During my long trek returning home to Florida from Russia, I watched a three hour documentary on the rise and fall of the Roman Empire and I gained an appreciation of why Trump is often labeled as a reincarnation of various leaders of the Rome. Caligula is the favorite of those who see caprice and cruelty, the emperor who reportedly planned to make his horse a consul, invoked whenever loyalty seems to outrank competence. Nero is summoned for the performer-ruler, the emperor-artist blamed for fiddling while Rome burned. Julius Caesar is the go-to for warnings about a strongman crossing the Rubicon and hollowing out a republic’s norms.
Each comparison captures something, and I think each overreaches. Caligula and Nero are remembered mainly for murder and madness. Caesar destroyed a republic with his legions. The comparisons say more about their authors’ fears than about the man.
After watching the documentary, I think the most apt comparison is Commodus, the son of Marcus Aurelius, who ruled from 180 to 192 AD. Ridley Scott’s movie, The Gladiator , brought Commodus to life via the actor Joaquin Phoenix. Commodus is less famous than the others, but the parallel rests on something more concrete than temperament. Unlike Trump, Commodus inherited a stable order from a revered predecessor. However, Commodus governed as a showman, and above all compulsively stamped his own name on the institutions of the state while he held power.
He renamed the twelve months after his own titles. He refounded Rome as Colonia Commodiana and renamed the Senate, the legions and the African grain fleet after himself. He had the colossal statue near the Colosseum recut in his own likeness as Hercules.
All of it stood until he was strangled in his bath on the last day of 192. Only then did the Senate declare damnatio memoriae and strip his names from the city, the calendar and the army. Rome had no way to check an emperor’s self-glorification except to kill him.
Donald Trump has revived the Commodus habit of renaming things and putting his name on a variety of public symbols. What is different, and what matters, is that the American system is not waiting for him to die to undo it.
The renaming campaign
In his second term, Trump has put his name on public institutions in the Commodus manner: first take control of the institution, then rename it. In March 2025, DOGE entered the U.S. Institute of Peace, replaced its leadership, fired its staff and took over the building. In December, the State Department put “Donald J. Trump” in silver lettering above the institute’s engraved name.
The Kennedy Center followed the same pattern. Trump purged the board and named himself chairman. In December 2025, a board made up entirely of his appointees voted unanimously to rename it the “Trump Kennedy Center.” His appointed president then renamed the Kennedy Center Honors after him too.
The list goes further: “Trump-class” battleships, “Trump accounts” for newborns, and his portrait on national park passes next to Washington’s. Allies in Congress have introduced bills to rename Dulles Airport after him, put his face on the $100 bill, and add him to Mount Rushmore.
The impulse to rename by decree reaches beyond his own name. On his first day back in office in January 2025, Trump signed an executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” On August 27, 2026, in the middle of a trade war with Canada, he signed another renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America,” effective immediately, and suggested the Atlantic or the Pacific could be next. Neither body of water carries his name, but both show the same instinct Commodus had: the ruler redraws the map by personal fiat. Commodus renamed Rome; Trump renames the waters around America.
Then there is the coinage. Roman emperors put their faces on the money, and Commodus had himself shown on his coins as Hercules. Days before his second inauguration, Trump went further in one respect: he launched the $TRUMP meme coin, a cryptocurrency that turned his name into a tradable asset. It is a private venture, not state currency, but it is the most literal version of the Commodus habit on this list.
This is where the comparison with Rome ends.
The courts moved first. Democratic Rep. Joyce Beatty sued over the Kennedy Center renaming within days, calling the board vote a “thinly-veiled sham.” On May 29, 2026, US District Judge Christopher Cooper ruled the renaming unlawful: Congress named the Kennedy Center, so only Congress can rename it. He ordered the signage removed, and it came down in June.
Trump’s response looks more like Commodus than like a modern president. The Kennedy Center is now temporarily closed, and he has suggested it could be demolished unless the courts let his name go up.
The Institute of Peace fight is live this week. On September 17 and 18, the ousted board asked a federal appeals court for emergency relief to stop the administration from carving Trump’s name into the stone facade of its Constitution Avenue headquarters. For now his name is only bolted on. Their motion argues that the administration would suffer no harm at all if the carving were blocked.
Elected officials are acting too. Fifteen House Democrats, led by Reps. Jared Huffman and Pramila Jayapal, filed a brief supporting a lawsuit against Trump’s image on park passes. They argue the law requires a yearly contest to choose the image. Meanwhile, the Dulles renaming, the “Trump Train,” the $100 bill and Mount Rushmore bills have all stalled in a Republican-controlled Congress. Federal law also still bars putting a living person on US currency.
The battles in the judiciary rage on. The Institute of Peace name is still up, and the underlying case over the institute’s seizure has been stayed on appeal since 2025. The geographic renamings also stand inside the federal government. The Gulf of America name has never been tested in Congress, which has stayed in Republican hands, although Canada has rejected “Lake America” and no other country is bound by either name. But the direction is clear. In Rome, the names came down after a funeral. In Washington, they’re coming down through court orders, lawsuits and a Congress that simply declines to act.
The Commodus comparison is usually offered as a warning that America is sliding toward imperial decadence. The naming record suggests the opposite lesson. A sitting president has tried to do what a Roman emperor did, and the institutions he tried to capture have pushed back while he is still in office.
The judiciary told him that a name Congress gave belongs to Congress. Members of Congress went to court. Ordinary legislative inertia, which is usually a flaw, has served as a defense.
Rome needed a conspiracy of the palace guard to erase Commodus’s name. The United States needed a district judge.
Trump’s defenders argue that the renamings were approved by boards acting within their authority, that honoring a president who brokered peace deals is legitimate, and that the lawsuits are partisan. They also point out that appellate courts and the Supreme Court may yet see the board and removal questions differently. I note that the Institute of Peace case, in particular, is still unresolved.
But even if Trump ultimately wins some of these cases, the contrast holds. He will have won them in a courtroom, under law, and not because nobody was able to challenge him. And, given Trump’s disdain for exercise, he is unlikely to meet the fate of Commodus, who was strangled by his personal trainer on New Year’s Eve in 192 CE.
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Is Donald Trump the New Commodus?
Aggregated summary from an independent source. Read the original at Sonar21.