Donald Trump: Wise Emperor or Condemned to Damnatio Memoriae?
About one year ago, shortly before the US elections, I published a post on Cassandra’s Legacy where I wondered what Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton would look like if they were Roman Emperors. I reasoned that the Roman Empire of the 1st and 2nd Century AD was facing many of the same problems which the American Empire is facing nowadays: declining resources, excessive costs, overextended military apparatus, and others. I concluded that Hillary Clinton might have resembled Emperor Trajan, who embarked on a difficult and ultimately self-defeating military attempt to expand the empire. Trump, instead, might have looked like Emperor Hadrian, Trajan’s successor, who took the opposite path: stopping all wars of expansion and consolidating the Empire within its borders.
One year after Trump’s election, it seems that my interpretation was correct. Trump is doing more or less what Hadrian did some 2.000 before him. Apart from not having engaged in new wars, Trump’s tax plan has a very transparent purpose, that of decoupling the US from the globalized economic system. (an interesting discussion on this point is provided by Dr. D. on “The Automatic Earth“). That may not be so apparent by listening to what Trump says, but the insults, the threats, and the outrageous behavior are mainly noise that masks the direction in which the Trump administration is trying to move – and it is like steering a transatlantic liner. It is slow.
In short, Trump is engaged in reversing the grand plan that the Neocons had devised in the 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union. At that time, the idea of a US-led World Empire seemed feasible and the plan was explicitly laid out in the “Project for a New American Century” published in 1996.
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