Less than two weeks have passed since the day of Donald Trump’s electoral triumph. And in a little more than two months he will start his “historic” new mandate. Historic because only Grover Cleveland had so far succeeded in winning a second non-consecutive term in 1892. And even more historic, because, unlike Cleveland, Trump had famously ended his first term on January 6, 2021, with an unprecedented and in no way allegorical assault on the same democratic system that, on November 5, elected him a second time.
Strange days are those that America and the whole planet are living in. And in such strangeness, this – unprecedented – seems to be the adjective that best defines a period of power transition now back, as before Trump laws and tradition dictated, to be peaceful. Peaceful and peacefully (at least for now) headed towards something totally new, never seen before. Or seen only in its disturbing features, in other remote times and in places very far from the one that loves (loved?) to call himself “the first democracy in the world”.
Coming to the point. After the celebrations – or perhaps as part of the celebrations, given the nature of his choices – Donald Trump has already begun to select members of his next government with great fervor. His horses, one could be tempted to say, using a metaphor that, in the light of history, is such only in very relative terms. It is almost impossible, in fact, for those who have even just a distant high school memory of the real or mythical events of ancient Rome, not to recall – once looked at the resumes of at least three of the nominees – two names from an ancient past. The one of Incitatus, that actually was a real horse – with mane and clogs – and that of the emperor Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanic, better known as Caligula, who notoriously – according to what is probably only a legend – appointed Incitatus first as a senator and then as a consul. Or, more likely,- as Suetonius and Cassius Dio, the two historians of imperial Rome who most extensively described the relationship between Caligula and his beloved horse seem to suggest – he merely jokingly threatened to do, for the sole purpose of mocking the Senate, an institution he saw as an annoying obstacle in the use of unrestricted powers that, as Suetonius points out, he did not hesitate to practice with extravagant cruelty.
Obvious question: who are, today, the Incitatuses of Donald Trump? Who are the members of his next government that most recall the ancient legend of Caligula? There are, at the moment, at least three of them, all with clogs and mane – that is: all able to create scandal for their obvious equine incompetence and incompatibility with the job – and all destined to key government positions: the Pentagon (secretary of defense), intelligence services (National Intelligence Director) and, last but not least, the Attorney General, at the head of the Department of Justice. For the first of three positions, Donald Trump has chosen Peter Hegseth, a forty-four-year-old guy with very modest military background – he participated in the campaigns of Afghanistan and Iraq, reaching the rank of major – and with a very noisy present as ultra-reactionary commentator for Fox-News, the television network owned by the Murdochs that of the Trumpian propaganda has always been the backbone. It is from this pulpit that Hegseth has in recent years, with obsessive accents, led his battle against what he, in tune with the new president and the far right, calls the “woke” inside the Armed Forces. That is, against the ideas of inclusion – an inclusion in which is also included, obviously, respect for democracy and the neutrality of the Armed Forces – that are circulating in the highest military leadership.
A real tough guy
He is a real tough guy, Peter Hegseth, in words as in pictures, considering that his body is covered with very symbolic tattoos. Among the others, right on his chest, a large cross of Jerusalem, symbol of the Crusades, of Christian Zionism and, for this reason, commonly adopted by the more openly fascist among the formations of the extreme American right.
The second (female) Incitatus – the one that will be in charge of the agency that coordinates the activities of the CIA, the NSA and all the remaining institutions of the US Intelligence – is Tulsi Gabbard representative of Hawaii, whose only experience in the field of national security services and espionage is her participation, between 2013 and 2014, in the work of the Committee on Homeland Security of the House. A very poor thing but sublimated by an undisputed skill in flip-flopping, given that, within four years, she passed from the Democratic Party – in 2020 she took part in the Democratic presidential primary contesting everyone else from the far left – to the far right of the Trumpian right. One must admit it: It is indeed difficult, in absence of an extraordinary talent in transformism and opportunism, to cover such a large distance in so little time.
