Behind Donald Trump’s Palace Walls

Donald Trump’s electoral comeback has provoked a lot of analysis from political scientists. Historians have been slower to engage with the subject. By temperament they are inclined to seek a longer view. Yet as photographs emerged of exuberant celebrations at the president-elect’s residence in Florida, and as – to widespread consternation or rejoicing – his appointments to key roles were teasingly divulged, the ways that power will work under the new regime have become clear. This is palace politics. The BBC’s excellent North America editor Sarah Smith compared it to Henry VIII’s court, though there have, as yet, been no treason trials.

The most resonant historical account of palace politics does not deal with the Tudors, but the Roman principate, which began with the reign of Augustus in 27 BC. It may provide us with insights into what lies in store, at least until modern historians are able to digest the sort of documents that Trump was prosecuted for leaving in a palace lavatory. That guide is Tacitus.

In his Annals, Tacitus claims to be writing a new type of history. By comparison with Roman historians of old, who had recounted magnificent feats of arms and momentous constitutional convulsions, his book would appear ‘confined and inglorious’, its matter ‘insignificant and trivial’. This was for two reasons. Beginning with the reign of Tiberius in AD 14, it concerned recent history, when the principate instituted by Augustus had evidently become permanent. Wars now happened only occasionally, on the far-flung frontiers of Rome’s dominions. Viewed from the capital, they had become a distant sideshow. And the principate, a desperate remedy for escalating, cataclysmic political turmoil, seemed to have brought political change to an end. Scarcely a ripple disturbed the prevailing peace. The senate, once the proudest embodiment of republican liberty, continued to function; but its sycophantic members were so despised by Tiberius, ‘liberty’s enemy’, that he pronounced them ‘fit only to be slaves’. With the great republican institutions reduced to a grotesque, antique charade, real power was focused on the emperor’s person. Politics happened for the most part inside his residence or, more precisely, inside his head, for he was ultimately in sole charge. On what basis could a history of such hidden, psychological power politics be constructed, given that it would leave little, if any, trace? Tacitus’ answer was rumour.

Patently untrustworthy, rumour nevertheless stood a better chance of revealing the emperor’s thinking and that of his inner circle than written records, which were likely to be ill-informed and/or irredeemably compromised. Junius Rusticus, Tacitus observes archly, had been chosen by Tiberius himself to keep the senatorial equivalent of Hansard; Junius was ‘credited with insight into [the emperor’s] deliberations’. How reliable could this authoritative record of the slave-assembly be? Hence Tacitus’ focus on trivia, which in such circumstances might well provide the best, most intimate clues. Rumour was largely about trivia; the emperor’s agents could not control it. In the imperial palace, the walls had ears. Secrets could trickle out, even from the villa on Capri which Tiberius reserved for his most clandestine activities.

By contrast, information which emerges via social media from the island resort of Mar-a-Lago appears to be carefully managed. In that respect, the dark arts seem to have been refined over the intervening two millennia. But as a press release informs the world’s media that the next Federal Secretary for Education will be the co-founder of World Wrestling Entertainment, it is difficult not to think of Caligula, Tiberius’ successor. In a story not known to have been recounted by Tacitus (that section of the Annals is lost), but in similar vein by Suetonius, Caligula is reputed to have threatened to make his favourite horse a consul. The consuls were the supreme magistrates of the republic. Caligula could not have made plainer his contempt for republican constitutional propriety. Tacitus does not claim that Tiberius attempted any such provocative appointment; but he surrounded himself with unsuitable advisers – most infamously Sejanus, prefect of the praetorian guard and a freedman, that is, an ex-slave. Freedmen were reviled by the traditional elite. Trump seems to be cocking a snook at the establishment in a not dissimilar way.

As for the preservation of a republican façade while its substance is eviscerated, views differ. It is rumoured that Trump envisages engineering the adjournment of Congress in order to avoid the normal scrutiny of his cabinet appointees. That would stretch constitutional propriety severely. It has not been disputed that he has been freely and fairly elected to the most important constitutional office. The princeps, by contrast, was not a constitutional position; hence Augustus’ retention of tribunician powers. Whether Trump’s oral sanctioning of the manner in which his then successor’s election was violently disputed amounted to an attempt to subvert the constitution remains a moot point. Testing it in the courts has now been pronounced unconstitutional: ‘all history is ironic’, Tacitus observes. The courts, Trump claims, have been manipulated against him in an unconstitutional manner under that successor, a claim rubbished by the successor, who nevertheless went on to pardon his convicted son on the grounds that the son’s criminal prosecution had been politically inspired. Rumours of a Trump purge of senior generals, to be replaced by a latter-day praetorian guard loyal to the new president, may turn out to be hysterical. But it is no surprise that Roman parallels are occurring to commentators. The constitution and the very layout of Washington, democracy’s theme park, prompt such reflections.

The outcome of the 2020 election was contested by a storming of the Capitol. Tacitus reports that one of Tiberius’ sycophants opined that accounts of events ‘will only come right if submitted to the approval of he who commands’. Tacitus’ view was the opposite. He was writing a subversive history of a system which had already been largely subverted. Augustus and his successors had not made Rome great again.

George Garnett is Professor of Medieval History at Oxford University, Fellow of St Hugh’s College and the author of The Norman Conquest in English History: Volume I: A Broken Chain? (Oxford University Press, 2021).