Trump is America’s Caligula. His mission is to destroy what made America great

In finalising his cabinet, Donald Trump has come to resemble an American Caligula, the Roman emperor rumoured to have considered appointing his beloved stallion as consul. So unorthodox have been the president-elect’s appointments that I half expected him to nominate his golf cart as the new transportation secretary.

Certainly, there’s been a “bread and circuses” feel to the staffing of the new administration, a phrase coined in Roman times to describe how leaders won the approbation of the populace not through the proficiency of public servants but by something more performative. Crowd-pleasing gimmickry. Attention-grabbing stunts. How fitting, then, that the formation of Trump 2.0 should coincide with the release of Gladiator II.

Illustration by Dionne Gain

After selecting Robert F. Kennedy Jr, a vaccine sceptic, to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, and Linda McMahon, a wrestling impresario, to become education secretary, Trump now wants Kash Patel to head up the FBI. This mega-MAGA 44-year-old, who served during Trump’s first term as a White House “political enforcer”, has a side hustle in selling pro-Trump merchandise. As well as penning Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy, he has written a children’s book, The Plot Against the King, which, as The Atlantic reported, features “a wizard named Kash who sets out to save King Donald from the sinister machinations of Hillary Queenton”.

At least the American republic can breathe a sigh of relief that former Florida congressman Matt Gaetz will not become attorney-general. A MAGA diehard who promotes himself on his website as “Trump’s Ultimate Defender”, he fell victim to what it is tempting to call “Gaetzgate”, a scandal combining accusations of sexual misconduct and drug use. Now, though, from a perch at the FBI, Patel could become “Trump’s Ultimate Prosecutor”.

It’s not just who Trump has appointed. Arguably, the larger story concerns who he wants to fire. His war on what he calls the “deep state”, a supposed shadowy network of government bureaucrats out to thwart him, is likely to result in the banishment of thousands of nonpolitical public servants. Trump believes he can do so with the flourish of his Sharpie pen, by signing an executive order that makes it easier to sack federal employees. The scheme goes by the Orwellian-sounding tagline “Schedule F”, and comes straight from the pages of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.

To carry out this purge, Trump has appointed Elon Musk and the gadfly-like pharmaceuticals billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy to head a Department of Government Efficiency, which, despite its name, will operate outside the official bounds of government. Musk has promised to “send shockwaves through the system”. The goal set by Ramaswamy is to eliminate 75 per cent of the federal government. Trump himself has likened their work to the Manhattan Project, the program that developed the atomic bomb.

Never before has the modern American state, which came into being in the 1930s when Franklin Delano Roosevelt created a swath of New Deal agencies to combat the Great Depression, come under such assault. To the MAGA faithful, the Trump restoration will bring about a governmental reformation. His re-election is often framed as a threat to US democracy. Just as real and present is the threat to US government.

Trump’s choice to head the National Institutes of Health, one of the world’s foremost medical research centres, exemplifies this scorched-earth approach. Dr Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford physician and economist, was a vehement opponent of lockdowns during the COVID pandemic. His thoughts on readying America for the next global contagion are blunt and severe. “Effective pandemic preparedness,” he wrote on social media in January. “Step 1: Fire all the people responsible for pandemic preparedness.”

As with most aspects of Trumpism, the assault on government has not come out of nowhere. For Republicans, this has been the direction of travel for decades. Ronald Reagan first made his political name in the mid-1960s with a rhetorical attack on government, which he kept on regurgitating until he won the presidency. “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” became the most ringing line of his 1981 inaugural address.

After the Reagan Revolution came the 1994 Republican Revolution. It was led by Newt Gingrich, the party’s first House speaker in 40 years, whose anti-government bombast was even shriller. This history partly explains why Trump survived his role in the January 6 insurrection. Many Republicans viewed it not as an attack on democracy but as an attack on government: a Trump revolution.

What often gets forgotten in this assault on government is the government’s central role in making America great in the first place. The New Deal agencies helped save US capitalism during the Great Depression, while an expanded federal government helped the US play a victorious role in World War II. At times of crisis, such as the 2008 financial crash, even staunch ideological conservatives became operational liberals and sought government assistance.

The Australian cultural critic Robert Hughes understood the link between the might of the state and the might of America. In noting how the desert-like American south-west could never have been settled without massive government spending on water engineering, he wryly observed: “They are less the John Wayne than the Welfare Queen of American development.” Trump, in drawing an analogy with the Manhattan Project, must surely have known he was referring to a government program.

Trump’s last attempt to bulldoze the apparatus of government ended in failure. When he left office in January 2021, the federal government was actually slightly larger than the day he took office. But this time he intends not only to “drain the swamp”. His intention is to nuke it.

Nick Bryant, a former BBC Washington correspondent, is author of The Forever War: America’s Unending Conflict with Itself.

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