One more thing must be honestly acknowledged: both the tattooed Hegseth and the wandering Gabbard express with absolute fidelity – and that precisely because of their displayed incompetence and the (again) unprecedented nature of their nomination – the political objectives and the ethical nature of the newly re-elected president. Like the Rigoletto, Donald Trump had announced it and re-announced it during his election campaign: “vendetta, tremenda vendetta!”. Many heads – he had said and repeated – will fall everywhere. But especially in the Armed Forces and the Secret Service. Starting with those – and there are more than a few of them – that belong to the guys that, having known him closely as president, describe him today as “a fascist to the core”. These are the words of General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time of Trump’s first presidency.
In conclusion: Trump needed two decapitators. And two decapitators Trump – who, let’s not forget, in defiance of the Constitution promised to use the military against the “enemy from within” – finally, and admirably quickly, appointed to the relative positions. Only skill required: a familiarity with the axe, tool to be used in absolute, uncondicional loyalty to the Great Leader.
Te Incitatus of all the Incitatus
The most Incitatus of the Incitatus – that is: the most openly animalesque of the horses chosen by Donald Trump for his next government – is however far and away the third, the one chosen to preside over the Justice Department. A brief introduction, to better understand the issue. Although chosen by the incumbent president and formally part of the government, the Department of Justice is considered in the USA a kind of “free zone”, called not to support the president’s policies but to defend the rule of law. For this reason, throughout the history of the Nation, the Attorney General – that is to say, the man who heads the Department – has always been a character with impeccable legal credentials, in most case a former magistrate who, in matters of philosophy of law, could bear more or less conservative or more or less progressive ideas, but nevertheless give ample guarantees of impartiality. Just to give an example: in the late 1990s, Janet Reno, Attorney General under Bill Clinton, did not hesitate, given the available evidence, to open an investigation against “her” president (the one that the media called “Whitewatergate” and which eventually led, along very twisted routes, to the 1998 impeachment process).
Well, the new Attorney General will have to be, by the will of Donald Trump, Matt Gaetz, a forty-two year old Florida MP, whose legal credentials only include a law degree and a very short traineeship as a lawyer at a Fort Walton Beach law firm (during which, by the way, he also found a way to get expelled from the Florida Bar, the local Bar Association). Everything else is pure politics. And politics in the purest, most vulgar, factious terms. Young Matt not only spent his existence – first in the Florida Congress, then in Washington D.C. Congress – travelling more to the right of the guardrail, but he also did that in the most boorish and provocative way of all, to the point of becoming, in the eyes of many of his fellow Republicans, all of them of proved Trumpista faith, an embarrassing example of fanaticism out of control.
During and after January 6, 2021, when the Trumpian troops assaulted Capitol Hill, Matt Gaetz had first instrumentally adopted the thesis, immediately ridiculously deflated, of a provocation organized by the extreme left with the complicity of the FBI – “I saw them – he thundered in the days following the attack from the benches of the Chamber – those who attacked the Congress were all antifa” -, then moved, with peremptory steps, to landscapes even more to the right of the attackers. ” I can assure you – Gaetz said and repeated sarcastically responding to those who accused him of being complicit in the attack on Capitol Hill – that, if it was up to me, that attack would be victorious. Victorious and armed”.
The sordid side of Incitatus Gaetz
Nor is this all. Matt Gaetz – who loves to be seen in the company of the Proud Boys, perhaps the most openly fascist and racist among the groups that support Donald Trump – has in fact also, for a couple of years now, be subject to investigations for a series of quite sordid crimes (which, of course, he denies having ever committed). Specifically: for aiding and abetting the prostitution of minors. Crimes that he himself allegedly have proudly shown off, via cell phone, to his colleagues in the same austere rooms of Congress. There is, or rather, there was an investigation against him opened by the Ethics Committee of the House of Representatives (commission, it is to beunderlined, with a Republican majority) whose results, announced as “very compromising”, were to be made public in a couple of days. Which probably (but one never knows) will not happen because, by virtue of his appointment as Attorney General, Gaetz has resigned as a representative.
