A Pretender Appropriate for the Age: Donald Trump’s Ersatz Caesarism

The Rubik’s Cube, like the chess board, can be counterintuitive to the noninitiated. A cube finished on one face seems closer to solution than one all mixed up, but cursory study of the many solution algorithms online teaches the opposite. With fixation on the facade, one misses more significant action elsewhere. Often, the creation of a good-looking face requires a contradictory mess of compromise at deeper levels, pushing the whole farther from solution. Solvers of Rubik’s Cubes, chess masters, and the politically initiated understand the difference between a situation’s superficial face and the substance behind it, allowing them to dazzle the naïve observer with prescient solutions or predictions of what comes next. It is precisely because most don’t understand the inner workings that things like Rubik’s Cubes are entertaining at all; when everyone knows the trick, there is no audience.

Enter Trump, a tall, blonde, brash businessman who doesn’t apologize for his masculinity, who triggers passionate hatred in all of the right people. A man with a fitting facade, perfect because it is unpolished in just the right places, for the White man’s president. Trump has already had a term in which he failed to deliver on his promises to his American supporters while over-delivering to Israel and even non-constituencies like the Black criminal class. But, like any cult of personality figure worth his salt, Trump inspires endless excuses for his failures, rivaled in number and convolution only by the many fantasies spun up by his unhinged opposition. Why does Trump resonate so, both positively and negatively, with the American and broader western public? Is it that he breaks the rules of engagement for presidential politics, speaking the truth for once on the big stage, or is he tapping into a deeper level of signs and symbols?

In the culture/civilization schema of Oswald Spengler, Western Civilization is at or near the period of Caesarism. What is Caesarism and what is a Caesar? In brief, Caesarism is a time when a great leader wrests power from a decadent political system through direct appeals to the people. The governing body previously interposing between head(s) of state and citizenry is stepped over. This transition is brought about through civil wars. A Caesar is the man who does this by achieving sufficient success and notoriety in a field fitting his culture to allow him to make such a power proposition to the populace. In the case of Rome, the so-called Optimates, champions of the Roman elite structure, were brought down by the so-called Populares, a loosely populist movement centered on issues like land reforms. The yeoman soldier, proud backbone of the Roman legions, was being asked to campaign for longer and longer periods, his farms laying fallow, while the proceeds of these campaigns went to a smaller and smaller clique of senatorial and equestrian elites. This grievance found voice first in the failed political career of the brothers Gracchi and the civil war of Gaius Marius against Optimates leader Sulla. It was ultimately consummated in the political personage of Julius Caesar, the nephew of Marius, who won his civil war against the new Optimates champion Pompey. Caesar’s smashing of the republican senatorial system survived his own assassination via Caesar Augustus and the succession of emperors.

When governing institutions passed a critical threshold of unresponsiveness to the people, the reaction of the people is a wish for destroying the instituions even at the cost of social upheaval. All segments of the American and wider Western public are dissatisfied with their so-called representative government and its policies. The American right, left, and center respond to polling in a manner consistent with the desire to crush their opponents and force their policy preferences. It is not an uncommon sentiment to wish for the destruction of such institutions, as the mainstream media, banking and finance, and Congress itself. Respect for the democratic process or following legal forms is now only a pretense for partisan desires rather than a principle unto itself. That Western Civilization resonates with Trump, and to a lesser extent with his global copycats, shows that it is ready for Caesarism. What’s more, this makes us also ripe for manipulation by a spun-up imposter, a Manchurian candidate with the facade of a populist but without the policy intentions. During Julius Caesar’s time, the patrician-born Clodius had himself adopted into a plebeian family, the equivalent of covering your Ivy league sweater with a Dickies work shirt, in order to help his political career eligibility for the tribunate. In other words, the public’s appetite for system resetting populism can be sensed by savvy players who will use it cynically.

Enter Trump, a businessman trained in the ways of the world by the homosexual Jewish legal heavyweight Roy Cohn, whose campaigns are largely funded by Jewish billionaires, who has several part-Jewish grandchildren, and who referred to himself as the king of Israel due to the favoritism he showed them in his first term. Not satisfied with the obligatory presidential visit to the wailing wall, Trump paid his respects with a visit to the grave of Jewish supremacist “rebbe” rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson. Does this sound like a man ready to fight a civil war on the side of the Populares against the Optimates, or like a well-placed ersatz Caesar meant to prevent the rise of the real thing? Is Trump cleverly biding his time, allowing himself to be stymied at every policy fork by lawfare and infiltration, before turning heel to the system at the age of 78 to fight a political war? Is it somehow beyond the ken of the Jews who dominate the media, banking, financial, academic, and entertainment sectors to sense that a fake rogue figure is now needed? The system, bankrupt of all legitimacy with the citizenry for decades, has been kept meta-stable up to now through stoking intense partisan hatreds that maintain some level of interest in the electoral show. As that strategy becomes less effective and the total loss of confidence in governance is sensed, these clever manipulators know full well how to give the people the look of the thing without the substance. I hearken back to the famous reaction of Jared Kushner to his first Donald Trump rally, viewing the masses of energized and angry Americans declaring hatred for the media and political system in general. How long did his ears tingle, did racial memories of the Pale of Settlement flash before his eyes, before he realized this movement itself could play the perfect spoiler to the realization of its own aims? Could this be why the Adelsons and others have given Trump’s campaigns hundreds of millions of dollars, or are they so stupid they don’t realize they’re laying fertilizer down around the growing tree that holds their nooses?

Political Caesarism is the marriage of populism with a great man of history, a rogue elite giving voice to the demands of the common. A Caesar is a leader credible with the people, who took wounds in battle and with skin in the game. Donald Trump is no Caesar. That he has the appearance of such is an indication of the corrupt confusion of pieces behind the facade. Donald Trump is not a system smasher, he is a necessary blunt stabilizer to counter a system driving off of a cliff. Donald Trump does not lead from the front lines, but skips out the back door after he picks a fight. Trump left his hoodwinked supporters to rot as political prisoners just as he left his business partners in prior decades holding the bag on failed ventures over and over again. The man has declared himself bankrupt on several occasions; believe him.

The danger to America and the broader west is not that either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris will be elected. The difference between their administrations will be largely aesthetic in nature. Perhaps a war with Iran is more likely under Trump, while the economy may do more poorly under Harris, but the reverse of both is perfectly possible. Economic, foreign, and immigration policy has largely been consistent across administrations, Democrat or Republican, for many decades, and for all of Trump’s bluster and Biden’s “return to normalcy,” theirs have been no exception to this trend. The danger is that the yearning in our people for a Caesar will be quelled and confused by this imposter, as viewing pornography tricks the brain into thinking one is fulfilling one’s reproductive directive. The West needs a true Caesar to knock over our decrepit and corrupt institutions, allowing progression through our next civilizational epoch. The chief obstacle to this, in a sort of Gresham’s Law of politics, is not the enemy itself but their ersatz Caesar golem.