Against Trumpius

Two nights ago, I wrote a post for this blog comparing our outgoing president to an ancient Roman aristocrat, Catiline, who conspired to overthrow the Republic through force of arms. I was basing the analogy on Trump's repeated effort to subvert the outcome of the election—including by trying to bully state officials into "finding" ballots that were never cast in his favor, as well as his plans to host a rally in front of the Capitol building on the day Congress was set to tally the electoral college votes and confirm Joe Biden's victory... but even with these marks against him, the comparison between the ancient and the modern demagogues might have seemed forced. After all, Trump, unlike Catiline, had at least not conspired in a violent coup attempt, right? 

Since that post went up, the events of the last forty-eight hours have shown the analogy rather more inescapably apt than it was even the first time around. I decided Catiline needed a further look. I therefore turned (having read Sallust in preparation for the first post) to the other great ancient account of the events of Catiline's plot: namely, Cicero's contemporaneous speeches in which he denounced the would-be usurper. What one discovers is that Cicero—who was serving at the time as consul, the highest executive position in the Republic—was in much the same position as we find ourselves now, on January 7, 2021. The plot has been unmasked. All serious doubt as to the seditionists' plans has vanished. 

We know, that is, not only that Trump's supporters stormed the Capitol building in order to try to block Congress from certifying the results of a democratic election—thereby overturning the Constitution and the rule of law—but that they did so at the instigation of President Trump. Not only did Trump encourage his supporters to go "wild" in the middle of the nation's capital; he also praised their violent conduct and stoked the baseless theories that spurred them to try to overturn the election and invade Congress in the first place. The fact that Trump himself was to blame for their actions is averred not only by Democrats, let it be repeated, but by newly-erstwhile members of the president's own administration. 

We know Trump is guilty of incitement and sedition, therefore,—if not in the criminal sense, then in the moral sense that is needed to justify his immediate removal from office. The president should be impeached for conduct that renders him unfit for the presidency or any public office; and he should therefore be convicted in such a manner in the Senate that he can never possibly become president again. We all know this. If trying to incite one's followers to overthrow the results of an election and prevent the peaceful transfer of power is not conduct meriting removal, what else could be? And since there is no serious prospect of the Vice President invoking the 25th amendment, articles of impeachment it must be. 

So that's where we are now, and when we open the first of Cicero's speeches against Catiline to the assembled senators, as I say, we find him in a precisely analogous situation. The guilt of his adversary has been proved. He has laid the damning evidence before the Senate. Now, the question is whether they will take action to punish him as he deserves and to prevent the conspiracy that he has planned from coming to fruition. After framing his immortal rhetorical question—how far will you stretch our patience, Catiline?—Cicero goes on to ask the assembled lawmakers what else they could possibly need to see to appreciate the magnitude of the threat the man poses. Is the nature of Catiline's character not abundantly clear by this point, he asks? Not only is he guilty of every crime, he also has a massive debt coming due that he seeks to escape by corrupt means (sound familiar?) 

The precarious state of his personal finances is far, however, from being the only Catiline-to-Trump parallel. There is also the uncanny ability he has to coerce loyalty out of people who really ought to know better. Cicero looks around at the senators, and he sees that Catiline has managed to alienate the vast majority of them. They silently avoid him or even stand up to clear a row of seats around him so as not to be caught in his presence (much as Trump's erstwhile followers and defenders are increasingly deserting him after his latest assault on our Constitution). And yet, even with their personal distaste so manifest and the evidence right before their eyes, many of them refuse to acknowledge the charges against him explicitly—much like our own senators casting a furtive look away from many a Trump tweet. 

Exasperated with their cravenness, Cicero argues that he has no choice but to let Catiline leave the city, in order as it were that senators might finally see him in the open. He is to be allowed to depart and join his army of fellow-conspirators, so that the Senate might finally confront the incontrovertible proof of his criminal ambitions. So too, Trump's rally before the Capitol yesterday was for many in his own party and administration a breaking point—a scales-falling-from-the-eyes moment. Here he was doing the thing liberals had so long said he would, and that others refused to believe. Conservative senators had enabled, abetted him for so long—made excuses for him—baselessly claimed that Trump did not harbor authoritarian ambitions and would accept the transfer of power—and here he was seizing upon that license in order to attack the unambiguous results of the election that unseated him. 

The maddening unwillingness of the senators to believe in the threat Catiline posed until it was too late must be familiar to any of us who have lived through the Trump era. And, in both cases, this baffling refusal to see what was directly in front of their eyes had its basis in prejudice. Cicero, after all, had to labor extra hard to convince the Senate of the truth—not only because of who he was bringing his charges against, but of who he was in making them. 

As his own account and subsequent historians make clear, Cicero was an outsider—a "new man"—in the halls of Roman power, due to his lack of aristocratic forbears. And Sallust describes how Catiline was able to use this fact to his advantage. In a speech that the later historian places into the conspirator's mouth, he taunts Cicero with his lowly birth, asking the other senators whether someone of such humble origins, who had to succeed to high office by reasons of his own merit and efforts alone, could truly be believed to have a more ardent patriotism than someone like himself—of old stock and to-the-manner-born. 

I can't help but see echoes of this situation in the fact that one of the first of the members of Congress to draft new articles of impeachment against Trump—in the wake of his latest assault on the country—was a naturalized citizen whose patriotism and status as a "real American" the president has himself—in his boundless racism and odiousness—repeatedly impugned. Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota is a Somali refugee who became a U.S. citizen in the year 2000. Trump, much like Catiline before him, has tried to suggest that a "new" citizen like her cannot possibly love their country as much as a native-born WASP such as himself, uttering "send her back" and other racist obscenities against the Congresswoman. 

But just as Cicero—the "new man"—ultimately saved the republic, whereas the old-stock Catiline sought to destroy it— so too it should be abundantly clear to us who the true patriot is in our present society. President Trump has tried to subvert the Constitution, overthrow the will of the American people, and substitute his own rule for the rule of law and the democratic process. If anyone this week has made manifest his hatred of this country we call home, it is the sitting president. Whereas Ilhan Omar took steps to defend those same institutions when few were willing to be so bold. Like Cicero seeing the cravenness of his senators and urging them on to bolder action, she could not stand her colleagues' silence and complacency. She did what someone needed to do, and what everyone now should add their names to support—introduce articles of impeachment against Trump... again!

And here it is shown all over again that true love of country has nothing to do with place of birth, and everything to do with loyalty to the ideas, institutions, and laws that ought to govern that society. As Cicero writes in his last Catilinian oration, speaking for the "new men" and naturalized citizens everywhere (Berry translation): "They by their own merit have obtained the rights of citizens, and sincerely consider this their home—while certain others [read Catiline and his followers] who were born here, and born to the best families, have thought of it not as their homeland, but as an enemy city." *Cough*... again, I ask—who does that sound like?