Glorious Orange Emperor is a dictator of decline.
Trump isn't Julius Caesar (and neither is Vance).
JD Vance is suggesting that the United States needs to disregard due process and start sending random Hispanics to third world prisons. For Vance, the 20 million1 illegals are an existential threat to America. Getting rid of due process is a necessary evil to deal with this existential threat.
Vance is undermining the rule of law and driving us further toward a dictatorship. But although this has been called “Caesarism” by some on the right (following Spengler), there are key distinctions between Caesarism and Trumpism.
Caesarism vs Trumpism
In the case of Rome, Caesarism wasn’t a total disaster because it engaged in the profitable business of military conquest. Caesar went into Gaul, slaughtered a million people, subjugated the rest, and started extracting tax money from the population.
The problem with “American Caesarism” is that Americans do not have the martial spirit of the Roman people. When faced with the prospect of funding (not even fighting, but just funding) a war in Ukraine, Elon Musk, JD Vance, and Trump himself have engaged in endless moralizing about the “bloodiness” of the conflict, or criticized petty minutia about the possibility of corruption and wasted money.2
Americans have neither the will nor the ability to conquer countries and extract taxes from them.3 The MAGA movement is constantly crying wolf about “imperialism” in “overseas wars.” The only wars they like have to do with Israel; not economic self-interest. The MAGA movement is mostly exhausted by foreign war. It has no Caesarism in it.
Since American Caesarism cannot express itself outwardly, it must turn inward. Instead of conquering Iraq and “taking the oil,” MAGA turns inward and attacks our universities, our Japanese students, and our constitution.
MAGA isn’t in the business of conquering foreign countries and extracting resources from them. Instead, it is trying to create a big wall of tariffs to shut off America from the rest of the world. Unlike Julius and Augustus Caesar, who made Rome richer by expanding the empire, Trump is attacking the tools of American neo-colonialism, like PEPFAR, trade deficits, and foreign aid. MAGA is making America smaller, not bigger.
Caesar and his successors increased the wealth of Rome by launching vicious, quasi-genocidal wars of aggression to expand the tax base. As the Romans pillaged their neighbors, they enslaved millions of people and brought them back into Italy. Caesar was in favor of mass immigration, and he brought Celts into the Roman Senate for the first time (which was previously ethnically pure).
The rhetoric of MAGA promises to expel all the manual laborers, which is the reverse of Caesar’s policy of mass enslavement. Caesar increased the Roman labor force and population with the importation of cheap labor; Trump and Vance want these people gone.
Whereas the original Caesarism brought economic growth and expansion, Trumpism represents a contraction of America away from the “brink of empire” toward the smaller concept of a nation-state. Vance talks about how his ancestors built this country with their “bare hands.” If you take this romanticism to its logical conclusion, Vance wants to kick out immigrants so that Americans can once again take up the glorious occupation of being manual laborers.
There are several American presidents who you could compare to Julius Caesar:
Lincoln defeated the separatists and united the empire.
McKinley conquered Hawaii, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, and Samoa.
Teddy Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet made America’s entry in WWI possible.
Wilson defeated the Germans, reorienting international finance away from London and toward New York.
FDR established the foundations of NATO, Bretton Woods, and the IMF.
Carter sanctioned the Soviet Union, renewed aid to Pakistan, re-established supremacy in the Persian Gulf, and funded the Taliban against the Soviets.
Reagan doubled-down on Carter’s foreign policy, which directly led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the expansion of both the EU and NATO.
By contrast, Trump and Vance undermine our support from Ukraine, cut off trade with our allies, and deport America’s cheap labor. This is not a Caesarian policy.
The 4D Chess Counter-Argument
The MAGA base is increasingly flirting with the idea that defeating Nazi Germany (and Imperial Germany before it) was a mistake. Tucker Carlson is the public face of this base, but there are many others within based-world who truly believe that the last 108 years of American foreign policy has been a tragic mistake. America should have let Hitler defeat Stalin, and the world would be better off.
Ignoring the moral implications of the Holocaust (and the likely genocide of Slavs which would have occurred after 1946) this is bad economics. By establishing military dominance over western Europe, the United States benefited enormously over the last 80 years in material terms. The dollar system has made America much more wealthy than it would have been if it had allowed the Nazis their Lebensraum.
