Trump Isn't Caesar. He's Tiberius Gracchus
Understand Where We Are, Roman Republic Style
Much is now made of the end of the American Republic resembling the end of the Roman Republic. Some aspects of that are true. There’s an increasing amount of social tension and acceptance of political violence. There is a populist political side that is attempting to undue the oligarchic interest, represented by the other party. That populist party is represented by a man against whom the oligarchs are wielding a legal apparatus as a form of lawfare, and it is ratcheting social tensions higher.1 Vast economic expansion and foreign victories led to this point. All that is true, but it’s not the whole story.
All of those things happened then and now. But, though those similarities exist, they are few and surface level. They might look like enough to draw a comparison at first glance, but they lack explanatory power and aren’t correct in many respects. If we’re in an imperial moment, it would be the incompetent Emperor Honorius stabbing Stilicho in the back while letting the Goths rampage across the border. But that too is only similar at the surface level.
So, we’re neither at the end of the Empire nor is Trump mounting his golf cart to cross the Rubicon. If that is the case, then where are we? Sulla, as some wish? Marius, given the populist upswell? Not in a Roman moment at all? No. We’re in a Gracchan moment, that of Tiberius Gracchus, to be specific, and that is a helpful clue about where we might go next. This article will explore the similarities between the story of Tiberius Gracchus and that of Trump, and use that to explain where we might go next.
NOTE: In last week’s article on Tyson and the Feudal System it runs, we said we would explore that topic in more depth. However, given the conviction of Trump and the shouts of “Julius Caesar” that resulted from it, this article, inspired by Alex Petkas’ excellent thread2 on the lawfare against Caesar and my thread on the Gracchi,3 seemed more topical. Tyson will return next week.
Trump, Caesar, and Tiberius Gracchus
The Caesar Comparison is Obvious, But Inaccurate
First, it must be said that there are similarities between Trump at the moment and Caesar as he headed toward the Rubicon. Both are populists. Both are of family wealth, though not as much as their critics claim. Both come from the “fast set” of society yet spurned those former comrades to embrace the cause of the dispossessed. Both tried to compromise with their former friends who saw them as class traitors but were attacked with vicious lawfare despite reaching out a hand of friendship and mercy. Finally, both are captivating speakers. For example, it's not that hard to imagine Trump giving the speech Caesar gave to his troops when deciding what to do. Here's the rendition of it from HBO’s Rome:
But while there are some similarities between the two men, the growing popular claim that Trump is Caesar is misguided. It misunderstands where we are in the life cycle of a republic, what happened in America that led us to a Manhattan jury convicting Trump, and what happened in Rome to spark the Civil War.
In fact, Trump being a rakish populares who is hounded by an oligarchic regime is essentially where the similarities between him and Caesar end. He's no conquering general, has no private army, and there's no Crassus-like figure, the death of whom upset a three-legged stool.4 Erik Prince, a man who did, at one point, command a private army that swept away all before it,5 was badgered and ruined by lawfare,6 and hated by nearly all of his socio-economic American peers, is closer to fitting the Caesar bill, though there are also a great many differences between him and Caesar.
Further, the American Republic isn't in a Rubicon moment. For one, our attitude toward and experience with political violence is completely different. The post-Lincoln Republic, a wholly different animal from the one that preceded it and died in the War Between the States, has seen no major internal fighting of the Sulla-Marius mold. Nothing has broken all bounds of politics. We have seen some rioting, rare melee’s between the most radical of each side, and even rarer political shootings, but little else. We’re far from even the military-style street fighting of Weimar, much less the blood-drenched proscriptions of Marius and Sulla or fighting in armies like Pompey and Caesar at Pharsalus.7 Caesar, when he crossed the Rubicon and marched on Rome, followed in the footsteps of two of Rome’s greatest men: Marius and Sulla. Their use of quasi-private military force (personally loyal legions) to achieve political ends set the scene for Caesar. Without their example and precedent, he likely would not have marched his men across the Rubicon and into history.
Additionally, our problems are different. America, for now, does have a teeming mass of unemployed, hungry hordes in cities with a few oligarchs owning everything while the rest suffer in squalor or live as slaves. Admittedly, we do have a grain-dole-like food stamps program,8 and use of EBT cards in cities like Baltimore, Atlanta, and St. Louis might resemble Rome’s poor lining up for their free Egyptian grain.
