The mob-boss president

GAVIN O’TOOLE is chilled by astounding reportage of Donald Trump’s first year in office, and its deployment of retribution as spectacle

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“MEN are more ready to repay an injury than a benefit,” wrote Tacitus, “because gratitude is a burden and revenge a pleasure.”

These words by the great Roman historian, who lived the tyranny of several mad emperors, comprise a lesson about the nature of power, and unwittingly foresee the fate of the United States.

To think that nearly two millennia later Tacitus’s bitter political analysis of Rome can be seamlessly applied to imperial Washington reveals a truth: that nothing has changed since the second century AD.

Read Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s astounding reportage of Donald Trump’s first year in office after his return to the White House, and this becomes abundantly clear.

The US journalistic duo’s chronicle coincides with the observations of Tacitus in every respect: the danger of power without accountability; the love of power unmoderated by principle; the increasing corruption of the governing classes; and how politicians relinquish their inheritance of free speech to flatter a god-king.

Regime Change has a simple message: it is easy to dismiss Trump as a spoilt, orange clown given to tantrums and prone to narcissistic self-delusion, but that would be unwise.

As profiles of the upstart with a wealthy and connected father from as early as 1979 suggest, note the authors: “Trump was also a decades-long student of power dynamics. He has a feral instinct for power and he is an intuitive reader of people.”

It is that pursuit of raw power through whatever vector can deliver it — money, violence, fear — which drives Trump, and once he has it in his possession, he works it like clay in service of his avarice, absent of shame or remorse.  

This explains the most predictable reflex of the US emperor, revenge — and Haberman and Swan devote an entire section of their book to “Retribution.”

The main reason for this is Trump’s self-evident criminality and corruption, traits that seemed likely to destroy him in 2023 as he battled a blizzard of arraignments and lawsuits. Having survived, revenge against anyone who dares to cross him would become his lodestar.

If there is one defining feature of Trump 2.0, therefore, it is the use of lawfare and abuse of legal power by the Department of Justice to hunt down those who speak up about the emperor’s new clothes or whose integrity dulls his brilliance.  

And the arch “keeper of grievances” in this atrocious conspiracy to turn US governance into a mafia feud is his dark enforcer with the gravedigger stare, deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller.

As Tacitus would have understood, Trump and Miller sensed early that vengeance was not only the birthright of a maligned tyrant, but also a gladiatorial display to satiate his populistic base in the gory amphitheatre of US politics.

Haberman and Swan observe that throughout Trump’s period of exile and criminal reckoning after Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election, he “grasped immediately and instinctively that he could repurpose his legal peril as a powerful political asset.”

Trump crowded the cases he faced — from sexual abuse, defamation, the inflation of property values, hoarding classified documents and conspiring to overturn elections, to the 34 felonies on which he would be convicted — under a single banner: “witch-hunt.”

The authors treat us to extraordinary fly-on-the-wall accounts of Trump’s expletive-fuelled excesses with reportage that reaches right into the Oval Office.

They argue that Biden’s victory, which Trump never accepted, was the main explanation why the gloves came off in his second term.

They explore this in all its capricious infamy — his obsession with bling, his personality cult, his trashing of institutional constraints, the violence and abuse he visits upon detractors, the greed of his spawn and obsequious aides.

But it is the section on Trump’s lust for retribution against a diverse cast of victims — from law firms, universities, the Smithsonian and the corporate media, to Venezuela’s president and Iran’s ayatollah — that will really cut to the bone.

Small wonder that Niccolo Machiavelli used Tacitus’s exact words to develop his own theory of power, insisting that gratitude is no way for a prince to rule — because only fear is binding.

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