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President Donald J. Trump was sworn into office just one month ago, but for many Americans, these few weeks have felt like years. Executive orders targeting diversity programs and marginalized groups, purges of the federal government, high-level resignations, extremist cabinet nominees, Elon Musk‘s forcible takeover of the administrative state, mass deportations, bizarre threats to annex Greenland and Canada, the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico, a string of deadly airline disasters, clashes between the White House and the judiciary, feuds with the press, and rising tensions over Russia‘s war in Ukraine — it’s hard to keep up with Trump’s daily blitz of authoritarian action and propaganda, let alone get a sense of the bigger picture.
One word comes up again and again as the media, legal experts, and longtime government officials try to describe what Trump has done in retaking power and launching a campaign of revenge against his enemies: “unprecedented.” It seems there is little to which his ferocious rule and brazen corruption can be compared, at least in the past two and a half centuries of the American republic. But the United States is still a young country, and a longer, more global view yields fascinating parallels to our moment that date back to antiquity. Here, seven historians tell Rolling Stone how monarchs, elites, and dictators of the past anticipated someone like Trump, the results of their often brash and short-sighted decisions, and what kind of legacies they ultimately left behind.
The stories aren’t road maps to the future, exactly. As most of these academics pointed out, history doesn’t really repeat itself. But, as they say, it can rhyme — and those echoes can help us make sense out of chaos.
An Uprising of the Peloponnesian War
Roel Konijnendijk, a classics professor and Darby Fellow in ancient history at the University of Oxford, warns that we should be careful in trying to draw connections between the Trump era and previous incarnations of brute power. “The regime’s particular combination of far-right bigotry and illegal asset stripping seems to me a unique product of the country’s character and history,” he says of the current White House. “There are plenty of cruel strongmen in ancient history with a total disregard for the responsibilities of office, but they never had the ideological context to imagine some of the things we’re seeing now.”
Still, he points to ancient Greece, and the commentary of Thucydides, the Athenian historian who lived in the 5th century BC. In his writings on the Peloponnesian War between Sparta and Athens for dominance in the Hellenic world, Thucydides remarked on the causes of an uprising in the city of Corcyra, where proponents of democracy overthrew a wealthy ruling class and put many of them to death. The civil strife in Corcyra, Thucydides notes, was the sort that “happened then and will forever continue to happen as long as human nature remains the same.” As Konijnendijk puts it, Thucydides “goes through a long list of familiar items: partisan rhetoric, distortion of truth, corruption of judgment, suspicion and paranoia, glorification of violence, faithless backstabbing, cruel vengeance, and polarization of society to the point where the moderate citizens are ‘destroyed’ and appeals to decency are ‘laughed out of sight.’” In the end, Konijnendijk says, “the democratic party annihilated the oligarchs in a seven-day orgy of violence.”
While it’s true that material conditions were vastly different in Greece almost 2,500 years ago, here in a post-Capitol riot U.S., popular armed revolt against the super-rich doesn’t sound quite as far-fetched as it did a few decades ago.
Julian the Apostate
Yii-Jan Lin, a professor at Yale Divinity School who has written about how the apocalyptic narrative of the Bible’s Book of Revelation influenced American ideas about immigration, says one common historical comparison these days is off the mark: “When Caligula appoints a horse as a consul,” she says with a laugh, adding that this tale of the 1st century Roman emperor’s purported insanity is “just apocryphal.”
Instead, Lin finds a possible precursor to Trump in Julian the Apostate, emperor of Rome from 361 to 363 CE. Playing to a nostalgia for the earlier Pax Romana under Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius, Julian rejected the rise of Christianity (Constantine I, the first emperor to convert to the religion, had ruled a few decades earlier, granting Christians certain freedom of worship and setting Rome on the path toward adopting it as a state religion by the end of the century). Julian “rescinded all the privileges that were given to Christians,” says Lin. “He wanted to basically purge the kingdom of that and install traditional paganism.” This attempt to turn back the clock included the purging of Christian texts from schools, the conversion of Christian churches into pagan temples, and religious persecution as it had been practiced in centuries past.
