US President or American Caesar?

The prospect of a second Donald Trump victory in November’s US election has widely been seen – at least by liberal commentators –as an apocalyptic threat to democracy. Indeed, the coming election is sometimes framed as a binary clash between democracy and autocracy. Some have even cast Trump as a new Julius Caesar, whose re-election would strike a fatal blow to America’s republican institutions just as Caesar’s dictatorship paved the way for the autocracy of the emperors. As the Financial Times put it back in June: ‘Trump would resume office as an American Caesar with a ready-made toolkit of executive actions.’