In February 2024, Rome’s Capitoline Museums placed in its garden a nearly 43-foot-tall copy of a marble statue of Constantine the Great that the Roman emperor had commissioned in the fourth century. Made from resin, polyurethane, and marble powder, the same-size reproduction was modeled from ten surviving fragments (including an elbow, a knee, and a hand with curled finger) and constructed by the Factum Foundation, a Madrid nonprofit.

Constantine is seated, wielding a scepter in one hand and an orb in the other, with a cloth tunic made from gold leaf and plaster. (For context, the statue of the seated Lincoln in the Memorial is less than half the height, at 19 feet from head to foot.) Some experts think the marble original was reworked from a colossal statue of the god Jupiter that Constantine selected to transform into himself. (As with those who get work done, they say you can see it in the face.) Although Constantine is thought to be the first Christian emperor, little is known about the extent of his faith other than that he thought it wise to stop persecuting Christians. He had bigger fish to fry—primarily beating back the “barbarians” beyond the Roman frontiers. He founded Constantinople and ruled at the start of the last 170 years of the Western Roman Empire.

In December 2024, you could easily take this colossus to have been a kitsch augury of America’s political destiny. You could do that, but of course you’d be running afoul of the cultural class’s proscriptive against historical and literary metaphor. We err, they warn, in seeing comparisons because comparisons can distort and mislead and enrage; they mint foregone conclusions. Our associations may be either too trivial or too grandiose for the context. Even someone like Malcolm Gladwell, whose popular cause-effect revisionism this class once lionized, is seen as having destabilized the expertise of institutions. Much of what he wrote has shown to be coincidence and anecdote that paved the way for the Joe Rogan “I do my own research” school of science and medicine.

This class also says that we must not elevate petty scamming tyrants with images or language from history and literature. Thus, Donald Trump is deemed too small-minded to be compared across time. For many on the left, it’s the pettiness above all that invalidates. In the September 10 presidential debate, Kamala Harris rightly called Trump an unserious man, unlike the very serious Hitler who wrote a manifesto of ideas. Trump is the unimaginative opportunist who stole the MAGA slogan from Ronald Reagan, claiming he didn’t know Reagan had ever used it because it wasn’t copyrighted. He even tried to brand the Bible. Much of his outrageousness comes from the shocking degree of his ignorance.

But in the America of 2015, an as-yet unidentified cult was eagerly waiting to be walked into by someone who would name it. Our cult-ready populace was decades (if not centuries) in the making, with input across the entire social and political spectrum of a nation owned by capitalism. Despite the broadly remembered sunniness of Reagan, Trump and the volcano-god-sounding “MAGA” promised to destroy whatever its enemy valued—government, yes, but also norms and decency along with seemingly neutral standards of science and medicine. One of the most dangerous MAGA conspiracy theories was that Hurricane Milton, which struck Florida in October 2024, was “engineered” by the deep state and that Florida’s weather was being “manipulated” by Democrats. But this reflexive blaming the Democrats for the faults of the earth predates Trump: the “thanks, Obama” meme made the rounds for seven years before Trump became the accelerator ne plus ultra, riding the escalator down to street level.

It doesn’t matter how small Trump is; his followers along with a critical mass of the American electorate lackadaisically shrink themselves to accommodate their imagined colossus. Societal norms that were shattered during the first Trump administration remained shattered while Biden was president, despite four years of successful policies and initiatives. Half of the country has lived within patriotic metaphors about Trump for more than eight years. His outrageous merchandising doesn’t create his supporters’ desires; it responds to them. They want to see him on Rushmore because they already consider him their triumphant Roman emperor, returning home with a procession of haggard but still-trucking elephants. They elected him to win wars, to extend territory, to bring back the loot and the spoils, to build wide roads adorned with giant statues of their gods and even bigger ones of himself. That’s what makes a cult an empire.

Whether we draw from Tolstoy or The Twilight Zone, we use shared stories to understand choices and intentions. We also use stories to understand the intentional misuse of stories as a means of deception. We look back to a time that was got through, for better or worse, to help us see how we ourselves look when we get what we thought we wanted.