But not all Trump supporters think this way. There are Trump supporters who claim that Trump is merely “reorienting” or “course correcting” the woke excesses of American foreign policy, and re-establishing American expansionism on firmer ground. I am highly skeptical of this position. But let’s try to steelman these folks. They claim:
Trump’s tariffs are a bait-and-switch, which will actually lead to more free trade!
Trump’s insults against Zelensky are a bait-and-switch, which will actually lead to more support for Ukraine!
Trump’s rhetoric on immigration is a bait-and-switch, which will actually lead to more merit-based immigration!
These 4D chess theories directly contradict Trump’s stated positions — they assume that Trump is lying and doesn’t believe his own ideology.
In the case of tariffs, Trump has been pro-tariff for over 30 years. The idea that he secretly likes free trade, and this whole tariff fiasco has been a charade to force other countries to lower their own tariffs, seems highly unlikely.
In the case of Ukraine, I think a bait-and-switch is more plausible in the long-term, but probably not in the short term. The Trump administration’s actions have forced Europe to invest more in defense, which is good for the long-term security of Europe. The European attitude toward defense for the last 30 years has been delusional, negligent, and self-destructive. The time for a massive build-up of European defense was 2014. But due to the influence of Russian allies like Sarkozy and Merkel, that never happened.
Whatever Trump is able to force the Europeans to produce in the short-term will have a negligible effect on the war. European expansion of production will take years, not months.
Assume that the moral and strategic goal of America should be to conclude the war as quickly as possible.4 Putin’s bet is that Trump won’t increase aid; Russia will win attrition; there is no reason to negotiate. If Trump massively increased aid, Putin would be threatened with greater losses, which would bring him to the negotiating table. It is now Trump, not Biden, who is allowing the war to drag on indefinitely, which is a huge gift to China and Iran, who are profiting massively from this war.
Lastly, on immigration, this is where I think the 4D chess narrative is most plausible over the long term. Vance will say some performatively racist things about “my ancestor”; random Hispanics will end up dead in an El Salvadorian prison; but when the dust has settled, the Trump administration will end up importing enough Indians, Filipinos, and Vietnamese to make up for the loss of a few hundred tortured Germans.
The Trump administration may do disgusting, ostentatious, chud-brained acts of violence against small numbers of innocent people as a kind of “scapegoating” ritual to appease the base, but in the end, the total number of immigrants in America will hold steady or even increase.
Conclusion.
If Trump was Julius Caesar, he would travel personally to the front in the Donbass and lead the troops there to victory. Trump is no Julius Caesar. That’s not entirely Trump’s fault: the victory of Christianity, and its successor (liberalism), have made exploitative wars of conquest and enslavement politically untenable. Technology has prevented great powers from going to war. With nuclear weapons ensuring mutually assured destruction, a man like Julius Caesar is no longer possible.
If Caesarism was to be adjusted for the 21st century, it would take the form not of bold invasions of conquest and mass enslavement, but rather, of free trade deals and open borders. If America allows goods, services, and people to flow freely into the country, then the GDP will rise, which will enrich the ruling class, even if the national IQ falls by a few points, and the concept of civic duty falls to the wayside.
Trump and Vance are seemingly opposed to imperialism, both in military terms as well as economic ones. They do not want cheap labor (our modern slavery) flooding into the country. They do not want to enlarge the NATO empire. They do not want to buy cheap goods from our imperial vassals, like Vietnam, Taiwan, Indonesia, India, South Korea, Japan, or Europe.
Instead, Trump and Vance want to make America smaller, by deporting millions of cheap laborers, closing the border, telling our allies to defend themselves, and erecting trade barriers to prevent the importation of cheap goods. They want “real Americans” to go back to work in factories making toasters.
If Caesar was like Trump, he would have withdrawn all foreign troops back to Italy, deported all slaves, and forced Romans to work on their own farms — just like back in the days of Romulus and Remus.
Trump isn’t Julius Caesar. Instead, he’s much more similar to Sulla, the dictator who tried to “restore the Republic.” We know what happened next. The Republic ended anyway, and Sulla’s legacy was to delay the inevitable with a bloody civil war.