Rather, we have a middle-class, ownership culture. Admittedly, that's declining as the oligarchs gradually seize control of everything, hoovering up the lion’s share of the assets for themselves.9 But, still, Americans largely own their homes, and most have some financial assets. Ownership remains, and the middle class is large, if shrinking. Further, while the Globalist American Empire represents the will of and benefits those oligarchs, as does much American tax and public policy, they don't yet dominate everything in the way the few with everything did by the time Caesar returned from Gaul. As such, our politics are different. They are much more about the middle class wanting to keep what it has had for centuries, namely home ownership and some degree of wealth and comfort, rather than trying to keep a vast underclass of urban poor stable under the feet of a rapacious oligarchy. Though we have such an oligarchy, we still have a large middle class, unlike Rome by the end of the Republic.
If Not Then, When?
So, if Trump is not Caesar and America’s problems are not Rome’s of Caesar’s day, then who is he, and where are we? To discover that, let’s first explore the current situation in which we find ourselves.
America’s Present Position
America currently is in a situation where the middle-class “yeomen” who were once her economic bedrock are declining. That decline has come largely because of "victories" abroad that made America a hegemon, trade policies that flooded the country with cheap foreign goods made in slave-like conditions that put middle-class Americans and the owners of the factories in which they worked or small businesses that they owned out of business. The slave labor of the East made American labor and business uncompetitive, except in sectors like IT, high-tech weapons manufacturing, and financial services. Meanwhile, the oligarchs who came up with such policies in government and executed them in the board rooms have made massive gains because they own most of the assets that benefitted from outsourcing and free trade.
The plight of those dispossessed yeomen was entirely ignored by the rapacious oligarchs that inflicted it upon them and so Trump rose out of nowhere, politically, to represent them. Importantly, though he is a populist figure, he comes from the monied elite. Rather than being a barefooted rabble-rouser, he’s an elite who betrayed his class to side with the old stock of America’s middle class rather than the vast throngs of poor and "knowledge worker" elites with whom his former friends side. In fact, he, at great personal and financial cost to himself, seeks to represent the interests of that declining middle class and is hated for it by his former friends. The regime despises him for that. They hate him for calling out how trade policy eviscerated the middle class, how factories closed because of offshoring inflicted by vulture capitalists of the Mitt Romney mold, how illegal immigration pushes down wages and up crime, and, most of all, for trying to craft policies that would address those problems and help the yeomen rather than the regime elites.
Meanwhile, America has a huge amount of crime and some urban unrest. However, that “unrest” is limited and largely about wanting free stuff and the ability to commit crime without repercussion, not revolution. Things in America might be unpleasant but they haven't yet broken down politically to the point where Sulla is marching on the city and making lists of estates to give to followers after detaching the heads of enemies from their necks.
The Gracchi, not Caesar
That situation is very reminiscent of a certain period in Roman history, though not the Caesarean era on everyone’s lips. Rather, we’re at the Gracchan turning point in Rome’s history. Specifically, the Tiberius Gracchus moment, with Trump as that figure. Not Gaius Gracchus. Not Sulla. Not Caesar. And certainly not Augustus.
To understand the similarity, it’s first necessary to understand the Rome of the day, a period that begins with the end of the Punic Wars. With those three great victories, the second of which was crushing and the third of which settled the score for all time, came the devolution of Rome. Out went the old Rome of wealthy but rustic, Cinncinatus-like nobles and sturdy yeoman farmers, one that Dionysius of Halicarnassus said was one where even Roman leaders "worked with their own hands, led frugal lives, did not chafe under honourable poverty, and, far from aiming at positions of royal power, actually refused them.” That old Rome might have been dying already, but it was largely with the carnage and accession to wealth of the Punic Wars, that it really died.
