The weekend’s UFC fight in honor of the Emperor Donald’s birthday is about more than his obsessive love for big, powerful men, men with tears in their eyes saying, “Mr. President, sir, would you like to touch my rock-solid abs?”
It’s about the fall of Rome, and that of America.
The decline of Rome didn’t begin when the Goths crossed the frontier or rival nations nibbled the edges of the Empire. It began when the Republic died, and Emperors with boundless self-regard and poor impulse control adopted theatrical personas and were told they were gods, not men.
The great crisis of Rome wasn’t merely military weakness, economic collapse, or political corruption. Those were symptoms of a deeper and more pernicious disease. The ruling class lost faith in the institutions that had built the Republic and discovered something far more intoxicating: spectacle and corruption.
When governing a far-flung empire became difficult, performance became easier. When problems became unsolvable, distractions became the irresistible tool to settle the restive plebs. If everyone was corrupt, from the Emperor on down, money set the terms of power.
And when citizens grew anxious about the future, emperors offered them the now-cliched narcotic known throughout in political history: bread and circuses.
This week, America gets its own glimpse of the Colosseum, with less blood but with the requisite mad emperor, his gravid belly straining this corset, slathered in makeup, struggling with his arousal at the edge of the arena, leering at oily, well-hewn men engaged in a pantomime he conflates with manhood and virility.
As headlines pile up with stories of wretched corruption, deep incompetence, economic malpractice, and a foreign policy that swings between delusion and destruction, the White House embraced a spectacle better suited to ancient Rome than a modern constitutional republic.