It’s a singular occurrence, much like the upcoming solar eclipse. A once-in-a-lifetime moment not only for ourselves but for anyone and everyone we know, and very likely everyone we ever knew.
It is the moment where Americans can honestly say that during the entire expanse of their lives there has never been a more venal, incompetent, incapable, depraved, corrupt, malevolent or infantile creature occupying the Oval Office than the person that occupies it today, preening and tweeting between his trips to the golf course and the bathroom.
Try as they might, no one alive today in this country can honestly dispute this.
Nobel-winning Economist Paul Krugman, writing in today’s New York Times doesn’t even try. In fact, he looks far back into history for a fair comparison, to the time of the worst, most sadistic Roman Emperors—to the Emperor Caligula, famous for murdering political rivals on a whim, issuing bizarre proclamations that shocked the Empire and installing his favorite horse as a Roman Senator—and he still comes back shaking his head: “no, not this bad.”
For one thing, Caligula did not, as far as we know, foment ethnic violence within the empire. For another, again as far as we know, Rome’s government continued to function reasonably well despite his antics: Provincial governors continued to maintain order, the army continued to defend the borders, there were no economic crises.
Finally, when his behavior became truly intolerable, Rome’s elite did what the party now controlling Congress seems unable even to contemplate: It found a way to get rid of him.
And that’s why even while Republican Senators now openly question Trump’s fitness for the office, the motivations for his actions, even his mental stability, and while business leaders normally locked in an embrace with the Republican party are instead fleeing in horror, the American public still has a major problem on its hands.
We can’t get rid of him. Or, more correctly, the majority of Republicans with the power to impeach and toss him out of office remain unwilling to do so out of fear of Trump's rabid base, upon whom their re-election depends, and because so much of the Republican Party’s entire reason for existence owes itself to the same cadre of White Supremacist Brownshirts and their racist sympathizers we just saw wreak havoc in Charlottesville, Virginia. Those people simply epitomize and channel what is now the default mental state of the core Republican voter.
The fact is that white supremacists have long been a key if unacknowledged part of the G.O.P. coalition, and Republicans need those votes to win general elections. Given the profiles in cowardice they’ve presented so far, it’s hard to imagine anything — up to and including evidence of collusion with a foreign power — that would make them risk losing those voters’ support.
Caligula is widely—if disputedly—viewed as representing the nadir of the Roman Republic, an example of the moral rot that been allowed to fester through decades of corruption, greed and apathy among the highest levels of Roman society. That interpretation may or may not be correct, as there are few sources actually documenting his reign. Many of the accounts that did survive have been criticized for being overtly praiseworthy of Caligula, or overtly harsh. In some ways this resembles the dichotomy we see today with Trump-friendly “news” sources competing with historically and traditionally legitimate journalists in their characterization of Trump’s actions. Additionally, some of the most critical accounts of Caligula’s actual personality were lost because their authors were persecuted by Caligula himself. Again, the parallels with Trump’s all-out assault on media critical of him are obvious.
But as Krugman notes, the scenario we face with Trump could easily end up being far more destructive to this country than anything Caligula ever did to Rome, simply because the Republicans who control the levers of impeachment show no inclination to put their country over their personal ambitions:
So the odds are that we’re stuck with a malevolent, incompetent president whom nobody knowledgeable respects, and many consider illegitimate. If so, we have to hope that our country somehow stumbles through the next year and a half without catastrophe, and that the midterm elections transform the political calculus and make the Constitution great again.
The 2018 elections may be the most critical in the country’s history. Assuming we make it that far.