For one, the carnage of the wars wreaked great havoc in Rome’s yeomen population. The wars took place before the Marian reforms, and so only those with the landed wealth to arm themselves were enrolled in the legions. So, off marched Rome’s yeomen armies as legionaries, and they perished in the tens of thousands. One hundred thousand perished at sea after the Battle of Cape Hermaeum during the First Punic War. During the Second Punic War, thirty thousand died at Trebia, fifteen thousand at Lake Trasimine, and over sixty-seven thousand at Cannae. Disaster followed disaster for them as Hannibal ravaged the Italian countryside. Though the Republic was victorious in the end, her fields were drenched with the blood of her yeomen armies.
Further, those who did survive were away for years at a time. Whether they had to fight in Spain with Scipio, bottle up Hannibal with Fabius, or march on Carthage, they were away from their family farms for years at a time. As a result, the fields of the fallen yeomen laid fallow for years, and the farmers who used to cultivate those small patches of land were ruined. For years, they had been away, and in their absence, much of the land wasn’t farmed, so they lost everything.
But as the yeomen suffered, the oligarchs prospered. With the final defeat of Carthage in the Third Punic War and Rome’s simultaneous conquering of Macedonia, innumerable throngs of slaves flowed into Italy, brought by conquering generals and bought up be oligarchs who wanted them to farm estates. Along with them came a stunning amount of wealth. It was monetary riches to a degree previously unseen by the formerly austere Romans. The result was that the oligarchs used their newfound wealth to buy the land of fallen legionnaires and their newly bought slaves to farm it, turning what was a system of small farms and responsible landowners into a collection of dispossessed urban poor and vast latifundia owned by the oligarchs and farmed by slaves.
Plutarch, describing what resulted in his Life of Tiberius Gracchus, wrote, “Afterwards the rich men of the neighbourhood contrived to get these lands again into their possession, under other people's names, and at last would not stick to claim most of them publicly in their own. The poor, who were thus deprived of their farms, were no longer either ready, as they had formerly been, to serve in war or careful in the education of their children; insomuch that in a short time there were comparatively few freemen remaining in all Italy, which swarmed with workhouses full of foreign-born slaves. These the rich men employed in cultivating their ground of which they dispossessed the citizens.”10
That was the situation into which Tiberius came as tribune.11 Despite being connected to one of the oldest and most notable of patrician families on his mother's side,12 he decided to take a stand against the oligarchic patricians and for the disposed yeomen. He saw how the demands of the state in wartime led to the ruin of their farms, and decided to fix that with an eminently reasonable land bill that would limit land ownership to a reasonable amount per family and return lands to the disposed yeomen who should be farming them.
Plutarch, describing what happened, wrote, “Caius Lælius, the intimate friend of Scipio, undertook to reform this abuse [oligarchs buying up the land and farming it with slaves]; but meeting with opposition from men of authority, and fearing a disturbance, he soon desisted, and received the name of the Wise or the Prudent, both which meanings belong to the Latin word Sapiens. But Tiberius, being elected tribune of the people, entered upon that design [to reform the oligarch abuse of the land and land laws] without delay, at the instigation, as is most commonly stated, of Diophanes, the rhetorician, and Blossius, the philosopher.”13
Further, describing how Tiberius came to his determination to reform the system, come what may, Plutarch recorded (emphasis added), “[W]hen Tiberius went through Tuscany to Numantia, and found the country almost depopulated, there being hardly any free husbandmen or shepherds, but for the most part only barbarian, imported slaves, he then first conceived the course of policy which in the sequel proved so fatal to his family. Though it is also most certain that the people themselves chiefly excited his zeal and determination in the prosecution of it, by setting up writings upon the porches, walls, and monuments, calling upon him to reinstate the poor citizens in their former possessions.”14
So, seeing how the oligarchic elites were abusing the legal system to seize the land, Tiberius crafted a law that would firmly limit how many acres any one family could own and require that those who unjustly acquired land to sell it back to the state so that it could be returned to its rightful owners, the yeomen of Rome. Predictably, the elites hated Tiberius for his land law and fulminated against him.
