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Maureen Dowd
Feb. 22, 2025, 7:00 a.m. ET
“Remember, I can do whatever I want to whomever I want.”
It sounds like President Trump, to the world. But it was Caligula, to his grandmother.
At least America’s Emperor of Chaos has not made his horse a consul. Yet.
A horse might be better than some of the sketchy characters surrounding Trump.
After pillaging and gutting the U.S. government, the Western alliance and our relationship with Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump is thinking of himself as a king and cogitating on a third term. He basks in the magniloquent rhetoric of acolytes genuflecting to an instrument of divine providence.
At the Conservative Political Action Conference this week, a group calling itself the “Third Term Project” erected a sign depicting Trump as Caesar. A wag on X wondered if they knew what happened to Caesar.
America was forged in the blood and fire of rejecting tyranny; its institutions were meticulously formed around the principle that we would never be ruled by a king.
Yet Trump delights in reposting memes of himself as a king and as Napoleon, with a line attributed to the emperor: “He who saves his country does not violate any law.”
