As a porn star sues President Donald Trump over a deal to keep her quiet about an alleged affair, and his White House is drained of everyone but his family, it’s hard not to think that America is entering into a period of decadence that rivals Imperial Rome in luridness. Even before the Daniels news, some historians and journalists compared Trump to famously degenerate Roman emperors. In an editorial earlier this year, New Yorker editor David Remnick predicted, “Future scholars will sift through Trump’s digital proclamations the way we now read the chroniclers of Nero’s Rome—to understand how an unhinged emperor can make a mockery of republican institutions, undo the collective nervous system of a country, and degrade the whole of public life.” Caligula has been invoked even more often, a comparison that New York Times columnist Paul Krugman called “unfair”— to Caligula.
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