Jamie Stiehm

ROME, Italy — I traveled to an ancient world to see a future version of America.

The “No Kings” chant is a bit off. Donald Trump’s true calling and character is akin to a cruel Roman emperor.

Under the sun’s glare, the Colosseum stood as huge and imposing as ever, even more so in real life.

Trump would love to enter the emperor’s gate to reign over the gladiators, in bronze helmets, as they take on wild animals. Gladiators were lucky to live to 25.

Bloodlust and violence were part of Rome’s public life. Yet bread and circuses fed the mass appetite too, observed the Latin poet Juvenal. “They will never revolt,” Juvenal wrote wickedly.

Trump risked a lot when he went after late-night comedy shows, our circuses. CBS canceled Stephen Colbert’s show for next season. But when Jimmy Kimmel’s show was suspended by ABC for a week, lots of Americans woke up from a slumber and got fighting mad.

Is satire dead? Not yet. Kimmel, and his biting humor, returned to the airwaves.

They say, in a popular myth going round, that some American men think of the Roman Empire once a day.

Oh, those aqueducts still make you tremble! The sheer bravery of fighting Carthage’s Hannibal and his elephants. Crossing the political bridge from the Republic: Julius Caesar became dictator for life and was stabbed at age 56 — in the storied Senate.

But let me say this on behalf of a few great Roman emperors: You actually had to go out and conquer the world.

“Veni, vidi, vici,” in Caesar’s words, means just that. You had to lead soldiers into battle and victory, on horseback.

Poor Donald can’t do that. He’d break a horse’s back.

His idea of conquering the world is to stand before the United Nations in a one-man parley, insulting the world community to their faces.

That hurts and curdles when you’re in another country. No American president does that, right?

But we are living in uncharted times: right on that bridge from republic to empire, with power concentrated in the hands of one man.

It’s happening now, today, when the vast American federal government may turn the lights out at midnight.

Again, we have a wakeup call to the country, a siren sounding that things are careening out of control in the capital. The opposition to Trump tries to play by old rules of the Washington game. But negotiation is for losers, in his view.

He makes no secret of “hating” the other side.

Sulla, a super brutal Roman emperor, had hundreds of enemies revenged and murdered.

Caesar’s heir, grandnephew Caesar Augustus, proved his mettle in long military campaigns before he claimed the title of emperor.

To his credit, Caesar Augustus kept the peace — the “Pax Romana” — in the stable and diverse empire stretching all over the Mediterranean Sea, the known world.

In Rome, you can visit the Ara Pacis (Altar of Peace), a gem of Roman architecture by the Tiber River. That was built to recognize the golden Augustan age, while the respected ruler was alive and well in Rome. He died at 75, a ripe age.

Unlike Trump, Augustus didn’t go begging for a Nobel Peace Prize.

But there was one key parallel to Trump’s so-called “Big Beautiful Bill,” as historian Mary Beard noted: “There were very few civic handouts in the Roman world that did not reassert social rank by giving more to the rich than the poor.”

Lessons learned from Roman history: To be a citizen of Rome, in Rome itself — not the provinces — was a high honor to take seriously.

The emperor never went to war against his own people nor put thousands out of work. He wouldn’t let farmers grow crops that grew idle with no place to send and sell them.

Nowadays, United States senators might note that Julius Caesar did not seize power as much as the Roman Senate ceded power to him, as the late Sen. Robert C. Byrd put it.

That goes for Republicans and Democrats alike, in this moment of crisis. Democracy must be defended, not just by blog posts.

And remember, Trump will let us burn, though he can’t play the fiddle.

The author may be reached at JamieStiehm.com.