“There’s also his movement [for] increasing efficiency of government, which is going to sound really familiar,” Lin adds, alluding to Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which Trump has empowered to gut U.S. federal agencies. Julian had “thousands of different servants” dismissed, Lin says, and “also had some tribunals set up in which we had he had high-ranking officials executed.”
But Trump’s reign is unlikely to end the way Julian’s did. The emperor “launched a counter-invasion of Persia in 363, and he was wounded and died while retreating,” Lin says, bringing two years of upheaval to an end. His successors were, of course, all Christian. Lin sees Julian’s failure as a potential lesson for would-be tyrants: “This kind of aggressive, chaotic power also will inflict damage on itself.”
Justinian I
Jeremy Swist is a classics professor at Grand Valley State University specializing in late antiquity, when the Roman Empire effectively split into two, with the western half collapsing in the 5th century CE as the eastern half — what we often call the Byzantine Empire — survived and evolved. He maintains that while it is impossible to extrapolate from this period to predict where the 21st century is leading, we can “put ourselves in the shoes of everyday people living under similar conditions, and imagine how they might have felt as forces beyond their control attempted to radically change their society, further exacerbating already existing social divisions, and aggravated by environmental and public health crises.”
To that end, he takes up the example of Justinian I, emperor of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire from 527 to 565 CE. Justinian, Swist says, assumed power in a time marked by fierce tribalism in religious and social life, and early in his reign brutally suppressed an insurrection against him in the capital city of Constantinople, killing citizens without regard for the their sovereignty, which was still guaranteed by the law despite centuries of autocratic rule.
In an inversion of Julian the Apostate’s anti-Christian policies, Justinian was “determined to stamp out paganism,” says Swist, and impose his interpretation of Christian theology throughout the empire. “This outlawing of religious pluralism manifested in attacks on what we would call institutions of higher education, as the most publicly visible pagans at that time were highly educated professors of philosophy, rhetoric, law, and medicine,” he explains. “These intellectuals were deemed threats to Christian morality, and famous schools such as the Platonic Academy in Athens were shut down and its faculty forced to flee the empire. The emperor aimed his moral crusade also at what he termed sexual deviancy, inflicting cruel punishments on those charged with homosexual activities, while he likewise cracked down on sex workers.”
Justinian’s attempts to homogenize society and enact order with new and systematized laws were paired with outsized ambition and vanity. “Justinian frequently named and renamed things after himself, such as several cities as ‘Justinianopolis,’” Swist says. His large building projects and expensive wars abroad, including campaigns to reconquer territories of the Western Roman Empire, drained the imperial treasury and eventually left the empire vulnerable to invasion. The waning of its power was hastened by climate change, namely “a drop in temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere by over four degrees Fahrenheit that persisted for a number of years that negatively affected agriculture,” Swist says, and a pandemic in the form of “an early form of bubonic plague” that killed hundreds of thousands.
Swist explains that we may well empathize with the people who tried to live through all this as we confront the uncertainties of a turbulent political atmosphere today. In one regard, we may be worse off, as Justinian’s empire lacked the technological means “to monitor its own citizens,” he notes. Yet it’s also too soon to tell what effects Trump’s own harsh edicts may have. “So far we are mostly seeing the laying out of an agenda, and we may be experiencing a lot of shock and awe, but time will tell how much of it will stick and have long-term consequences,” says Swist.
King John and the Magna Carta
Eleanor Janega, a medieval historian and co-host of the podcast Gone Medieval who writes extensively on how contemporary society is imprinted by that epoch, looks at the risks Trump poses to the international economy and geopolitical stability and is reminded of King John of England, an unpopular ruler who occupied the throne from 1199 to his death in 1216.
