My motive for taking a trip for a couple of weeks wasn’t to get away from almost two years of non-stop Trump, but it was an added benefit. I was largely cut off from news in English for much of the time, and this seemed healthy. Sort of like the moral and intellectual equivalent of a whole body cleanse.
Of course, you can run but you can’t hide. No matter where you go you can’t help being reminded of our dear leader. This was especially the case in Rome. Everywhere you turn you encounter the shards of history, recalling how a great Republic turned into an imperial tyranny, too often led by feckless, malicious, egomaniacs like Nero and Caligula.
Instead of deliberations in a Forum, power resided on a hill that gave us the word for palace. And outspoken defenders of Republican virtues like Cicero, who saved Rome from conspirators like Catiline and fought the rise of Caesarism, were brutally eliminated.
Fast forward 1,600 years to the Borghese Gallery and one can see how a beneficiary of nepotism lived in renaissance splendor. This was the villa of Cardinal Scipione Borghese, whose uncle was Pope Paul V, remembered for trying Galileo for heresy for describing the nature of the solar system. The pope was the 17th century equivalent of a climate change denier.
Cardinal Borghese amassed a huge fortune through the sort of corrupt papal fees and taxes that had helped spawn the Reformation. But unlike Don, Eric and Jared, the Cardinal at least spent his loot wisely on a beautiful, balanced, classical villa and filled it with masterpieces by the greatest artists of his time — Bernini, Caravaggio and Raphael.
A side trip to Hadrian’s Villa and the Villa D’Este, with its astonishing water gardens, were a further reminder that money can be deployed with both taste and a level of excess that make a Trump Tower or Mar-a-Lago look paltry and tawdry by comparison.
Yet all such historical artifacts carry with them two simultaneous messages. First, what a piece of work is a man who can create such things, but also the constant reminder that used to be whispered into triumphal ears — Sic Transit Gloria Mundi. This is a notion clearly lost on the current occupant of the Oval Office who probably would think Gloria Mundi was a contestant on one of his Miss Universe pageants.
Stops at the islands o Corsica and Elba, which incidentally are Edenic, brought reminders of another would-be Caesar whose glory was fleeting. Napoleon came a cropper because of overreach. He made a fatal miscalculation when he decided he could come out on top in an encounter with the Russians. By now, Trump is probably wishing he’d never hard of Russia or thought he could practice the art of the deal on a former KGB villain. Yet, mysteriously, he has still not begun his own retreat from Moscow. Maybe they really do have something damning on him.
By the time I touched down on an international runway, I was catching up on two weeks of news that included Trump calling the idea of collusion with the Russians a hoax while hosting the Russian ambassador and foreign minister in the Oval where he leaked classified information provided to the United States by Israel, saving the Russians the trouble of spying on them.
He also moved forward to investigate nonexistent voter fraud against his campaign while firing Jim Comey as FBI director because he didn’t follow orders to stop investigating former NSC chief Michael Flynn’s connection to the Russians and their attempt to influence the election in Trump’s favor.
And the day after I got back to my own bed, Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein, who Trump tried to blame for the Comey firing, got a bit of his own back by naming former FBI director Bob Mueller a special prosecutor to get to the bottom of the Trump/Russia election mess.
This development seemed to me as heady as the Mirto fortified wine of Sardinia, as piquant as the padron peppers of Galicia that I couldn’t get enough of in Barcelona, and almost as sweet as the noisette gelato of Corsica.
Yes, alas, we are back to talking about Watergate and using the I-word, and this is depressing for those who love this country and return to it humming Chuck Berry’s “We’re so glad we’re living in the USA.” But at least we are struggling to keep from falling into the spiraling decline that followed the Five Good Emperors or the sleaze and corruption that besmirched the Renaissance papacy.
Mueller would be wise to heed the advice Deep Throat gave 45 years ago. Follow the Money! The Russians may have hacked the election, but Trump and his family appear to be busily hijacking the presidency for pecuniary gain. A clever pundit has recently suggested the Italian model for Trump’s bad behavior is less an ancient Caesar than a recent Berlusconi. Treason is hard to prove, but peculation leaves a money trail.