional norms to the breaking point, made him an appealing prospect to voters who were already angry about a system marked by corruption and growing inequality.
Preternaturally handsome (if also prematurely balding), Caesar was the ancient equivalent of a celebrity and openly traded on the people’s adoration of him by portraying himself as a victim: No one, he suggested, was ever so mistreated, no one so prevented from doing what the people wanted him to do. Like Trump, Caesar announced that there was never a more innocent man anywhere in history.
We have no ancient Twitter feeds from this period to review, of course, nor video or newspapers. But what was most striking to observers at the time, as well as to historians, was how what had operated as an imperfect but functioning democracy for 500 years — fully half a millennium — so rapidly devolved into a hostile, belligerent conflict teetering on the edge of a crisis.
Was this conflict, and the following 40 years of civil war, the fault of Caesar alone? Certainly not, just as Trump is a mirror to a partisan and divided America rather than a political aberration. Caesar was a product of his time, and the republic he operated in was in decline long before he entered the picture.
What matters, however, is not Caesar himself, nor, for that matter, Trump. What matters is that these parallel stories reveal a persistent narrative about greed and power and one that we would do well to heed in this crucial moment.
The president of the United States is strapped with massive debt, faces potential litigation and is behind in the ballot box of the current election. His actions to undermine the election are not surprising; he has warned us himself that is what he will do and has already spent weeks working to undermine the integrity of the election with absurd or patently false tweets.
Donald Trump has every reason to cling to power, and we have every reason to expect him to try to do just that until the last ballot is counted, and likely after.
After all, we’ve been here before.
Ayelet Haimson Lushkov is an associate professor of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin, the author of Magistracy and the Historiography of the Roman Republic: Politics in Prose and a Public Voices Fellow of The OpEd Project.