Trump’s Rubicon

In late 2020, I wrote an article that was published on The Globalist comparing Donald Trump to Julius Caesar. Only weeks later, Trump himself further validated the comparison by perpetrating the January 6 coup attempt.

That act of insurrection directly paralleled Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon with his army — committing open treachery against the Constitution, state and people.

Trump and Caesar

The 2020 article found both similarities and differences between Trump and Caesar. One of the most significant similarities was, and continues to be, that both men sought power not for its own sake, but also for the legal protection provided by high office.

Caesar had high-placed enemies ready to bury him under litigation once he resigned his governorship. Trump out of office has been — at least partly and preliminarily — subject to accountability for his various political and financial crimes.

Now: The attempted assassination parallel

Only in 2024 has one more key element been added to the story: Trump has been the victim of attempted assassination. However bad a Trump presidency would be, this development is potentially even worse. We will have more to say at the end of the article about why.

For the moment, let us simply be clear that political violence, like so many kinds of violence, is abominable and unacceptable.

Two attempts in fact

There were in fact two apparent attempts on Trump this past summer. The first one does not really count as a parallel with the attempt on Caesar because — as far as we can tell — the attack had no discernible motivation.

As best we can tell, the shooter was simply an emotionally disturbed young man with a gun, a type seen all too often in the news from the United States, and Trump was just a high-profile target of convenience. The Butler, Pennsylvania attack can be compared with the 1981 shooting of Ronald Reagan: A despicable act, but not a political act.

The second purported attempt, by a potential assassin who was chased away by the U.S. Secret Service before he could fire a shot and then arrested, was different. We could speculate about the mental state of this would-be shooter, but it appears that he was motivated by politics.

According to news reports, the suspect, though once a Trump supporter, is now a partisan for the cause of a free Ukraine and an opponent of Trump.

So now Trump has the status of being “victim of (attempted) assassination” in common with Julius Caesar.

No political conspiracy, though

Some Trump surrogates have made an argument that would support an even stronger parallel: A claim that there has been a political conspiracy to assassinate Trump.

This claim, however, is groundless. There is no evidence that the would-be assassin had any collaborators, or any grounds to imagine that any politician of national stature in the United States today (with the exception of Trump himself) would entertain the idea of resorting to violence.

Aided and abetted by the Democrats?

Another talking point of Trump surrogates has been that the Democratic leadership has “encouraged” assassination, even unintentionally, by painting Trump as an existential threat to U.S. democracy. This accusation can be carefully taken apart.

First, Trump’s candidacy does present an existential threat to U.S. democracy. It would be foolish to pretend otherwise. He has shown very plainly that he is willing to use violent and extra-legal means to attempt to hold on to power (and immunity from prosecution for crimes).

Enter dementia

Ever since he sought out tabloid celebrity in the 1970s, he has been well known for his vanity, delusion, brazen lies, entitlement and vindictiveness, qualities that are now aggravated by dementia.

His worst impulses were kept in check during his first term as President primarily by the people surrounding him: Veteran Republican staff and administrators and lawyers and politicians (Vice-President Mike Pence among them) whose first loyalty was to the country and the Constitution.

Worse the second time around

A second Trump presidency would look very different, because the most qualified and responsible Republicans will be unwilling to serve with him. (Dozens who served in his first administration agree that he is unfit).

Moreover, Trump will not make the same mistake twice: To staff his second administration he will be looking for personal loyalty over principle or experience or ability (as is seen in his choice of J.D. Vance as running mate).

The Republicans in Congress have shown repeatedly that they are cowed by Trump (and his base) and will not stand up to him, even if he adopts terrible policies and commits egregious crimes.

Enter the Supreme Court

The Republican majority on the Supreme Court has gone even further, making baffling rulings, in defiance of precedent, Constitution, and common sense, to cater to Trump. Most notably, ruling that Trump cannot be prosecuted for any crime he has committed in the past as President or will commit in the future as President.

In other words, if Trump returns to the White House, the only real check he would face, if it materializes at all, would be a slim Democratic majority in one or both houses of Congress. 

Are Democrats exaggerating? No

But let us return to the Trump campaign talking point. Have Democratic leaders been publicly exaggerating, or even stating forthrightly, the threat posed by Trump to democracy? No, they have not.

