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

[marmar]

Is Donald Trump more like Hitler or Augustus Caesar? Honestly, it's both
An aspiring dictator, fueled by popular resentment, overthrows a failing republic. We've seen this show before

By Jim Sleeper
Contributing Writer
Published February 17, 2025 6:00AM (EST)


(Salon) 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."

....(snip)....

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.

....(snip)....

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. ...........(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/02/17/is-more-like-hitler-or-augustus-caesar-honestly-its-both/

[Deep State Witch]

1. Augustus Was The Model

For Napoleon, Mussolini, and Hitler.