Janega says it is a “massive misunderstanding” to believe that “everything was great” after the rebel barons forced John to seal the Magna Carta, the famous charter of legal protections first issued in 1215. Instead, she points out, these rich landowners were shielding themselves and their assets, not the rights of commoners. “John was indeed a very bad king, and the nobles were in revolt against him because he blew all of the kingdom’s money on war in France, and Magna Carta was drawn up in response to this,” Janega says. But, she continues, “John decided he was just going to ignore that fact. Moreover, he asked for, and received, direct papal support in this. Pope Innocent III wrote from Rome to support John and stated that Magna Carta was ‘not only shameful and demeaning, but illegal and unjust,’ and he excommunicated the barons,” who then waged a civil war against John. Magna Carta would not be reissued until 1225, under John’s son, Henry III.
Now as back then, Janega says, the rest of the world is capitulating to what a nation is doing — this time the U.S. — in order to preserve their own relative status. Nobody, she says, “wants to say anything to America because they don’t want to establish a precedent wherein the power of any government can be questioned.” King John’s excessive spending threatened the comfortable status quo of the barons, so they fought for Magna Carta; today’s billionaires have sought to guide Trump’s agenda so they can keep raking in profit even in the case of a devastating blow to markets, with these same oligarchs — Musk in particular — posing as champions for individual liberties. “If Trump was just trashing the civil rights of Americans, that would be one thing, but threatening the world economy is another,” says Janega. “So, we are seeing people do the internal math about who they will align with in order to protect their own interests as wealthy individuals.”
“There are always going to be wealthy and powerful people who side with destructive forces to suit their own ends,” she adds. “There are also always going to be powerful people who overlook the rule of law because it gets in the way of them doing what they want. This is in no way unprecedented. This is what happens when the wealthy and powerful aren’t strictly controlled. They will always seek to do these things, and that’s why taxation and limitations of power are important.”
King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella
Besides Julian the Apostate, Yii-Jan Lin mentions the Spanish monarchs King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile. In 1492, the same year the royals sent Christopher Columbus on his first expedition to the so-called “New World,” they issued the Alhambra Decree, exiling the Jewish population from their territory.
“Here we have mass deportation,” says Lin. “And that was just an incredibly boneheaded move. Not only incredibly racist and terrible, but also, you think of all the different parts of the economy and society that Jewish peoples were a part of in Spain, and the [king and queen] are cutting their nose off to spite their face.” Even as riches began flowing back from the Americas, Spain’s economy was effectively collapsing because of the attempt to uproot Jews —“getting rid of an integral part of your workforce, your culture and society, without thinking about the consequences at all,” as Lin puts it. The displacement also meant that important arts, heritage, and wealth moved to other parts of Europe.
Lin says there’s no shortage of examples of disastrous deportations like those Trump wants to see. “I mean, before Trump, there’s plenty of it in American history, rounding up people,” she says. “It just brings in a different population. With Chinese exclusion laws [in the late 19th century U.S.], then you have Japanese agricultural workers. Then you have Asian exclusion [in the 1920s], so you bring in Mexican migrant workers. So it just continues and continues, and you can shift the hate onto who you want. But the real story is that you need workers.”
The Third Reich
You don’t have to look very far to find instances of people likening Trump to Adolf Hitler. His own vice president, J.D. Vance, did it back in 2016, and his new Health Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy, did the same that year. The analogy is typically dismissed by MAGA voters as a hysterical exaggeration, while its usefulness in liberal or leftist critiques of Trump seems minimal.
Yet it’s impossible to overlook some of the similarities between the Trump administration’s actions and those of the Nazis as they consolidated power in Germany in the 1930s. Ben Miller, a doctoral fellow at the Graduate School of Global Intellectual History at the Freie Universität in Berlin and co-host of the podcast Bad Gays, which looks at “evil and complicated queers in history,” observes that both quickly took steps to erase and demonize transgender people. “This is the most concerted, immediate anti-trans push by a newly elected government or by a newly installed government since the ascension of the Nazis to power in Germany,” he says. “And that’s not to say that the Trump administration is literally the new Nazis, but it is to say that both the Trump administration and the National Socialist dictatorship have immediate interest in targeting trans people.” In both cases, Miller says, the regimes reacted to noticeable changes in the “sex/gender system,” a concept coined by sociologist Gayle Rubin, meaning the social structures that transform biological sexuality into our ways of existing in the world. (A far greater share of Gen Z identifies as LGBTQ+ compared to older generations, for instance.)