Kamala Harris and her surrogates have been rightly pointing out the stain of January 6 on Trump’s record. However, for the most part they have been focusing on policy issues and following the standard Democratic playbook of trying to offer voters a message of hope. Their goal is to differentiate themselves from the opposition by laying out a more attractive vision for the future.

In fact, if a potential Trump assassin is stirred by political speech to consider Trump a clear and present danger to the republic, the public statements made by Trump himself might be quite adequate.

Trump has toyed openly with the idea of serving an unconstitutional third term. He has told his supporters that if they vote him into office in 2024 they won’t ever need to vote ever again. (“In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not gonna have to vote”).

He has said he would be a “dictator” on “day one” of his second term. He has vowed “revenge” and “retribution” against people who have crossed him, including “televised military tribunals” for former Congresswoman Liz Cheney and throwing various other top Democrats and Republicans in jail.

Advocating for a second American Revolution

Or a potential assassin might be moved by the menacing promise made by the head of the Heritage Foundation. He said that Project 2025, a policy blueprint for an authoritarian second Trump administration, will constitute a “second American Revolution,” which will be “bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

Or consider the words of J.D. Vance, Trump’s running mate, who called Trump “America’s Hitler” (as well as a “moral disaster,” a “total fraud” and “reprehensible”) before his own political ambitions prompted him to become docile and kiss Trump’s ring.

Words matter

Defenders might say Trump doesn’t really mean any of the extreme things he says. Is that any excuse? Do words not matter?

Caesar pushed the envelope of his political power by having his lackeys offer him a crown in public. He never accepted it, but the exercise allowed him to gauge the mood of the mob and see how far they would be willing to support his despotic ambitions.

And by publicly declining the crown each time, he earned the praise of good republicans. Trump is arguably playing a similar game: Seeing how far he can strain the institutions of a democratic republic while maintaining plausible deniability.

A credit to the American political spectrum

With the stakes of this election so dire, it is in fact remarkable — a credit to Americans across the political spectrum — that this political season has not been more uncivil than the two would-be assassins have made it.

It is worth remembering the uptick in violence that accompanied Trump’s first rise to and fall from power — not only the January 6 riot, in which lives were lost.

There was also the 2017 Charlottesville tiki-torch rally (one life lost), the 2018 spree of pipe bombs mailed to Trump critics, the running of Biden campaign buses off the road in Texas in 2020, the foiled 2020 plot to kidnap a Democratic governor in Michigan and the 2022 attempted kidnapping of the Democratic Speaker of the House and assault on her husband.

Remarkably uneventful

Comparatively, the 2024 campaign year has been relatively uneventful. One might chide the hypocrisy of those in the gun rights community who celebrate the second amendment as a check against tyranny and yet line up behind Trump (“well, he’s our tyrant” is perhaps the thinking?).

But even so, it is creditable that neither of the two assassination attempts against Trump was followed by reprisals or other vigilante action of any kind. We can only hope that this restraint continues to Election Day and beyond.

(One reason to be cautiously optimistic is that, as reported by ACLED, recruiting and organizing by extremist groups across the political spectrum has declined precipitously in the United States since the last election cycle.

The crackdown on the January 6 rioters and Trump’s decision not to pardon them may have convinced many potential right-wing militants that it is not worth sticking their neck out for him. And with so little street-level activity to oppose, anti-fascist groups have been similarly dormant).

High stakes

And again, with the stakes of the election so dire, it is also worth reminding ourselves why political violence is so abominable — why attempted assassination should be abhorred and condemned, even when directed at a villain like Trump.

And for this we can turn again to the story of Caesar. Caesar’s assassins were patriots. They were correct in viewing Caesar as a despot, an enemy of the Roman constitution. But their unlawful action did not restore the Roman constitution. It simply drove a deeper nail into it. Shakespeare’s play about Julius Caesar captures well the tragedy of the thing. (See the 2020 article for more on this topic).

As the Supreme Court knows (or should know), there are no one-off course-corrections. Every new action establishes a precedent and will have ripples indefinitely into the future. So it is with political violence.

Conclusion

The risk of establishing a precedent of political violence in the United States, normalizing such violence, crossing that particular Rubicon, arguably poses an even greater potential danger to the institutions of the republic than does even a second Trump term. So let us hope that Trump is simply defeated at the polls. Resoundingly.