Sic semper tyrannis
It’s practically a truism that tyrants come to a bad end. History is replete with cautionary tales: if tyranny is your Faustian choice, in the end, expect to give the devil his due. From Caesar to Richard III to Napoleon to Hitler to Ghadafi to Saddam Hussein, murder, bloody defeat, miserable exile, suicide, torn to pieces by enraged mobs and execution is your lot. Expect the worst. Sic semper tyrannis — thus always to tyrants.
Sometimes the perilous end of tyranny is less obvious but equally horrible. While it’s true he died peacefully in bed, it was a foreign bed, and Idi Amin endured his final years in power in Uganda in an orgy of paranoia that nearly drove him mad with terror.
But for every rule there’s an exception that proves it. Josef Stalin enjoyed the closest thing to absolute power, and he died of a stroke in his study at power’s pinnacle. So it is not guaranteed that destruction is automatically built into tyranny. Tyranny is just dangerous, to be sure, and few survive it.
The worst of history’s tyrants, almost by definition, were bad at what they did. Hubris made them so. They were inevitably unlovely and incautious, and those who knew them well seldom loved them. The sycophants who praise tyrants to their faces during the day curse them in secret at night. Fear is a bad tool for controlling others, and for many tyrants it’s the only one in their toolbox. As with the Wicked Witch of the West, celebrants at the defeat of tyrants can sometimes come from surprising quarters.
I am not suggesting that Trump will come to a bad end. We must be prepared for a Trump who remains in office until January 20, 2029. Anyone who thinks otherwise, who thinks the worst case scenario cannot happen, hasn’t been paying attention. The election of 2024 was a worst case scenario. Trump avoiding prison was a worst case scenario. Trump not being held to the plain reading of section 3 of the 14th amendment, proscribing the holding of office by insurrectionists, was a worst case scenario.
Many said none of the worst case scenarios would ever happen (including yours truly), and we were wrong. I still recall the words of Lawrence O’Donnell from just a couple of years ago: “Donald Trump will never go near the Oval Office again.” I don’t know about anyone else, but as for me, I plan to learn from those mistakes.
But one thing is certain, Trump will die one day. Hemingway said, “Every true story ends in death,” and Trump’s story, however unbelievable, is a true story. He will die, and billions of human beings across the planet will celebrate. But we can’t count on that happening soon. The news is full of stories of the “imminent death” of tyrants. Such hopeful rumours that Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong un — and even Trump himself — ultimately proved untrue or exaggerated. So far, anyway.
One thing we can probably count on is that Trump is going to be bad for the Republican Party. So bad, in fact, that if his trajectory of evil continues the 2026 midterm election will make the 2018 Blue Wave look like a ripple in a bathtub. Trump is becoming bad for other Republicans and voters are turning against him in surprising numbers. Republican town halls are becoming toxic waste dumps for furious constituents, and millions of enraged Americans are turning out in protests against him every month.
But the only thing that’s certain is uncertainty. The only guarantee I can offer by way of a guarantee, brothers and sisters, and it’s far from ironclad and full of caveats, is that we will survive Trump. We will survive him because history has shown us that we always survive tyrants.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.