Importantly, though, Miller clarifies, the attacks on trans people are “the front of a flying wedge which is really going after the bodily autonomy of absolutely everybody, cis women included. That doesn’t mean that what’s happening to trans people isn’t, on its own, important, or a distraction from the real fight. That is the real fight right now. Those are real people. These are real lives that are being hurt, and we need to fight for them and with them. But it is to say that all of us have a stake in that fight, because all of us have an interest in having control over the capacities of our bodies and over the decisions that we make about our bodies.”
The restriction of reproductive rights is one obvious area of overlap when it comes to the policing of gender identity and sexuality, Miller says. The Nazis developed “a very detailed and very elaborate pseudoscience of race” that “justified the idea of turning the right kind of women into birthing machines for the right kinds of people,” he notes. “The philosophy behind what the Trump administration is doing is more diffuse and less specific, but I think there are some definite echoes when J.D. Vance says we need more babies, meaning we need more of the right kind of babies — as opposed to immigrants.”
Miller acknowledges, too, groups like Gays for Trump, with members seeking to distinguish separate from other LGBTQ individuals, and the existence of men in 1920s and 1930s Germany “who thought of themselves as being normal gay guys” and “very much thought that they had nothing to fear for Nazism.” One gay member of the original Nazi paramilitary Sturmabteilung (SA), in fact, wrote an anonymous memoir drawing a link between his sexuality and, as Miller describes it, the “homoerotic band of brotherhood of the fascist militia.”
“Now, of course, that didn’t go very well,” Miller continues. “When the Nazis came to power, they did a lot of things that the Trump administration is not doing right now. They sent police in to shut down gay bars immediately and started initiating mass arrests for sodomy under an existing anti-sodomy statute.” The outcomes for stigmatized people who cast their lot with an autocratic force out of “misguided conviction, or out of fear, or out of the misguided idea that that they can somehow make themselves safe by punching others in the face, historically is very bad,” he says. “The track record for solidarity is much better.”
20th Century Strongmen
Alex von Tunzelmann is a historian who focuses on 20th century international relations and political iconography; her most recent book, Fallen Idols, is about the toppling of controversial historical monuments. She says that while Trump may not yet meet the definition of a dictator, his style recalls “those of many 20th and 21st century absolute rulers,” from “declaring himself above the law” to “attempting to govern through relentless executive orders.”
“It’s not unusual for absolutists to lean on informal yet highly visible lieutenants, in this case Elon Musk,” von Tunzelmann says. “That’s a powerful but precarious position to hold: such lieutenants either tend to become extremely unpopular, drawing fire sometimes literally away from the authoritarian himself; or they become too popular, threatening the authoritarian. Adolf Hitler’s ‘man with the iron heart,’ Reinhard Heydrich, was assassinated. Vladimir Putin’s Wagner Group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin briefly led a rebellion against him and soon afterwards was killed in a suspicious plane crash.”
Trump’s “erratic” behavior, she adds, “destabilizes everyone around him and establishes him as the only fixed point,” his version of a “mad king” act that — deliberately or not — frames his power as “unpredictable and unboundaried.” (An extreme case would be Ugandan military dictator Idi Amin, known to play up stories about his alleged cannibalism.) Von Tunzelmann also cites the attempted renamings of geographical features such as the Gulf of Mexico as a dictator-like move. “Among many renamings, Rafael Trujillo renamed the capital of the Dominican Republic Ciudad Trujillo, and the country’s highest mountain Pico Trujillo,” she says. “I was strongly reminded of this when I learned there was a bill in the West Virginia House of Delegates to rename the state’s highest point, Spruce Knob, ‘Trump Mountain’” You know an authoritarian has really arrived when he doesn’t even have to order this stuff any more: people just do it to suck up to him.”