Plutarch, describing the land law and the elite’s hatred of Tiberius, wrote, “Never did any law appear more moderate and gentle, especially being enacted against such great oppression and avarice. For they who ought to have been severely punished for trangressing the former laws, and should at least have lost all their titles to such lands which they had unjustly usurped, were notwithstanding to receive a price for quitting their unlawful claims, and giving up their lands to those fit owners who stood in need of help. But though this reformation was managed with so much tenderness that, all the former transactions being passed over, the people were only thankful to prevent abuses of the like nature for the future, yet, on the other hand, the moneyed men, and those of great estates, were exasperated, through their covetous feelings against the law itself, and against the lawgiver, through anger and party-spirit. They therefore endeavoured to seduce the people, declaring that Tiberius was designing a general redivision of lands, to overthrow the government, and cut all things into confusion.”
But, Tiberius was ready for their attempts to outflank him. Far more popular with the people than they, he said, in speech recorded by Plutarch, “The wild beasts that roam over Italy... have every one of them a cave or lair to lurk in; but the men who fight and die for Italy enjoy the common air and light, indeed, but nothing else; houseless and homeless they wander about with their wives and children. And it is with lying lips that their [commanders] exhort the soldiers in their battles to defend sepulchres and shrines from the enemy; for not a man of them has an hereditary altar, not one of all these many Romans an ancestral tomb, but they fight and die to support others in wealth and luxury, and though they are styled masters of the world, they have not a single clod of earth that is their own.”
Remind you of the war in Iraq, fought to defend US dollar hegemony and oligarchic interests,15 for which thousands died and thousands more were maimed for life, a war that Trump said was a bad idea?16 That war also, particularly by 2008-09, was fought by men with little to their names on behalf of predatory, oligarchic interests who cared little for those middle-class men dying in the streets as greed at home caused an economic collapse, particularly for the middle class.
In any case, the Roman elites proved intransigent, unwilling to give up their illegally acquired advantaged for the benefit of the state and its long-suffering soldiers. Instead of cooperating on the common-sense, mild bill proposed by Tiberius, they pressured his fellow tribune into vetoing the bill, as both tribunes had to be in support of it for it to be passed. So, Tiberius radicalized. As Plutarch records, “Tiberius, irritated at these proceedings, presently laid aside this milder bill, but at the same time preferred another; which, as it was more grateful to the common people, so it was much more severe against the wrongdoers, commanding them to make an immediate surrender of all lands which, contrary to former laws, had come into their possession.”
Things then escalated further, with Tiberius attempting to pressure the other tribune, Octavius, into backing down and allowing the bill to move forward. He used his power to pressure the oligarchic opposition and they entered a conspiracy to kill him. As Plutarch records, “[T]he rich proprietors put themselves into mourning, and went up and down melancholy and dejected; they entered also into a conspiracy against Tiberius, and procured men to murder him; so that he also, with all men's knowledge, whenever he went abroad, took with him a sword-staff.”
When the Senate refused to pass the bill, Tiberius, relying on his crowd of supporters in Rome, held a vote in which he goaded the crowd into voting Octavius out of office and for the severe land bill, passing it. Because of the oligarchic Senate’s intransigence, he relied on mob “democracy,” with temporary success but future consequences. It was a situation, Plutarch says, in which “the course he had taken with Octavius had created offence even among the populace as well as the nobility, because the dignity of the tribunes seemed to be violated.”
Plutarch, recording that series of events, wrote, “When the people were met together again, Tiberius placed himself in the rostra, and endeavoured a second time to persuade Octavius. But all being to no purpose, he referred the whole matter to the people, calling on them to vote at once, whether Octavius should be deposed or not; and when seventeen of the thirty-five tribes had already voted against him, and there wanted only the votes of one tribe more for his final deprivation, Tiberius put a short stop to the proceedings, and once more renewed his importunities; he embraced and kissed him before all the assembly, begging with all the earnestness imaginable, that he would neither suffer himself to incur the dishonour, nor him to be reputed the author and promoter of so odious a measure. Octavius, we are told, did seem a little softened and moved with these entreaties; his eyes filled with tears, and he continued silent for a considerable time. But presently looking towards the rich men and proprietors of estates, who stood gathered in a body together, partly for shame, and partly for fear of disgracing himself with them, he boldly bade Tiberius use any severity he pleased. The law for his deprivation being thus voted, Tiberius ordered one of his servants, whom he had made a freeman, to remove Octavius from the rostra, employing his own domestic freed servants in the stead of the public officers. And it made the action seem all the sadder, that Octavius was dragged out in such an ignominious manner. The people immediately assaulted him, whilst the rich men ran in to his assistance.”
