Of power, perversions and no consequences

History's most destructive rulers shared one defining characteristic before they were ever rulers at all. They were men who had learned, through a hundred quiet confirmations, that consequences did not apply to them. Nero stabbed unsuspecting Romans in taverns for amusement and ordered noble women to makeshift brothels on the riverbank to applaud his singing and solicit the favour of his person, because nothing and no one had ever made him stop. Caligula appointed his horse to the Roman Senate because the institution of the Senate had never once successfully resisted him. This is how it always goes. It is not excess alone that produces catastrophe. It is excess that has been rewarded by the absence of accountability. That dynamic of unaccountable power has not disappeared with time. If anything, it is one of the most precise and useful lenses through which to understand the presidency of Donald Trump.

Trump's record of escaping consequence is long and remarkably consistent. In 1989, after five young Black men known as the Central Park Five were arrested in connection with an attack on a jogger in New York, Trump purchased full-page advertisements in major newspapers calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty so that these men could be executed. They were later fully exonerated by DNA evidence. Trump never apologised and faced no meaningful consequence. When he ran for president in 2015, he described Mexican immigrants as rapists and murderers. The remark drew outrage and then faded, as his remarks always have. Once in power, he implemented a family separation policy at the southern border that shocked the world. Toddlers were torn from their parents' arms and children slept on bare concrete floors in detention cages. Many parents were deported while their children remained in custody. The world condemned it. Trump remained president. In 2018, it was confirmed that his lawyer Michael Cohen had paid porn actress Stormy Daniels $130,000 to prevent her from speaking about an alleged sexual relationship with Trump. That payment eventually led to a criminal conviction, the first of a sitting American president in history. He was elected again regardless.

His long association with Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted paedophile who died in a federal prison cell in 2019 under mysterious circumstances fits the same pattern. Surveillance cameras covering Epstein's cell malfunctioned on the night of his death. No footage of his cell door was recovered. Documents released in subsequent years raised serious questions about the network of powerful men connected to Epstein and what that network had enabled. The allegations surrounding Trump's conduct in Epstein's company were deeply disturbing to say the least, yet they reached no definitive resolution and, as they so often do with Trump, produced no consequence.

This is precisely what makes his conduct as president genuinely dangerous. A man who has spent a lifetime learning that he can act without consequence does not, upon acquiring the most powerful office on earth, suddenly develop restraint. He simply operates at a larger scale. The same impunity that once allowed him to place newspaper advertisements calling for the execution of innocent Black men now allows him to treat international law as an inconvenience and sovereign nations as personal adversaries. His administration's kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his transportation to the United States to stand trial was a violation of sovereign immunity. It was the act of a man who does not recognise boundaries that exist beyond his own will.

The war with Iran is the fullest and most consequential expression of this yet. It did not emerge from any groundswell of support within his own administration or among the American public. Accounts suggest he was pushed by Netanyahu and moved forward in the apparent belief that a swift campaign was achievable and that he could absorb whatever followed. When the attack was carried out and the justification had to be assembled after the fact, his team reached for the same claim that American administrations have recycled for nearly five decades, that Iran was weeks or months away from acquiring a nuclear weapon. The argument is so worn, so thoroughly detached from credibility, that it persuades almost no serious analyst anywhere in the world.

What Iran war has shown, in real time, is a man who cannot keep his own word and cannot keep his own house in order. He pledged no strikes on civilian infrastructure and then struck it. He announced the imminent end of the war on multiple occasions while simultaneously escalating attacks. He had Iran's Supreme Leader killed and then told the world that Iran had offered him the position. Even by the standards he has set for himself, it was a remarkable thing to say out loud. Few now take his statements as reliable guides to anything. More than a dozen senior US military officers have been dismissed in recent weeks, which goes to show how badly civil-military relations have deteriorated under his command. Those vacancies may well be filled by officers chosen for their personal loyalty but such an approach has never been the formula by which protracted wars are won. 

Iran, meanwhile, has declined to be intimidated and sees resistance as the only rational posture available. The longer this war continues, understandably, the more the economic weight of it shifts in Iran's favour. Yes, the two-week ceasefire has bought vessels temporary passage through the Strait of Hormuz, but a negotiated pause is not a resolution, and if the Strait closes again which very likely will be, the resulting global energy crisis will be far more severe.

The lesson of history's most dangerous rulers is not that they were uniquely evil men. It is that they were ordinary men with ordinary appetites who were never once made to stop. That is what accountability is really there for. Not as a procedural formality, but as the only thing standing between a man who wants no limits and the moment his wanting becomes a catastrophe. When that mechanism fails consistently enough and for long enough, the consequences eventually stop being his alone to bear. They become everyone else's problem to survive.  

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