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Trump Can't Defy History.

Power rises. Power falls. And those who forget history are doomed to repeat its mistakes.
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I'm in Rome, standing in front of the Pantheon, a building dedicated to the gods, then taken over by the Roman Catholic Church and dedicated to Christ, now taken over by tourists, dedicated to sightseeing.

It's an interesting place to be while watching the news from the US, my home country, to think about hubris, to think about arrogance; The gods were going to last forever. The Caesars were going to become gods. Democracy in the Senate would give way to the power of emperors. The emperors would maintain the worship of the Roman gods by emphasizing them when Christianity came forward. But Christianity triumphed and the Forum was taken over by churches that were demolishing the marble ruins of the Forum to help build St. Peter's, and on and on the story goes.

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But one thing remains constant in all these stories:

The emperors who held themselves up as gods were soon overthrown. Christianity overthrew the empire, secularism overthrew Christianity, but Christianity, as the great historian Tom Holland shows in his books, overcame secularism because the so-called humanist ethics of rights and all the rest of it really were founded on the idea of biblical-like Christianity; Paul's teaching that the least of these should be first; Jesus' teaching that the least of these should be first… It's a big mix.

But one thing in this mix doesn't change, and that is those who hold themselves up forgetting the lessons of history as imperious rulers always in the end are crushed by history, where their memories are crushed.

Watching Donald Trump claiming to be this great president that's changed everything, when actually he's just reverting to the pre-Christian paganism of ancient Rome and reverting to the idea of the master ruler, the monarch, replacing democracy with his gaggle of billionaires following in his wake. He too will fail and he will be replaced and he will not be remembered for anything except as a man who tried to buck the trend of history where hubris and arrogance are always punished because people put themselves in a little self-styled bubble and in that bubble they think they can do anything. But we humans know one thing and that is the rule of god or the rule of nature or the rule of evolution however you want to describe it guarantees that those who separate themselves from the lessons of the human community in the end fall.

So here in Rome, I would simply say to those people looking at the beginning of the Trump presidency, thinking something new is happening.

No, it isn't.

The same thing is happening there as happened in Rome.

The same thing that happened in Rome to the Roman Catholic Church when they gave total power to the papacy, led to total corruption of the papacy; to the bad popes.

The same thing that happened in the Reformation that held itself up as an alternative to the church and began to burn its own heritage simply repeated the history of the Roman Catholic Church, and the cycle continues.

America is not something new. It is just another human construct.

And in this moment of tremendous upheaval, because we have the arrogance of one man unleashed against the world, unleashed against Ukraine, unleashed against Americans who voted for him; the MAGA faithful are going to find that along with Trump, their own dreams of prosperity will be crushed. As inflation takes off again, as all these policies to discount our allies in Europe, to crush our alliances, bring their own reward.

So standing here at the Forum in Rome is a good place to remember that we are all bound by history; that Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and all the rest are not exceptions, they are the rule. And they are returning to a pagan ethic of dominance and power over others, of lies and trickery, and self-delusion to the point where they really believe, as the Caesars did, that they are gods, that they stand above history.

History in the end always triumphs.

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Sadly, we're all stuck with these people. But the hope is that what happens to them will happen soon enough before they take us all down with them. And so from Rome, this is Frank Schaeffer wishing you a very good day. Tutto bene, as we say in Italian. Everything is fine. History will repeat itself. This is a moment of madness. And after that madness, hopefully something settles down and we return to a little moment of calm.

We're watching 70 years of history since World War II, upended by Trump and Musk and the others. But in the end, the billionaires will not have the final word any more than the emperors who built this building behind me to glorify the gods had the final triumph. Because if you go inside, all you see is crucifixes now. The Roman Catholic Church had the final word. And in the end, the great gods of the Roman Empire, including the Caesars, fell.

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