As might be predicted, that wasn’t the end of the matter. The bill was passed, but Tiberius died. A crowd of armed oligarchs and their similarly armed attendants murdered him in broad daylight, on Capitoline Hill. As Plutarch records, the “persons of the greatest authority in the city . . . [and the] attendants they brought with them had furnished themselves with clubs and staves from their houses, and they themselves picked up the feet and other fragments of stools and chairs, which were broken by the hasty flight of the common people. Thus armed, they made towards Tiberius, knocking down those whom they found in front of him, and those were soon wholly dispersed and many of them slain. Tiberius tried to save himself by flight . . . Publius Satureius, a tribune, one of his colleagues, was observed to give him the first fatal stroke, by hitting him upon the head with the foot of a stool. The second blow was claimed, as though it had been a deed to be proud of, by Lucius Rufus. And of the rest there fell above three hundred killed by clubs and staves only, none by an iron weapon.”
Gaius Gracchus, Tiberius’ younger brother, was later elected tribune and re-enacted the land law of Tiberius with great success. He was, however, also murdered for his efforts to restore the fortunes of those dispossessed by Rome's "victories" abroad. For decades afterward, even speaking of the Gracchi put one under suspicion.
The result, for Rome’s political system, was cataclysmic in the long run. Though the elites temporarily retained their power, they did so only at the cost of destroying the system’s legitimacy, stirring up great grievance, and legitimizing political violence. As Mike Duncan put it in The Storm Before the Storm, "The final victory over Carthage in the Punic Wars led to rising economic inequality, dislocation of traditional ways of life, increasing political polarization, the breakdown of unspoken rules of political conduct, the privatization of the military, rampant corruption, endemic social and ethnic prejudice, battles over access to citizenship and voting rights, ongoing military quagmires, the introduction of violence as a political tool, and a set of elites so obsessed with their own privileges that they refused to reform the system in time to save it.”
The oligarchs could have just accepted the reasonable law, made sure it didn’t pinch their pockets too much, and moved on from the episode with reasonable wealth and tranquility. Instead, they dug in their heels to fight against a reasonable policy change and caused chaos in the present, the bloodbath of Marius and Sulla a few generations on, and the Civil War Caesar won mere decades after that.
Trump and Tiberius
Trump, then, is very similar to Tiberius in terms of style, aim, how the regime responded, and what that response meant for their agendas.
At a surface level, both men were off-the-cuff politicians. Gaius Gracchus is regarded as being coldly calculating and perhaps aiming for a dictatorship, as later achieved by Caesar, whereas Tiberius was a hot-blooded politician who aimed to help the yeomen and got carried away in attempting to effect his aims. Finally, the two are similar in tactics. Tiberius giving desperate speeches to the dispossessed middle class to get the bill passed in the days before his death is reminiscent of Trump’s speeches in the final days of his presidency, and the speeches Tiberius gave throughout the episode are more articulate but similar in tone and point to the speeches Trump gave at rallies in 2015-16 and has started giving again in his 2024 campaign. In other words, both used powerful oratory to raise the ire of the dispossessed middle class by explaining to that class what the rapacious elites did to it, with that oratory also rallying the crowds to action.
Besides that somewhat surface-level similarity in style, their general goal was similar. Now, land matters less than it did in Rome, or even Victorian England.17 Wealth is made, earned, invested, and saved in a variety of means, not just the soil and that which grows from it. So, Trump cares less about farms and farm size than the Gracchi, though America’s family farms are being demolished by behemoths that rely on cheap labor as well.18 Regardless of whether the concern be with land or access to economic opportunity more generally, the idea that the yeomen a) ought not be dispossessed so that oligarchs and hoover up all the wealth supposedly won abroad and b) that policy needs to be crafted to address their predicament and concerns, is very similar. Relatedly, the problem of economic elites preferring slavish, cheap labor from abroad to higher wages and better work for the native middle class is a problem of Tiberius’ day that Trump tried to address as well. Now, we have wage slaves rather than fettered, barbarian slaves, but the idea and effect on the middle class are similar.