I don’t think Trump will be that bad, because I don’t think he has the guts to go that far. I suspect that Democrats will take power in 2028, and they will continue the neo-Caesarian policy of inviting in cheap labor while expanding America’s influence abroad. In this sense, Carter and Clinton, as neo-liberals, were closer to Caesar than Donald Trump.
While Caesarism is typically thought of in the aesthetic sense as a “strong masculine military ruler who makes a cult of personality out of his dictatorship,” this is a superficial analysis. Sulla also fit those characteristics,5 but Sulla was no Caesar.
The distinction between Sulla and Caesar is that while Sulla claimed to be “Making Rome Great Again,” restoring power to conservatives and oligarchs, Caesar promised to smash the power of the oligarchs, brought foreigners into the government, promoted foreign wars, and imported thousands of slaves to do the cheap labor that Romans didn’t want to do.
Caesarism isn’t just an aesthetic: it’s an economic, immigration, and foreign policy package. Both Caesar and Trump can be described as populists who enjoy the support of the military — but Sulla was also popular and had military support. When placed in proper context, Trump’s form of dictatorship is much more Sulla than Caesar.
If Rome and America really do follow the same trajectory, then there will be a new Civil War, which the MAGA faction will win. But the victory will only be temporary. Eventually, there will arise a military general who opposes the conservatism of MAGA, who wants to engage in foreign expansion and invite in mass immigration.
But maybe America isn’t following the path of Rome. Instead, it might be following the path of China, and entering a period of 300 years of decline.6
Consider how, by 1525, the Ming Empire had completely destroyed its merchant fleet because it was afraid of the effects of free trade.
Maybe Trump isn’t Julius Caesar. Instead, he is the Hongxi Emperor, who burned, neglected, or repurposed China’s merchant fleet. The Hongxi Emperor’s explicit justification for ending merchant voyages is because they were a distraction from the task of defending China from foreign influences, both in the form of cultural and military incursions. A powerful empire receding from the world out of fear of military decline and social change — sound familiar?
I don’t believe it’s 20 million, but let’s steelman Vance.
During Operation Cyclone, at least 25% of aid given to the Taliban was stolen and sold on the Pakistani black market. That’s $2.1 billion in 2025 dollars. This is the cost of doing business. The policy was successful at destroying the Soviet Union. But Musk and Vance will endlessly drone on about how we need more money for the programs back home — not an imperial mindset.
Greenland and Canada would be a net loss from an economic point of view as opposed to simply trading, unless you cancelled their welfare and enslaved their populations, which isn’t happening. Additionally, you can think of annexation of North American territories as a form of “consolidation” rather than “expansion.” We already have effective military control over these territories, so it’s not true expansion in the Caesarian sense. These are captive populations already.
I am in favor of supporting Ukraine indefinitely as an endless war, but Biden’s lackluster support seems to indicate that Democrats are unwilling to commit to this, so it’s not realistic to promote this. The political will isn’t there.
Sulla’s cult of personality was less developed than Caesar’s, but he did have one:
For the most distinguished and influential of the citizens, crowned with garlands, followed in the procession, calling Sulla their saviour and father... And when at last the whole spectacle was over, he gave an account of his achievements in a speech to the people, enumerating the instances of his good fortune with no less emphasis than his deeds of valour, and finally, in view of these, he ordered that he receive the surname of Fortunate… (Plut. Sull. 34)
Perhaps Greece would be a more apt example, which has really fallen off hard since Constantinople fell. Or Spain, who never recovered after the Armada.
Interesting comparison between Trump and Sulla and contrast between Trump and Caesar. I think that the most quotable lines in this one are are the following:
Instead, Trump and Vance want to make America smaller, by deporting millions of cheap laborers, closing the border, telling our allies to defend themselves, and erecting trade barriers to prevent the importation of cheap goods. They want “real Americans” to go back to work in factories making toasters.
If Caesar was like Trump, he would have withdrawn all foreign troops back to Italy, deported all slaves, and forced Romans to work on their own farms — just like back in the days of Romulus and Remus.
James K Polk: Annexed half of Mexico