In Trump’s Gaza pronouncement, a disdain for humanity worthy of Caligula

Robert Zaretsky
February 6, 2025

Striding across the stage, the most powerful man in charge of the world’s most powerful empire declares, “I’ve finally come to understand the purpose of power. It’s to give the impossible a chance. Starting today, and for all the days to come, my freedom will no longer know any boundaries.”

When those words were spoken on the stage of the Théâtre Hébertot in Paris where Albert Camus’ play Caligula opened in the fall of 1945, the audience could not help but relive their own recent experiences. After all, the country had only just been liberated from four years of occupation by Nazi Germany. It was an occupation abetted by the reactionary and antisemitic regime of Vichy and an occupation which relatively few fully resisted, with which relatively few fully collaborated, and to which the rest mostly accommodated themselves.

Today, a different figure, Donald Trump, is now striding across a different stage, the stage of — forgive the cliché — history. Descending onto this stage from a golden elevator in 2016, the 45^th and now 47^th president has ever since refused to exit from it. Over this span of time, comparisons between Trump and Caligula have been consistent and constant. In 2017, a headline for an opinion piece in the liberal New York Times declared that “Trump makes Caligula look pretty good” while in 2024, a columnist for the conservative Washington Examiner penned an article titled “Caligula on the Potomac.”

Yet, when those commentators, along with nearly all the others who have invoked the comparison, think of Caligula, they are thinking of the Caligula that the Roman historian Suetonius bequeathed to us. The historian, who relates several sordid and bizarre predilections he attributes to Caligula — including an incestuous affair with his sister and his intention to name his horse as his consul, his violent treatment of subordinates and his addiction to gladiator combat — concludes that the man he refers to as a monstrum, or monster, was “sound of neither body nor spirit.” To put it more succinctly, the man was mad.

Over the years, both medically qualified and unqualified critics have wondered whether Trump is also, if only in clinical terms, mad. In light of this week’s press conference held by Trump and the visiting Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the question suddenly became even more pertinent and insistent. A short piece that appeared after the conference by the New Yorker’s David Remnick was headlined “The Madness of Donald Trump.” Yet Remnick, perhaps desperate to believe that Trump is not truly and seriously mad, speculated that the president’s remarks at the conference were an instance of Trump “playing the madman” to extort concessions from both allies and opponents.

Such desperation is deeply understandable. How else to react when the most powerful man of the world’s most powerful empire announces, to the surprise of even his closest aides, that the US would “take over” a pulverized and impoverished Gaza? And what to think of the proposal that, after somehow moving its two million residents (who are determined to remain there) to, well, somewhere else, we would proceed to build “the Riviera of the Middle East?” What is to be said about Trump’s belief that this “could be so — this could be so magnificent. We’ll make sure that it’s done world-class.”

Of course, many of us rush to conclude that Trump is crazy — or, in Remnick’s interpretation, crazy like a fox. But the Caligula of Camus’ play suggests a different way to understand this moment and man. When he began drafting this work in the mid-1930s, Camus did not see his protagonist as mad. Instead, Camus transformed Caligula into an existential figure who embraces the absurd condition of life. As the emperor tells one of his advisors, “I’m not mad; in fact, I’ve never felt so lucid.”

With this lucidity, Caligula grasps that life has no transcendental meaning or purpose. What is one to do? Especially when one is an emperor and thus free to do whatever one wishes. As Caligula affirms, “I’ve come to see the uses of supremacy. It gives impossibilities a run. From this day on, so long as life is mine, my freedom has no frontier.” These impossibilities, Caligula states, include “turning the economy upside down,” “setting no value on the lives of Romans or anyone else’s,” and proclaiming that, when he chooses, “there will be a catastrophe, and I will stop the catastrophe when I choose.”

When asked why is doing this, Caligula replies, “After all, I haven’t so many ways of proving I am free. One is always free at someone else’s expense.” All of this suggests that Camus’ emperor is hellbent, by these arbitrary and indiscriminate acts, to make his subjects acknowledge and accept the meaningless of life. Ultimately, Caligula is not just an emperor, but as the Camus scholar Raymond Gay-Crosier suggests, a kind of impresario of nihilism. As he proclaims, he will provide for his subjects “a celebration without limitations and the greatest of spectacles.” In fact, he “will show them something they have never seen before.”

While I do not know the Latin for “flooding the zone with shit,” I do know that we are also seeing something we have never seen before. Yet our emperor, in the full exercise of his near-complete freedom to act, is not trying to make us understand the meaningless of life. Instead, what he has revealed, in his remarks on Gaza, is that the lives of others, in his eyes, are meaningless. In his introduction to the play, Camus reminds us that “Caligula rejects friendship and love, basic human solidarity, right and wrong — leveling everything through his destructive rage.”

So, too, for the man who would be our emperor. It is the task of his fellow citizens, and not his subjects, to instead remind him that everything he rejects we find all too meaningful.

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