Then there is the utter hatred felt for them by the oligarchic regime is exceedingly similar. Reading Plutarch’s life of Tiberius Gracchus, one feels the visceral hatred and dripping contempt the oligarchs felt for him. That same contempt is easily discernable any time MSNBC, CNN, ABC, and often even FNC talk about Trump and his supporters. That hatred and condescension applies to how the regime feels about their supporters as well. Hillary's "basket of deplorables" comment comes to mind, as does the “learn to code” dismissal of economic concerns hurled at blue-collar workers for years.
Similarly, of course, there is how both men were treated by the regime after the climax. Tiberius was bludgeoned to death for his pains, and the current American regime wants to stick Trump in jail without Secret Service protection so that he can be Epsteined. Even more similarly to Tiberius, Trump had to retreat to the White House bunker when the oligarchs sent a bludgeon-armed mob of Antifa and BLM goons after him in 2020, and those goons breached the outer White House perimeter.19 As with Tiberius, the elites couldn’t help but raise a violent mob against the man they smeared as a rabble-rouser.
Relatedly, in both cases there was not yet full-scale fighting. It was the melee of mobs and elite procedural manipulation that brought both men down, not the armies of Marius, Sulla, or Caesar; political violence was legitimated by the oligarchic regime’s conduct, but not yet at the full level of the later unpleasantness.
Similarly, there was not yet a crown in the gutter for any man to pluck up. Things were bad and required dramatic change, but the goal of both was to renew and preserve the Republic, not use the Republic’s failings to, like Napoleon or Caesar, become emperor. The time is not yet ripe for that, as the story of Tiberius Gracchus and Gaius Gracchus, who more directly aimed for the purple, shows, however much neo-reactionaries call for a Caesar to cut the Gordian knot and end America’s woes.
The final similarity is the regime-caused failure of both men to achieve their goals. In Tiberius’ case, that was his murder at the hands of a patrician mob. In Trump’s case, it was the 2020 Color Revolution launched against him. Though they succeeded in ramming through the land law, what the Gracchi did not do was succeed in establishing a government by and for Rome's small farmers. With their murders, the oligarchy was stronger than ever in terms of political power until Caesar crossed the Rubicon, with the temporary exception of when Marius seized Rome. The same might be said of Trump. His administration was a breath of fresh air amidst a fog of regime hatred for the middle class, but most of his achievements came via executive action and so were gone with the wind once the regime deposed him and put the shuffling corpse in office.
Where Next?
While both men failed to make their agendas long-lasting, in both cases, the regime spent its legitimacy in making it so. In crashing against the popular will of the native population as represented by both men, their respective regimes wasted away centuries of accumulated trust and civic capital.
What followed for the Gracchi within just a few generations was first Marius, then Sulla, then Caesar. The Republic that had lasted for centuries died in decades because it lost legitimacy and murder became a viable way to settle disputes, and with Julius Caesar came a man with the power and means to start putting serious reforms into action.
Will our history follow a similar course? Who knows. Twain said history rhymes, though, and if it does, then it's not that hard to see what we have in store: declining state legitimacy and, with his conviction, permission to use the legal system as a bludgeon against political enemies. That is particularly true given that, in the wake of the regime’s chimp out over Trump’s attempt to help the dispossessed middle class, trust in and respect for the system is at a miserable low. It remains, then, to see if a Gaius follows and, if so, who Caesar ultimately is.
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For an excellent thread on the lawfare similarity, read this one, written by Alex Petkas, the host of “The Cost of Glory” podcast: https://x.com/costofglory/status/1796553771914600585
Blackwater never once failed in a mission; no principal it was protecting was ever even seriously injured, though some Blackwater men did die.
Read about the grain dole, framed as a welfare program, here: https://www.historyskills.com/classroom/ancient-history/grain-dole
For a discussion of what the tribune office was and more information on Tiberius, read:
On the dollar hegemony aspect of the war: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3520267
Check out our article on landed wealth here:
Superb and totally on point - I wish I had seen this sooner! Finally, someone who understands Roman history! My temptation was to go the Julius route too, (the personalities are so similar!), but you make a better and more persuasive case for Tiberius Gracchus.
The road to glory, is the road to the stars.