In some sense, Trumpism doesn’t fit any narrative, and this may be because the explanation for its success is always shifting. I’ve come to think of the structure of what we’ve been living thus far as mirroring the structure of The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford’s 1915 novel. That book purports to tell the tragic story of the English Captain Edward Ashburnham and his seemingly perfect marriage from the perspective of an American couple who spend time with the Ashburnhams in a German spa town. But the American narrator, John Dowell, is unreliable to the point of either gross self-delusion or else devious manipulation of events to cover up his voyeuristic complicity. There’s one longtime affair amid many other affairs, two fake heart ailments, an overlapping affair with a teenager, and one suicide followed by a more violent suicide. Edward Ashburnham is who he is, whereas John Dowell has a keychain full or maudlin clichés that he tries out one by one to see if any will work. His serial fecklessness becomes a weapon he ultimately wields to ensure complete and utter tragedy for all. Americans—who keep trying to efface any responsibility for the horror befalling them—are the John Dowell in this story.

One of the greatest ironies of the MAGA base is its obsession with the past when it has no use for the lessons of history. They seem to want to escape the limitations of the present reality by erasing the parts of the past they find painful—something psychologists might call a redescription of trauma. While the right idolizes the past through the lens of exclusion, the progressive left has made the grave mistake of allowing a cult of presentism to prevail within academic culture—this ongoing Inquisition of the past to be judged by terms of the present, which are deemed to be perfect. Preventing books from being read is the way the left discounts writers and thinkers from the past and the right discounts writers and thinkers of the present.

The brief years of the Kennedy presidency were probably the last time Americans were optimistic and confident about both the near and distant future. I’m sure most people wanted the Cold War to be over and the civil rights struggles resolved, but they seemed happy with the scientific frontier and its rewards in convenience and entertainment. The fact that you had two Hanna-Barbera prime-time cartoons about a “modern family”—one living in space (The Jetsons) and the other in the stone age (The Flintstones)—showed a culture at ease with its own starring role in humanity’s timeline.

Today, no one but the very rich lives for the future; everyone below, both right and left, is terrified of it. That’s because the future is wholly claimed by technology—unregulated, capitalist-owned technology that “cares” about climate degradation and disasters only when enormous profit can be turned. There is no narrative of an American future where technology is not the deciding factor.

During the first Trump administration, I worked with someone who said “Dear Lord” in response to any new presidential low. He was stridently nonreligious, and when I asked him why he said “Dear Lord” in relation to Trump, he was surprised at himself. He said his mother said “Dear Lord” at the bad news on TV that no one had an answer for, the news everyone thought would only get worse. He himself talked confidently about Trump being voted out of office, but I couldn’t help thinking how his subconscious seemed to have serious doubts. To their detriment, Democrats treat Trump like an oil spill, where many federal agencies and authorities work together in coordinated stages to contain the threat, clean up the pollutant, and institute a better firewall against that specific threat. But Trump doesn’t just break things; he floods our language with lies and preemptively destroys systems to create a crisis environment of conflict and confusion—a quagmire where a single decider becomes logistically imperative. This is where we are, and there really is no going back. Progress is only what can be made of the social fragments and debris that Trump 2 leaves behind (if in fact the living man ever leaves office).

That Dollar Store Constantine is a metaphor not just because it’s a colossal empty shell. It’s a metaphor because Italian Fascists in the 1930s popularized the idea of Benito Mussolini as the new Constantine after he and Pope Pius XI signed a 1929 treaty recognizing Vatican City as an independent state under its own rule. You might say that in the global decade of fascism, dictators and Vatican Catholics were as joined at the hip as America’s Day One Dictator and two-thirds of the Roberts court (give or take a liberal Catholic).

Now the world has a second Gladiator movie because American men can’t get enough Roman Empire blood, just like they couldn’t get enough Sopranos blood. You can write off as coincidence Ridley Scott’s movie appearing seventeen days after an election where a major story was revenge-seeking men, but people will remember the vibe. At least I will, this spectacle of violence and dehumanization as entertainment and the overriding objective of punishing your enemies at all costs. Another thing to be lived through on a journey to discover what we thought we really wanted. §