Von Tunzelmann is meanwhile struck by Musk’s foregrounding of his young son X Æ A-Xii (X for short), and a few of his other children, as a new wrinkle in MAGA iconography. Joseph Stalin was one for such displays as well. “At the same time he was imprisoning, torturing, and murdering millions of people, Stalin loved to be depicted surrounded by smiling children: for instance, statues of Stalin and the Happy Soviet Child were mass-produced and put up in schools, hospitals, and parks across the Soviet Union,” she says. “That contrast between the benign, fatherly image and horrific reality was intentional. Of course, Stalin had mostly terrible and sometimes nonexistent relationships with his own children, who he had by lots of different women.” Musk consistently (but inaccurately) claims that humans are facing population collapse and should be having more babies, and often carries his son X on his shoulders during public appearances, to the frustration of X’s mother, the musician Grimes. Although he has at least 12 children by three women, Musk has been criticized as an absent father by his estranged trans daughter, and has pointedly ignored communications about family needs from Grimes and a right-wing influencer who recently claimed to have given birth to another son of his, according to the two mothers.
Latin American Authoritarians
Lastly, Latin America may shed light on what Trump and his allies are doing now that they control the government. Luis Herrán Ávila is a historian of the Cold War in the region, with a particular interest in anti-communist and extreme right-wing movements, and a professor at the University of New Mexico. He says that the hostile Republican approach to the U.S. educational system has the hallmarks of past crackdowns on schools and scholarship in the Southern Hemisphere.
“The military regimes in Chile, Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, to name the classic examples, were very much invested in the idea that education had been taken over by Marxists at all levels, but most especially in universities,” Herrán Ávila says. “In Chile, the military plainly defunded public universities, causing a drastic drop in enrollments and closing avenues for upward social mobility. Ideologically speaking, their outlook was not drastically different from that of the U.S. right (then and now): they saw campuses as sites of indoctrination and perversion; they despised youth counterculture, feared women’s sexual liberation and feminism, and practically equated things like birth control or sex before marriage as attemtps to destroy the moral foundations of the nation.” These notions, Herrán Ávila observes, “may not be very original,” but they retain a certain “potency.”
In late 2023, Javier Milei, an economist turned pundit and then politician, took office as president of Argentina, and inflicted harsh austerity measures while firing thousands of government workers. Musk has praised these policies and apparently found inspiration in Milei’s “chainsaw” attacks when organizing DOGE to do the same for Washington on Trump’s behalf. “The key to understand this historical connection,” Herrán Ávila says, “is the use of concentrated authoritarian power (acquired via coups back then; and through elections now) to ‘demolish’ the public sector in the name of a crusade against corruption, impose deregulation in the name of efficiency, and promote the power of corporate elites in the name of innovation.” The “promise of some kind of ‘rebirth’ or ‘redemption’ from the mistakes and sins of predecessors,” he adds, is “an important component linking the present to what those military regimes were pursuing 50-plus years ago.”
An antecedent to this rhetoric, Herrán Ávila says, can be found in the Argentine military’s seizure of power in 1976, as the subsequent regime claimed to be conducting a “process of national reorganization,” (a.k.a. El Proceso), “almost akin to a ‘revolution’ or a radical reconfiguration of state and society, but for and by the right.” The junta carried out a bloody campaign of state terrorism in which it killed or disappeared tens of thousands of perceived dissidents to quell any political opposition.
As with some of the other atrocities addressed here, this nightmare has thankfully not come to pass for the United States. But from top to bottom, the correlations that leap to mind for historians when they consider Trump’s stated priorities in a second term are hardly encouraging. While this whirlwind of a first month promises more reckless and vicious politics to come, and no one can hope to predict truly “unprecedented” turns in the national narrative, the truth is that in certain and meaningful ways, people have been here before.
