How inconvenient! What in the world was the New York Times thinking about when it assigned a man, Dylan Freedman, to help reporter Katie Rogers write a piece about the aging Donald Trump headlined, Shorter Days, Signs of Fatigue: Trump Faces Realities of Aging in Office? Truly, the president had much to criticize! As a start, after pointing out that, at the end of his eighth decade, the people around the president still talk about him as if he is the Energizer Bunny of presidential politics, how could a reporter then write that he recently appeared to doze off during an event in the Oval Office???!!
Oh, sorry, this 81-year-old just lost his train of thought. (I must have dozed off!) Anyway, back to the subject at hand: how could Rogers possibly have done such a thing? How unfair! How, well, yes, ugly! Its true that, on False Social (oops, sorry, I got confused again, Truth Social), the president ignored Dylan Freedman, insisting that Rogers, the writer of the story, who is assigned to write only bad things about me, is a third rate reporter who is ugly, both inside and out, and that the paper she writes for is a cheap rag' and an enemy of the people. Can you blame him? How in the world could a Times story have possibly claimed that yes! time was taking its toll on the man once running but now evidently walking or limping this country?
Of course, it was an outrage and, all too sadly, Donald Trump has in recent times continually been subjected to such outrages from women reporters, resulting not surprisingly in Rogers being the third woman in recent weeks hes corrected in his own striking fashion. In response to a question by Bloomberg reporter Catherine Lucey about the Epstein files, he said: Quiet, piggy. And in another situation, in response to a question about Epstein, he called ABCs Mary Bruce a terrible reporter and later added that she was a terrible person and ABC a crappy company.
And so it goes in Donald Trumps distinctly aging America. Unfortunately, anyone who thinks hes simply heading for a future garbage heap of history had better think twice. In reality, as TomDispatch regular Liz Theoharis suggests today, President Trump may be taking us not into an exhausting future, but into an ever grimmer and distinctly more autocratic past. Tom
Is Trump the New Nero?
The (Immoral) Politics of Authoritarianism and the Bible (Then and Now)
As more of the Epstein files are released, reminding us of Donald Trumps close association with Jeffrey Epstein and the young people he abused and trafficked, as well as the presidents ongoing array of misogynist insults and actions (like calling journalist Catherine Lucey piggy and name-calling Marjorie Taylor Greene to the point where she jumped ship), what keeps coming to my mind are the sexual exploits of authoritarians throughout history. As a scholar of the New Testament and the origins of Christianity, I have a special interest in the lives of the Roman emperors in particular, the notorious Emperor Nero.
According to historians of antiquity (trigger warning here!), Emperor Nero was known to use and abuse many people, especially women, allegedly murdering two of his wives and his aunt while sleeping with a Vestal Virgin and yes! his mother before he killed her. Roman politicians and historians held back remarkably little when considering Nero's excesses. Perhaps the most famous of those writers, Tacitus, shared how Nero polluted himself by every lawful or lawless indulgence. Cassius Dio, author of 80 volumes of Roman history, describes Nero skulking around Rome at night insulting women, practicing lewdness on boys, and beating, wounding, and murdering others. And Suetonius, the most famous biographer of the Caesars, claimed that Nero had invented a perversion all his own. At public games he was hosting, he would put on an animal skin and assail with violence the private parts both of men and women, while they were bound to stakes.
While such vivid horrors may be particular to Nero (and his own sense of depravity), Donald Trumps posture on gender and sexuality does all too grimly echo that of many powerful men throughout history, including those Roman emperors. His sense of comfort in objectifying and demeaning women, whether through his pussy dig from the 2016 election or his comments about his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, who likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side, is definitely well-documented.
As Soraya Chemaly, feminist writer and author of All We Want Is Everything: How We Dismantle Male Supremacy, pointed out at Salon: Right after the grab em by the p*ssy tape, we should have [had accountability] and that's not what happened. And then after the more than two dozen women came forward with detailed stories that were similar, we should have seen it grind to a halt. But the fact is we don't care about that kind of predation we just don't care. And that's a function of sexualized violence as a tool of male supremacist oppression in the home, in the street, in politics.
Sex and Authoritarianism
The behavior of Emperor Nero and President Trump may be reminiscent of each other (and, for that matter, of so many other kings and tyrants throughout history) because using and abusing sex by those in power has been a pillar of past authoritarian systems. Full stop.
Bring up the way sexual predators tend to act with impunity and you don't have to go far to find examples. In recent years in the U.S., there was the genesis of the #MeToo movement the sexual harassment perpetrated by those in the entertainment industry, higher education, Supreme Court justices, and politicians. And such leaders have learned from the best of them. Scratch under the surface of any authoritarian ruler, in fact, and you're likely to find cases of harassment and abuse.
For Rome, those in power dominated the people and nations they subjugated not just economically, militarily, and politically, but sexually, too. Rape and prostitution were central aspects of what it meant to be conquered by Rome. And just as that empire used sexuality (depicting in public art and monuments distinctly gendered conquered nations) to expand its control and territory, the Caesars themselves regulated the sexual behavior of those they had already conquered as a way to further consolidate power. They passed or upheld marriage laws, naming and regulating who could (and could not) marry whom in an effort to promote what they considered proper social order. Although Nero himself broke some of those laws (especially when he castrated someone enslaved to him and proceeded to marry that person, and when he dressed as a woman and married a freedman, violating laws against men marrying men and anyone marrying someone of lower status), it was clear that such laws were easily circumventable by those in power, even while still being fiercely enforced for Roman subjects. (Doesn't such a double standard still hold true?)
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