By: Andrew MacDougall
This week, the President of the United States of America posted a video of a man on the verge of being mauled and killed by a tiger. A human being dying in the most horrible way. Who does that?
The man, a young Briton named William Chapman, jumped into the tiger’s enclosure at a zoo in Doncaster, England. Chapman’s family say he was suffering from “significant mental illness.” And why did Trump decide to amplify a video of a mentally-ill stranger’s death? The most powerful man in the world offered no reason, saying only “don’t mess with nature!”. In other words, Trump posted the death of a stranger … for kicks.
That is sick.
What’s more, Donald Trump posted the video on Truth Social, the proprietary social media platform he created after being kicked off platforms like Twitter (as it was then) and Facebook for refusing to accept the results of the 2020 presidential election and encouraging an insurrection attempt on Jan. 6, 2021. So, Trump posted a video of a stranger’s death on a platform he owns and was forced to use because he tried to declare himself emperor.
An emperor enjoying people being eaten by tigers in front of a crowd. I feel like we’ve been here before. Next up: a horse as consul. And while Trump’s Colosseum is digital rather than physical, the result is the same: like late stage Rome, Trump is offering his people bread and circuses. Like Nero, Trump is fiddling while his Rome burns.
And you would, too, if your political party was heading toward a midterm election thumping. Trump’s Republicans are behind in key races and the president now faces the very real threat of an unruly and obstructive Congress, one that will be motivated and empowered to investigate the many real instances of graft and corruption blighting his administration.
Nor is Trump the only administration official offering up spectacle. War Secretary Pete Hegseth recently announced that Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan would be executed by firing squad and that the execution would be broadcast for all to see. Talk about a category error; Hegseth seems hell bent on giving Hasan the very public martyrdom he craves, a death that will only serve as a recruitment tool for America’s enemies. And this is at a time when jihadists’ tail feathers are up thanks to Gaza and Iran — the very disputes that are pushing up diesel prices in America.
Speaking of diesel, Trump, in true emperor style, has just ignored American sanctions law passed by Congress in order to strike a deal with Vladimir Putin to release negligible amounts of diesel from Russia to America ahead of the midterm elections, a move that will help Putin keep his jackboot on Ukraine’s throat just as the Ukrainians were putting real pressure on Russia through their strikes on its oil refineries. And while Trump claims he brokered a ceasefire on strikes against energy infrastructure, Putin — to the surprise of absolutely no-one not named Trump — doesn’t appear keen to take instruction from his geopolitical enemy.
It’s enough to make you weep. Just what has happened to the mighty United States of America, the supposed Leader of the Free World?
In one sense, it’s simple to explain. You elect a venal, narcissistic and corrupt man to the most powerful position in the world and bad things happen. Like Putin or Xi Jinping, Trump wants to be a powerful dictator. But there are supposed to be checks and balances to a president’s whims. Nero isn’t supposed to survive in a republic like that of the United States. But the Republicans, who will all one day claim to have never supported Trump after he goes, are now quiet as mice. The challenge will not come from inside the House or Representatives or the Senate.
Nor is it likely to come from the judiciary. While Trump’s appointees to the Supreme Court chuck him an occasional loss, the court has shown a lot of latitude to Trump’s use of executive power. The president has also weaponized the Department of Justice and other bodies like the Department of Homeland Security, striking fear into his political opponents and other parties, like law firms, who might seek to hold him to account.
But Trump’s biggest win against checks and balances was against the mainstream media. Trump’s 10-year war to sow distrust in the “fake news media” is now paying off in spades. Trump can chuck up scandal after scandal — his meme coin scam, his acceptance of a $400m plane from Qatar, hundreds of millions invested into his family’s World Liberty Financial, tens of thousands of stock trades, some of which bear the hallmarks of insider trading — and nothing sticks. And by creating and endlessly fuelling an alternative ecosystem of digital media, Trump and his proxies are able to muddy the water until the citizenry reaches a point of polarized apathy.
And so, when Trump goes on the stump to support his candidates and the arenas are nowhere close to full, he can say they were packed to the rafters. When he tells those rallies he was looking at his male candidate’s ass with admiration, it gets a ripple of commentary, but nothing more. When Trump’s cronies do things like destroy the Lincoln Reflecting Pool, Trump can blame unknown and unseen vandals, with absolutely no evidence. And his supporters will believe him. The mugs. That’s not me speaking, by the way, that’s Trump, who recently told one of his rallies that he could “say the stupidest things and you’d clap”. And they clapped him.
The craziest thing is Trump will never — and would never — be there for the people who come out to see him. He doesn’t care about any of them, as evidenced by his war of choice in Iran and the chaos it has caused to the ordinary American’s cost of living. Trump demands absolute loyalty without giving any back. Just ask Kimberley Guilfoyle, his ex-daughter-in-law who was just turfed from her job as U.S. Ambassador to Greece when the press around her behaviour got too bad.
As ever with Trump, the cruelty is the point. He is more like Nero than he would ever admit, if he even knows who Nero is. But at least Nero had men like Seneca around to try and temper their emperor’s maladies. Trump has no one around him to stop him from doing things like posting videos of real human beings being eaten by tigers. Or then posting an AI video of himself wrestling a tiger to the ground like the big, bad man he isn’t in real life.
As a non-student of history, Trump will not know that Nero was eventually felled by a wave of provincial revolts that were themselves fuelled by inflation and disruption to the Roman grain supply. Nero was eventually condemned to death and committed suicide before the sentence could be applied. Trump is too vain for suicide, but the provincial revolts and interruption to key supplies are here.
Let’s hope it’s the beginning of the end for Trump.
Andrew MacDougall is a director at Trafalgar Strategy and former head of communications to Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
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