American Caligula: Trump’s assassination paranoia threatens us all

America’s current plight was nailed recently in an analysis by the Harvard Kennedy School’s Jeffrey Frankel, who dedicated an entire paragraph to the notorious despot who was bankrupting the world’s greatest superpower, “building luxurious villas and hosting huge parties.”

Frankel described how this strongman “blamed his troubles on his predecessor … He reveled in gold coins. He insisted that people worship him as god. He grafted busts of his head onto statues of gods. He humiliated senators by making them kiss his feet.” The mad king declared war over a narrow body of water and also had an unseemly sex life.

Of course, you all know that the Harvard scholar was writing here about the Roman emperor Caligula, who ruled the ancient regime during the tumultuous four years from 37 A.D. to 41 A.D., and whose obsessions with large public works, humiliating his political enemies, self-deification, and perversion has sparked two millennia of speculation about his cognitive state.

Why yes, this does all sound very familiar. Donald Trump has never pushed his favorite horse for a top government position — as Caligula is said to have done with his trusted steed Incitatus — but he did send Pete Hegseth to the Pentagon, which is close enough. The professor Frankel’s riff on the notorious Roman is found in a February essay about Trump, “Caligula Reincarnated,” in which he argues that Trump’s “bizarre words and actions” are reaching the same depths of irrationality.

I agree, and it’s important to note that in the five months since that essay, there’s a new parallel between Caligula’s doomed and dangerous reign and the 47th American president, and it’s becoming a huge danger to civil liberties here at home and to peace abroad: Fear of assassination, and the paranoia that flows from that.

The last months of Caligula’s reign were marked by his mental deterioration and his panic that the many enemies he’d made in a short time on the throne — the once-allied lawmakers he’d publicly humiliated, or the political enemies that he’d prosecuted — would attempt to murder him. The emperor accelerated the most repressive aspects of his regime even as he schemed to move the seat of power to Alexandria, for his own safety.

In recent days, Trump has begun wobbling down this same bumpy, ancient Appian Way. It’s been reported that a Trump murder threat by Iran, which has seen a top general and its supreme leader killed on orders from the American president or his allies, was relayed to the White House by Israeli intelligence. That prompted a remarkable public moment where the U.S. leader mused about his own death.

“I speak about it a lot because the life of a president is very dangerous,” Trump told reporters during a NATO summit in Ankara. “I don’t really care, because I’m doing my job … I like being No. 1 on TikTok better. But I’m No. 1 on the list for killing,” which sounds, oddly, like a boast from a TV reality star still obsessed with his ratings.

There are several things to unpack here. First, you probably know this truism: Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean there’s not someone who’s out to get you. Famously, Caligula was assassinated (as were his wife and young daughter) just before his planned move to Alexandria, by his own trusted guards.

Similarly, Trump has been the subject of at least four assassination attempts, including one at a 2024 Butler, Pa. campaign rally where shots apparently grazed his ear and killed an attendee. This unfortunate situation has felt inevitable as Trump’s toxic, divisive and often hateful rhetoric lights a spark under a nation where violence was already as American as cherry pie.

But political violence is morally abhorrent and never solves anything. The healing of America from the bad place we’re in right now depends on Trump’s continued health, so he can someday be brought to justice for his corruption and his crimes against humanity. A Trump assassination wouldn’t be just wrong, but it would trigger a wave of repression under JD Vance that would also drill the final nail in the coffin of U.S. democracy.

Still, the actual danger to Trump’s life — which the Secret Service learned of through a tip from some of the same Israeli intelligence officials who worked to goad the U.S. into this botched Iran war in the first place — remains hypothetical. The threat to the liberty of all Americans from the president’s spiraling paranoia is real and already underway.

To begin with, Trump has already used the assassination tip as an excuse to ratchet up tensions in the Persian Gulf, where the fragile ceasefire between the United States and Iran’s new hard-line rulers had already imploded — bringing new death and destruction while dragging down the world economy. The president who sounded blasé about his own mortality on Wednesday has changed his tune.

Trump wrote Saturday in a Truth Social post that “1,000 missiles are locked and loaded” if he is killed by Iranian agents, adding: “Orders have already been given, and the US Military is ready, willing, and able, for a one-year period of time, subject to extension, to completely decimate and destroy all areas of Iran.” There are many reasons here to worry — not only over the escalation of a war that was pointless from Day One, but also the likelihood that Iran will be blamed if anything happens to Trump, regardless of who is actually responsible.

But the assassination paranoia is coming out in other, insidious ways. Alarm bells went off this week when Trump flew to the summit in Türkiye in his new Air Force One — the $400 million “gift” airliner from Qatar that U.S. taxpayers spent hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade, even as Trump plans to keep it for his presidential foundation in 2029 — but ditched it to fly home in an older Air Force model.

The New York Times put five top reporters on this story, because Americans deserve an explanation of how and why our tax dollars were spent on this project — exactly the kind of free-press accountability the founders envisioned when drafting the First Amendment. Their sources told them that despite the massive expenditures, on top of the initial corruption, the former Qatari jet lacked key defensive features like advanced anti-missile capabilities — which explains why Trump switched planes after the Iranian assassination tip was delivered.

The White House was livid at the article, which it seemed to interpret not as accountability journalism but a breach of security. Embattled FBI director Kash Patel was yanked off an airport tarmac where he was flying to Chicago to mainly watch his girlfriend in a country-music festival and summoned for urgent meetings.

Late Friday, federal agents banged on the doors of several Times reporters and delivered subpoenas demanding that they testify before a grand jury on Wednesday, in what appears to be a pivot point for America’s already shrinking freedom of the press under a Trump regime.

“The appearance of federal law enforcement agents on the doorstep of news reporters should shock the conscience of any American who believes in the Constitution and the press freedom it protects,” David McCraw, the Times’ lead attorney said.

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Let’s be clear: Trump is using these assassination fears — real or perceived — to drastically increase his assault on the civil liberties of American citizens, and this is likely to only get worse in the coming days.

While the FBI was out badgering journalists, workers back at the White House were erecting scaffolding on the North Portico of the presidential residence, part of an apparent security upgrade that is supposed to last for months. This is in addition to the failed push for $1 billion in taxpayer money to build a massive underground bunker beneath his new ballroom meant to replace the already demolished East Wing.

Somewhere underneath all of that, Caligula is surely looking up from his fiery final repose with a knowing smile of recognition.

The madness has been a slow train coming, but it’s starting to accelerate and may soon run off the rails. The assassination paranoia is a new layer on top of the president’s late-life obsessions with imposing his physical legacy on the nation’s capital and with clinging to absolute power — and thus forestalling the inevitable probes into his rank criminality — by any means necessary.

The increasingly unpopular Trump’s determination to prevent a free and fair midterm election — such as firing the entire Election Assistance Commission, while making extortionary threats for a new law that would make it harder for millions to vote — are not unrelated to his assassination-driven threats to Iran or the New York Times.

It is all moving in the same direction: Building the foundation to declare a national emergency, the last refuge of every dictator from Caligula to Hitler to the strutting strongmen of the 21st century. If, heaven forbid, there is a fifth major assassination attempt against this president, it will surely reignite any smoldering embers of the Nazi’s 1933 Reichstag fire — a justification for the end of civil liberties.

Let’s not sing along to the age of paranoia. The lynchpin of American democracy remains the same as it ever was: the peaceful transfer of power. In the present crisis, that can’t come soon enough.

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