Trump's Seating Matters

It's a shame Roman history has become a social signal for manosphere membership. The internet is now peppered with halfwits calling themselves something like Maximus Gladius Twatius and waxing lyrical about their imagined norms of Roman behaviour. Consequently, I can't post a thing about the eternal city without feeling like half of Bluesky is labelling me a "bro" with a Rogan-Tate problem. And I don't even like podcasts.

This saddens me because my first love (and undergraduate degree) was history. There is something so joyful about transporting oneself to a time long gone and yet, somehow, still echoing. I adore the drama of it all, the mystery, the fact that people who were the same as us in every meaningful way - fears, hopes, desires, frailties - had such different lives. And Rome reigns supreme. The diligence of the empire's scholars and their transition from palace scribes to church bureaucrats has given us a wealth of source material. We can feel Rome.

Contrary to bro-knowledge, there isn't a scrap of evidence that Romans gave a salute with a straight, outstretched arm held at an angle with the palm down - it was most likely attributed to them by French artists - but you can call it a Roman salute if you like. Or you can call it the Bellamy salute that was once part of the US Pledge of Allegiance, but we all know who appropriated it in the mid-twentieth century and why America stopped using it. And you'd have to be a particular kind of stupid to think anyone of Elon Musk's intellect is unaware of that.

Granted, he made the gesture quickly and with messy execution, so there is a (thin!) veneer of credibility to the pleas of innocence being made on his behalf. Make of it what you will. What's certain is that it raised the questions you'd expect, inflamed who you'd expect and emboldened who you'd expect. And everything about the inauguration and its immediate aftermath seems designed to have done just that.

The US is withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement and the World Health Organisation, the Capitol rioters have been pardoned, Trump has declared there are only two genders, DEI is over, more troops are deployed on the Mexico border, etc. And, if the policies themselves weren't obvious enough, there were the theatrics of the pre-inauguration rally, the stadium, the public signing of executive orders, the Oval Office redecoration, and so on.

We have nothing like it in Britain. Here the Prime Minister takes over within hours of winning the election and quietly gets on with things (not always competently). There may be a brief speech to the media, but that's about the boring sum of it, so I'm always rather bemused by the noise and colour of the American way. Even more so this time.

And I couldn't fail to notice the bigwigs of Silicon Valley who were seated in front of Trump's cabinet picks. Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Sundar Pinchai and Jeff Bezos represent enormous bulks of the West's information, AI and cloud computing infrastructure. But not one of them represents a democratic mandate or fealty to the American President - their power and influence (almost incalculable as it is) was acquired through a capitalist concentration of wealth, not electoral victory or presidential grace.

I'm not naive. I know full well that the ultra-wealthy have been whispering into politicians' ears since democracy began. And I know that granting private citizens such honour, and foreshadowing the clout they will have in Trump's America, is the President's prerogative. (And other countries have similar democratic "holes")*

But the stage management of this inauguration was nothing if not a statement piece. Trump has signalled what his second term will be, who will hold power in his name, what he hopes to turn America into and which Americans it will belong to. The symbolism of where these tech billionaires sat - on public display - matters.

I saw a documentary years ago that highlighted an interesting difference between the victory parades of the First and Second World Wars. In 1918, monarchs and aristocrats were generally given more prominence and prestige, but after World War Two, presidents and prime ministers walked out in front. The West was transitioning from empires to representative democracies.

We are almost certainly witnessing a new transition.

*There is a misconception in Britain that the wealthy can't take power here because only ministers can lead governments and ministers must be members of Parliament. Aside from that sentiment being nonsense in a country that still has a king, there is no such restriction on ministers - a prime minister may appoint anyone to an office of state. However, since only members of Parliament may cast votes within it, each time a private citizen is appointed, the Prime Minister effectively loses a vote. It is thus rare.

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