Even some Republicans of sure Trumpian faith have, in recent days, greeted the news with dismay. And now many people are wondering: why Gaetz? What has prompted Trump to name, for what is traditionally the most neutral and bipartisan of all positions, a character that in effect appears as a fierce caricature of partisanship? To reward the unconditional passion – a passion never touched by any nuance of human decency – with which the young Floridian representatives has always represented him in Congress? For distraction? For a joke badly told? Or for what other reasons?
The precedents are known. According to Trump – in a classical expression of Freudian projection by virtue of which every accusation of his is a de facto confession – the Department of Justice has been, during the term of office of Joe Biden, “weaponized”, used as a weapon against him. And for this reason it must be now ruthlessly purged and (in this case really) “rearmed” in its favor. A hit-man, not a lawyer, was what Trump was looking for. And a hit-man he has finally chosen, surprisingly picking, among the many cutthroats available in the ranks of Trumpists, just the one that, for his zealous, excessive love of blood is today politically and personally seen with disgust even by one part of the faithful of the cult.
What is, then, the ultimate meaning (if a meaning exists) of the operation? Who knows. Considering that all appointments will now have to pass the Senate – even if Trump has asked the Senate to permit him an extensive use of the so-called “recess appointments” that would allow him to skip the normal process – what we are seeing is just, as someone argues, a machiavellian maneuver to get rid of an overzealous and now cumbersome servant. Dear Gaetz I did everything possible, but those bad guys in the Senate don’t love you. I’m sorry. Good bye, thanks for everything and friends as before.
Much more likely, however, is that, in the implicit but very clear form of a peremptory call to total submission to the absolute power of the Great Leader, precisely the “bad guy in the Senate”, are actually at the receiving end of the message contained in Gaetz’s appointment. Because precisely this – a spectacular gesture of subjugation or, better still, an ostentatious testimony of medieval vassalage, is what, since the very beginning, defines the belonging to the cult. And to better understand that is worth taking a step back and remind what happened when, two years ago, in the race for one of the two Senate seats in Ohio, the current vice president, J.D. Vance, asked for the endorsement of Donald Trump, despite the fact that in the not-so-distant past he had openly called the current president (then only a participant in the 2016 Republican primary) a “real idiot” and a potential “American Hitler”.
From the Vance’s kiss to the Gaetz’s toad
He asked for it and got it. How? In exchange for a metaphorical, but no less humiliating kiss, whose innermost political motivation and anatomical location Trump himself took care to reveal, with typical elegance, during a meeting appropriately transformed into a ceremony of repentance and redemption. ” In the past – thundered Trump from the pulpit- J.D. said very bad things about me. But then he met me and now he kisses my ass to get my endorsement”. Standing ovation of the public and immediate close up on the wide, ecstatic smile that illuminated the face of the current vice president…
That’s the way it is. Yesterday J.D. Vance had to kiss Trump’s ass to atone for his past and to sit, once elected senator, at the right of god father as vice president. Today it is the Senate’s turn to swallow, as an explicit testimony of unalterable faith, the toad of the appointment of Matt Gaetz, a character so trumpianously trumpian that it became odious even to a good number of trumpians. This, in the light of the facts, seems to be the most plausible explanation.
Once upon a time there was a democracy called America…
Then, of course, anything can happen. It could be that Trump, given the reactions, decides to withdraw Gaetz’s candidacy. It may be that, in an unexpected leap of dignity, the Senate, rejects this candidacy (and it may be that, as noted above, this was precisely what Trump was looking for since the beginning). It may even be – but to believe it you really have to be very optimistic – that the fall of Gaetz opens, with consequences all to be measured, the door to a crisis of trumpism. The only thing certain is that, as the horses chosen for the new government testify, Trump’s election victory, numerically modest but politically devastating, has opened a new and disturbing page of history.
A story of which, at the moment, only the beginning is known. Once upon a time there was a country called the United States of America, a democracy far from perfect but born under the aegis of a principle – all men were created equal – which had, at the end of the eighteenth century, enlightened the world. Then, 250 long years later, the people chose Caligula and…
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