The spectacle in Washington grows ever more theatrical. Our living emperor, Donald J. Trump, has once again donned the mantle of the aggrieved patriot, firing back at what he terms an ‘unpatriotic’ rebuke from the House of Representatives over his Iran policy. The vote, a bipartisan resolution asserting that Congress must authorise any further military action against Iran, was a mere slap on the wrist. But the President, with the exquisite sensitivity of a man who mistakes every pinprick for a dagger, has escalated. He calls the majority of his own party’s representatives traitors. He threatens vetoes. He rages against the machine that he himself now commands.
One is reminded of Caligula, or perhaps more aptly, of the latter days of the Roman Republic when the Senate was a rubber stamp for whichever general had the legions’ loyalty. Trump’s base will cheer, naturally. They see a strongman defending the nation against the effete, unpatriotic elites. But what we are witnessing is not strength; it is the petulance of a man who cannot abide the constitutional check that a coequal branch of government places upon him. The House rebuke was not an act of treachery. It was the faintest whisper of the republic’s original design: that the power to send young men and women to die must be shared. Trump’s response is the howl of a monarch who has forgotten that he is not one.
The president’s language is instructive. ‘Unpatriotic.’ The word is a cudgel, designed to silence dissent by questioning the very loyalty of the questioner. It is the language of a man who believes that patriotism is defined by allegiance to him, rather than to the Constitution. This is the intellectual decadence of the modern conservative movement, where ‘America First’ has become a personal slogan rather than a policy. One could laugh if the stakes were not so high. The Iran situation is a powder keg: the assassination of Soleimani, the scrambling of diplomacy, the risk of a wider war. And here we have a president playing the victim, his Twitter feed a fountain of grievance.
Historians will look back at this moment and marvel. They will see the same patterns that marked the decline of the Roman Republic: the erosion of norms, the centralisation of power in a single figure, the transformation of political opposition into treason. Trump is not the cause of this decay, but he is its most vivid symptom. The House, in its timid resolution, tried to reassert a sliver of its authority. But the president’s counterattack reveals how hollow that assertion is. He knows that the base will back him, that the media will obsess over the drama, and that the checks and balances of the constitution are only as strong as the politicians willing to enforce them. And those politicians, with few exceptions, are weak.
In the Victorian era, when Parliament faced a similar crisis of imperial overreach and executive ambition, there was at least a sense of institutional honour. Gladstone and Disraeli clashed over the Eastern Question, but they did so within the bounds of a shared understanding that the Crown was subject to the Commons. Today, the president treats Congress as a nuisance, a pack of ‘human scum’ (his words, not mine) who dare to question him. The tragedy is that the American people, exhausted by two decades of war, seem prepared to accept this. They want a strong leader, even if that strength is merely the theatrical bluster of a man who cannot stand to be told no.
Do not mistake my tone for partisan glee. I do not write to cheer the Democrats or mourn the Republicans. I write to point out the rot. The Iran episode is a microcosm of a larger sickness: a nation that has forgotten the virtues of republican governance, where the separation of powers is a quaint theory, not a daily practice. Trump’s response to the House rebuke is a declaration that the legislative branch is irrelevant when it comes to matters of war and peace. This is not democracy. It is the plebiscitary dictatorship that the founders feared.
As Rome fell, the Senate debated the fine points of aqueduct maintenance while the barbarians gathered at the gates. We now debate whether a president can start a war without the consent of Congress, but the question is answered before it is asked: of course he can. The only check that remains is the next election, and that is cold comfort to the families of the soldiers who will die in the next conflict. The president calls his critics unpatriotic. In truth, it is the patriotic duty of every citizen to resist this executive overreach. But that duty, like the resolution itself, seems a forgotten relic of a more robust age.
